my family sends bad news in texts with as few words as possible.  my mother sends: "fyi: I might have melanoma." then she sends a picture of the dog in a sombrero.

i don't even know what melanoma is, i imagine little pac men eating away at her breasts before i remember the strange mole on her back.

some people see cancer everywhere. i might be one of those people now. other people say you can create a cancer in yourself simply by dwelling on it. I imagine a pure white light boring little holes throughout my body. go ahead and eat me out light.

at work i am moody and wanting to bask in it. my coworker explains in great detail how she burned out her planters wart using salicylic acid. she asked if her kids wanted to come look at it, they didn't. she thanks me for not being disgusted by her. she describes the experience using the words follicle and viral core which i do like.

a friend texts me "i have gonnorhea...can't believe from julio. we go to the library together n shit. damn"

someone left a pink gum wad in the drinking fountain and it looks like a spleen. as if to say "let me share with you the most abhorrent parts of me." 

blood lust

I recently heard that heroin addicts can be found eating their scabs because little bits of their vice preserves itself in dried blood. This is strangely intimate? This is profoundly sad.

A poet on my Facebook feed likened watching the electoral votes come in to watching a cancer screen of the nation. What we saw was widespread malignancy. This spoke to me not only because I fear malignancy of our collective soul as well as our corporeal whole, but because I spent the evening and early hours of the morning in the ER waiting room with my partner who had been having difficulty breathing as of late.  If this sounds to you like the birth of another metaphor, I mean to tell you that it is not.

It is not revelatory to say, but to love another with a body capable of failing is the most vulnerable thing. To hold that body and love every inch of it knowing it might be the cause of your undoing is a pure and sickening thing. I would do it over and over and over again. Absolutely I would.