Burning up

It was already way too late by the time the fever broke. It had already made mush of all the parts of my brain that had still been functional by that point. It’s strange how getting sick as an adult is far worse for me than it was as a child. I don’t remember getting illnesses like this, where my body was cooking itself so hot that I couldn’t remember which day it was or if I had eaten already. Where I could only manage to be awake for about 4 hours at a time. I went to sleep last night bundled up, woke to my alarm completely naked, pondering how often I’d jolted up at various points, thinking how weird it was that I had had the exact same dream no less than 5 times. Something about math class and dangerous people I don’t talk to anymore.

Maybe my humors were out of balance. In the old days they could have leached me, laid me down on a table and dappled my arms in fat black parasites. Anything to stop the burning. Fevers are hard because it’s like you can feel your body dying in real time. I always think of Mary Ingalls going blind in the one room cabin.

I was thinking about the alchemical implications of rampant fevers, sourced from the original alchemical process of heat—fire as a purifying element. Melting, scorching, burning, charring. I don’t think it matters much. But the idea that we have to suffer to be made well, and that suffering usually happening through something like hell, well. The fever had broken by the time I got to work and it felt like I just survived an exorcism. Perhaps I did.

Three hours later my nose is bleeding in the bathroom and I’m thinking about perforated septums for the first time in a year and a half. Thinking about how badly I want to quit. Kicking myself that I begged God for so long to be corrected in mind, body and soul, and I expected that it would be some kind of spiritual mental occurrence rather than a physical one. Johnny Cash postulated the burning ring of fire. I was there, in the ring, hanging upside down in the bathroom holding a skillet listening to audio tapes of Allen Ginsberg. Burning ring of fire. So stupid that the answers to everything stay dangling too close to our faces for us to see.

To acclimatize your body when in a feverish state you need to use its mirror. You need to become cold. Go lay in the snow or take a cold shower if you can stand. To do—to become—yes. To do anything you need to do the other thing too. Every action has its equal opposite. To neutralize my anger and conquer the beast I needed to forgive.