Illness Has Settled Into My Body Once Again.

          In honor of my current illness, I am writing again, and if you do not like it, you should stop reading but you will not! You never do. People pretend to have boundaries and then wander straight past them like sleepwalkers. Anyway, I am sick and therefore qualified to speak on sickness. More qualified than usual! Praise!

          Disease is holy. 

          For anyone new to my blog, let me be clear. When I say "holy", this does not mean "good."

          Goodness is a human invention, a cheap moral compass that spins differently in every hand. What's noble to one person is monstrous to another, what's "bad" to some is utterly unremarkable to others. Morality is a local ecosystem, not a universal law.

          No, “holy” describes placement, not virtue. A natural order, not a moral one. Rot and disease are extremely holy in this sense.

          Disease is as old as life itself. Cholera, typhoid, leprosy, smallpox, rabies, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, trachoma. Illnesses so old they've shaped the bones of history, carved paths through civilizations, outlived empires more thoroughly than any creature ever has.

          Disease is older than your ancestors, and older than the first person to bury the dead, and older than whatever creature first decided to stand upright. It is older than the stories about the stars, and older than the stories of the gods assigned to them. Illness sits in the world like an old stone that never eroded properly. It is simply there. It continues. It continues because that is what it knows how to do.

          Disease is not the villain of the world, it is the world itself. It is nature's equalizer, its editor, its reminder that the body is not a fortress but a temporary arrangement of meat and chance.

          It's inevitable, eternal, primeval, holy. A presence that deserves reverence simply because it refuses to vanish. Perhaps such is the reason, even as I cough myself half-conscious, I feel a strange sense of awe.

          It just exists, and because it exists in me, I get to feel its existence in real time. I become a place for it. A host, or a vessel. That feels meaningful, no?

          There's something almost spiritual in that vulnerability and porousness. It feels as if I'm communing with something invisible and ancient, something that doesn't care about me but touches me anyway. Not a god or a demon, but something older than either concept. Something that doesn't need a name, but we've given it one anyway: Sickness.

          There is a kind of awe in that. A terrible awe, but awe nonetheless. To be reminded that I am not a fortress. Reminded that something microscopic can rewrite me for a week, a day, an hour, a moment. Sickness reminds me how temporary every thought is, and how temporary I am.

          There's this strange sense of being... selected. Not chosen for greatness, not chosen for suffering, just tapped. As though the universe snapped it's fingers before my eyes and said, "You. Pay attention.”

          And in this sweaty, shivering state, I feel closer to understanding the world than I ever do on a normal day. As though illness strips the insulation off reality, and for a moment I can touch the raw wires underneath.

          Disease is holy because it predates us, because it strips us, because it enters without negotiating and leaves without apologizing. Because it makes me aware of myself in a way health never does. Because it terrifies me, because it comforts me. Because I feel something ancient watching me breathe.

          I am feverish. I'm too warm and too awake and my thoughts are moving like a flock of birds in a shape no one is controlling. I should rest, I should drink water, I should sleep. Instead, I am writing this, because the words keep pouring out of me. They won't stop.

          Perhaps that's why I find it so addicting. Disease is holy. I know this as surely as I know I am burning up.