Influenza

You hate being sick. You hate a lot of things when you’re sick, but most of all, you hate being sick. It’s not necessarily the burning sensation from deep down your spine, it’s not particularly the twinge in your nose as the tiny delicate filaments get high of the fumes from your stomach, and it’s not the delirium that destroys immaterial immoral cities with every breath that light into ignition the sacramental heat that boils in your brain. The muscles also are insignificant, roiling forever in their contrast beneath the bone, their weary movement and acidic power bringing the coils of serpents under your skin, to feast on what delights they might find there, and to sacrament the rot at the core.
It is the dream feeling that you hate so much, the one where you know that perchance should you give in to that deformation of oblivion, that defamation of sweet repose, that you will never awaken to hear the blood benighted the skin again, nor feel the astringent heat running through your being as if you were merely a vessel for the fever that grips you. In this state, anything is possible, from the molecules at the very desk you sit slumped at churning themselves in strange ways, to the dreams of the horribly and beautiful city of R’leya with it’s sleeping monstrous gods tearing through the delicate synapses of your brain to feed upon the wavering, loose madness that your mind has spawned, covering them in sweet laughter if daydreams.
In fevered, mad passion, you are Azathoth, you are Soma, and you are Ponpei in all its glory. In blasphemous magnificence, you gnaw on the inconceivable symbols that are mere words and shapes and lines in the real mirror that has broken in to a thousand pieces that will never come together again until the stars are right and the ancient things that have laid dormant in the imagination of man have broken loose again to waver their shapes in the cloudless sky, until they become something more than patterns, more than mere deteriorations in the constituent truth that decorates the reality reflected in a shard of the mirror which contrasts and deflects the lies that the shard lying next to it speaks, irreverence in the very light reflects, but it is true, for all of it is true, every bent warped liquid shape of it is true, even though some reflect a sea where bloated entities nibble upon the sanity of men, or a harsh winded sirocco doom calling from the depths of the sand where it is cold enough to freeze a man without ever giving him time to breathe out that blasphemous, heated breath, even though the blighted sun roasts the grains above it in the greedy quench for water.
It is Algol, in it’s unfortunate movement across the night sky, the cured and cursed medusa’s eye that stares at you instead of you staring at it, and you are immobile, although wholly flesh, and weak as stone for she is coming, she is deceiving and she is filling your mind until the light twitches and it’s accursed eye is stabbed out by the heroic and blood crusted Perseus, and the things that stared at you from the cold reaches of empty space are muted for now, and you tremble in fear for the eclipsing binary will be over soon, for monsters never die completely, and soon medusa will be reborn.
And you are wasted, like Sirius stealing light from the Polaris; you are weakened and shamed, lying on the floor as the dreams of R’leya speed through your fevered mind, for you are a mere gateway for the binary code of the old ones that rest in the protein form for which no scientist has ever figured out to why they work, despite all attempts of nature that they shall not live. You are Spica, and the light has been eclipsed on the foretold and condemned day of the madness that will last for a thousand years and die.
You hate being sick.