Sickness

It's a poison that refuses to be purged from the body, perhaps because it infects not so much the body, but the soul. It festers beneath the surface like a deep wound without hope of healing.  Your mind shies away from it, so at a loss is it as to how to make such an unpredictable presence adhere to the laws of logic. Thus the deceitful predator is free to run rampant, gnawing at your independence and using the splintered remains of your painstakingly-constructed control to pick its teeth. It hooks its claws into the walls surrounding your darkest secrets and pulls them apart stone by sacred stone. All the while you sit idly, somehow still clinging to the hope that any day now, it will turn around and be the warm, furry, comforting Labrador you thought it was when you let it in the first time it showed up uninvited. You know it will eventually give you everything it promised it would when it whispered through the cracks in your heart that it needed a place to stay and grow. So you sit, and you twist, and you wake up one day to find it has swallowed you whole.

And yet it is all anyone sings, talks, or writes about.

And yet I am supposed to sigh dreamily,

swoon immediately,

praise a higher power for being stricken with

that inexplicably-desired pestilence called

Love.