We must embrace pain and burn it as a fuel for our journey. - Kenji Miyazawa
I do not have a face. Or a personality. Or a body. Well, I do have a body. An abnormal mass of cells buried in your brain. Or your lungs, or your blood, bones, lungs, bladders, skin... I could go on forever. In this case, I was in her brain. I don't know her name. I am a tumor, a cluster of abnormal cells that serve no purpose, other than to ruin you. Positively buried in gray matter, other cells clustering around me in the child's brain. I feel a rush of ecstasy and adrenaline, then a sickness that screams and buzzes inside me, loathing myself and hating that I was alive.
Before, when medication was new and shining on a pedestal, or earlier when shamans and wise men were the center of the tribe, village, dynasty. I was there. But people died earlier, too early for me to become known, and those who lived longer were too healthy for me to grow in, parasitically. Then with choking overpopulation, obesity, and pollution, I began to thrive. The first evidence of myself dates to 1600 B.C, in mummies bones. But without medication, everyone diseased died. That fact made me feel horrible. Me, a killing maniac who can't control themselves. I wished I didn't exist.
Anyway, the girl I infected. She is young. Her brain is small, busy drinking in everything around her. When she sleeps, her dreams are colorful and outlandish, brain wild in REM stages. When she and her family first found out about me, the doctor sucked fluid from her spine with a shining syringe, the needle biting into her back and pulling out cerebrospinal fluid, yellow and unhealthy. Her brain was leaking liquid, space I took up in there squeezing it out like water from a sponge.
See, the thing is, I don't like infecting people. When I begin to grow, and their bodies grow weak and frail, their hair falls out at the roots. It depresses me to a point where I loathe my existence with every fiber of my being. I also wish I didn't exist. When my host became diseased, her vision began to blur. She thought she needed glasses, but neglected to tell her parents. If she had confided in them, I would probably already be gone. I remember trying to tear myself apart, split, broken from the inside. The sense of desperation and agony, because I was trapped inside myself.
The girl was a dancer. Her body was fluid and flexible on the stage. That night, she was the main dancer, star of the show. Other dancers flurried off the stage. Suddenly she wasn't feeling right. Her feet stopped. Her head spun. Then, in front of the audience, she collapsed. She fell to the ground, trembling, her body contorting and her face reddening. There was a pause. People seemed to think that her collapse was part of the dance. Then someone in the audience screamed and panic ensued. Feet thundered in her ears as they pounded the wood and the carpet. She tried to rise but her arms trembled and quivered until they gave out. Her parents fought to get onto the stage, pushing past her teacher. The Father cradled her in his arms as they rushed to the ambulance. Her vision was clouded and her brain felt hard and unfamiliar. Time seemed to freeze as she was rushed to the emergency room, frantic tests and experiments ensued, the doctors drew blood and peered at it for hours, scanning for epilepsy and other seizure diseases and conditions. Then the doctors put her to sleep with a well-worn teddy bear, cried on and squeezed with other children. She wondered how many of those children had died. The girl's parents were torn from her and taken into the other room. From the girls wildly functioning brain, I heard a strangled shriek, then much frantic whispering. Soon the tired mother entered to the girl's bedside and buried her head in the small, thin hand, heaving dry, racking sobs. The girl's teddy lay face down on the floor, the stuffing from the worn cloth looking like clouds upon clouds of tears.
The next morning, the girl lay in bed, moved overnight to another hospital ward, looking small panicky, a tiny bump under the bright, frayed, coverlet. Her mother appeared with a tray of food, glistening and a little gray, which the girl reached up to take. When she held the green plastic in her hands, her arms began to tremble and shake, looking as if her bones themselves were shuddering with an earthquake. Her hands released the tray, falling limply at her sides. Mother at the window whipped around in horror, staring at her child with food spattered all down her front, too weak to cry.
Days later. The girls head suddenly shivered with a harsh pang. They had become more and more recent, a hammer pounding on an anvil in her skull, of a battering ram trying to break the bone. Sometimes the headaches are so bad her body, once so alive, now showing signs of me, curls into a ball, damp with constant tears. Her Father's visits become more frequent, and he brings her tokens of golden days when she could go wherever she pleased without my presence in her head. Flowers and rocks, feathers and leaves, and once a blue-green robins egg, her favorite gift. Soon the trinkets began to show the seasons when daisies turned to brilliant leaves, which turned to melting snowballs and mistletoe and holly.
Her friends visits tapered then ended completely, particularly when they strung her dance shoes to her bedpost and she burst out in tears. In the weeks following the shoe incident, her world began to flip as she experienced dizzying vertigo, which marooned her in bed. The migraines and vertigo exhausted her of tears, so her eyes were permanently swollen, nothing falling from them.
She remembers clearly one night when the pain had stopped enough for her to stagger out of bed. She opened the hospital door to her parents, a triumphant smile on her face. It quickly melted when she saw her parents sitting stiffly across each other, silence hanging like heavy fog in the air.
"I just do not know you anymore," Her mother said in a monotone, "I have no idea why we are still together." Her voice was piercing and unkind, and her face looked like a metal mask melted over her features. It was a side of her soft, gentle mother she had never seen before.
"You know very well why we're still together," Her father hissed.
Mother only shot him a contempt glance, "Splitting now is out of the ques-"
The girl shut the door softly before she heard anymore. She sank to the ground, her back against the cold metal bars of her bedpost, and she didn't move for the until the room turned pearly blue with the morning light. It was me who caused all of this. Shame overtook me and didn't release its vice-like hold until I had an epiphany.
