Gripping on Me
- Submitted by: phi18
- Views: 105
- Category: English: Creative Writing
- Date Submitted: 02/21/2016 10:12 PM
- Pages: 3
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Gripping on Me
The sky has its way with me. As clouds lower their shoulders against the horizon, a warm front’s humid body slides along my skin, lifting the hem of my dress to curl around my waist and stretch along my spine.
Closer still, the atmosphere enters me soundlessly. Barometric pressure squeezes my joints, each a tiny fishbowl of synovial fluid that cushions the space where two bones pivot and swing.
My immune system loves and defends me too diligently. I am one of the joint-diseased and chronic, we who have lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. If we could map our pain, the constellation of joints would glow on the map, lit to follow storm fronts and hurricanes. A joint-sick friend and I trade texts: Rain coming—got bad at 2 PM, now flat on the couch. You?
In this sky-grip, I am one of many, and we are on fire.
I lie back, linked in pain with other bodies, in a kind of planetary transcendence. I watch the sky with closed eyes as an internal aurora borealis throbs, exquisite and strange. The rhythm and shifting whorls scrawl inside my flesh and bones in a patterned grammar I can almost pretend to decode. I have decided to listen to the air.
The atmosphere outside mirrors each tiny joint bubble inside me; the fates of both worlds have been permanently altered.
The heated sky skews and pitches, longing only for balance, hung with carbon-rich effluvia from the coal that launched the factories of London. Outer and inner protective layers become inflamed. My over-eager immune system works too well, devouring its host, while the planet’s protective atmosphere holds the dangerous heat that men have made.
The atmospheric and the arthritic trace tendrils of smoke from the industrial explosion. My disease is said to be a signal miscopied: genes or molecules scrambled by chemical by-products that echo our desire to be faster and stronger than nature. My flesh and bones retract against the heat of the world’s fever as the storms whip the...
The sky has its way with me. As clouds lower their shoulders against the horizon, a warm front’s humid body slides along my skin, lifting the hem of my dress to curl around my waist and stretch along my spine.
Closer still, the atmosphere enters me soundlessly. Barometric pressure squeezes my joints, each a tiny fishbowl of synovial fluid that cushions the space where two bones pivot and swing.
My immune system loves and defends me too diligently. I am one of the joint-diseased and chronic, we who have lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. If we could map our pain, the constellation of joints would glow on the map, lit to follow storm fronts and hurricanes. A joint-sick friend and I trade texts: Rain coming—got bad at 2 PM, now flat on the couch. You?
In this sky-grip, I am one of many, and we are on fire.
I lie back, linked in pain with other bodies, in a kind of planetary transcendence. I watch the sky with closed eyes as an internal aurora borealis throbs, exquisite and strange. The rhythm and shifting whorls scrawl inside my flesh and bones in a patterned grammar I can almost pretend to decode. I have decided to listen to the air.
The atmosphere outside mirrors each tiny joint bubble inside me; the fates of both worlds have been permanently altered.
The heated sky skews and pitches, longing only for balance, hung with carbon-rich effluvia from the coal that launched the factories of London. Outer and inner protective layers become inflamed. My over-eager immune system works too well, devouring its host, while the planet’s protective atmosphere holds the dangerous heat that men have made.
The atmospheric and the arthritic trace tendrils of smoke from the industrial explosion. My disease is said to be a signal miscopied: genes or molecules scrambled by chemical by-products that echo our desire to be faster and stronger than nature. My flesh and bones retract against the heat of the world’s fever as the storms whip the...