Prosthetic Government Appendage
Terminal Love
You have to be willing to develop cancer if it befalls your true love: AIDS, HIV, HPV, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, to say nothing of the common cold, the flu, the four poxes, and any other germ of virus here unlisted, or scientifically unrecognized and thus, unnamed.
Not only must you be willing to become infected, you must actively want to become infected. Though this desire doesn’t guarantee your being ill alongside your true love, your heart and soul need to be in the disease, resonating with the sickly poison which now dumps its waste runoff into your sweet and dearly beloved. Out of duty? No. Out of purely shared joy—you must long and wish to swim in those polluted waters, side by side.
“Who will be there to take care of them, if I fall ill, too?” You might ask.
The answer, is, of course, that you will take care of each other, as the life ebbs and flows and returns and eventually unbinds itself entirely from the both of you.
“Who will do the grocery shopping?
“Who will pay the bills?”
You won’t worry about such things when you’re both kneeling and writhing in puddles of days old uncleaned vomit, gripping one another’s cold, clammy hands.
To think of that, though, is to go too far, to jump to the very end, and why on earth would anyone want to do that?
Until that fated end, you’ll live as you always have, in bursts of activity and motion in between intermittent recesses into lifelessness, fever delirium paradises, panic stricken outbreaks, and mutually inaccessible, and oftentimes reality-antagonizing hallucinations.
The key is to remain ill together, die together, use one another as protective barriers and garbage bins; that you share each other’s germs, fluids, excretions, Cough into each other’s opened mouths, wipe snot on their dresses and shirts. Use them as a rag, a bag, as gloves, as personal protective equipment. Kiss them once they’re used up. Love the disease that ravages life.
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