I have been ill for the past four months with different, but repetitive and ultimately banal ailments, each lasting approximately 2-5 days, giving me just 4-7 days of healthy respite between each bout. The first and most damaging ailment was Covid (my second infection), which took down our family for the week between Christmas and the new year when we were supposed to see the rest of our relations. I’m not normally one to glutton in holiday escapades with family, but I happened to look forward to this year’s fraternal orgy, as it would have involved traveling to the woods with friends, we orphans of modern family warfare.
These metaphors feel outsized, considering the broken world and all of the people hurting inside it, but I use the outsized because pain is painful.
But Covid over the holidays is just a preamble to the ensuing three months of subclinical fallout that took place in my body. I mean to tell you about the multiple colds, the stomach flu, barfing around the clock for 36 hours until *snap* I just didn’t, anymore. The week of tinnitus. The days of motionless depression. My face burns from too much sunlight when the problem used to be too little vitamin D.
The harshness of skin that is ill. Let’s talk about that.
Now, every ailment is terrible. “Eating something funny,” even, can ruin your life. Imagine shitting your pants a little, while at the dais in an open televised debate. Your political career would be ruined! Imagine a paper cut on your tongue while you interview for an important job. It would drive you crazy! Hayfever would affect your judgement, keep you at home when you should be in action. Small is mighty.
Big is worse, of course. Watching my aunt die after having the entirety of her insides molten by cancer treatment, was gruesome. I feel terrible complaining about common ailments, especially the generic ones over which I have complete control, I tell myself; I tell you by purging the thoughts into newsletters. The condition worsens because I feel so helpless about the ailing world. The horrors in Gaza and Sudan, everywhere. Giving my time in the neighborhood helps. I get sick again.
My idiotic takes on physical ailing can’t sing or dance their idiotic allegories for this idiotic life. If warfare amounted to letting others fight idiotic ailments—the cold or a mundane dehydration, whatever we fault for malaise—it would already be won. It would be a generous strike of violence. To go beyond and perform a mortal attack then, goes beyond descriptions of quality. It is pure evil.
So pardon the metaphors. This leads back to at least an aspect of what I wanted to say about skin ailments. My skin is triggered by what we generically call stress. But when I speak of the harshness of skin that is ill, I mean to say that aching skin is an attack—the harshness is transitive. It is the world assaulting your barrier. My skin has decided to react to your absence by weeping around the clock with no rhythm or rhyme. It yearns to be scratched off with my insufficient nails. I have hives that make me ungentle to the touch, impossible to look at without eliciting pity or worse, disgust.
I don’t want justice for this skin. And yet the short reprieves I have felt from incessant meditating to will the pain of my sensitive skin away, the only ways I have been able to stop thinking about how desperately I need this skin to be torn away or touched, is to be preoccupied with the speech of love, soothed by the artificial masculine by coating my entire body in a steroid twenty times stronger than cortisone. The father I needed, not the father I want.
I dream incessantly when I manage to sleep, but the pain in my skin keeps me up, as if the yearning and the expression of desire, or the expression of these microscopic fevers inside the high layer of my pores, forgets, that needing to spit out the fecal matter of whatever mite or might has decided I am desperate enough to play host for parasitic attention. The harmed skin, the attacked skin, just needs to be asleep, thinking about how it will be touched again. How badly it deserves to be held and stroked and accept all the other words no one likes; your moisture, your wetness, the damp grip of something a touch stronger than care. The want.
If I could, I would hold and touch the skin of anybody who wanted to be touched. If touch worked that way, would that it could end some modicum of suffering, I would touch you. I would touch every body. And if we had no interruption between our skins, perhaps I would have no more room for the endless thoughts of war, and you would remove the vacuum of want, the notion of war from your own skin.
P.S. It’d be irresponsible not to close the loop on this saga of seemingly endless sequence of ailments so I’ll say I have found a bunch of great health and healing professionals. In Whitney Houston’s words, “it’s not right, but it’s OK!”