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Often the illness that has plagued my life, at different intervals, the most has been punishment. Feverish on the skin, soft winds of prickles developing on the chest, pale skin coating my vulnerability- thuds of my drum and gulps of my beginnings- all for illness to cloud the sun and stars, to shoot an arrow through the naivety of my childish ambition. One pill fails, one pillar of your secure empire has been bombed into obscurity, and so the fever infects time. Soon enough all flowers are lilies, beige coloured for your body to hide. Everything has crumbled to powder on my black board, the heart within my body never belonged to myself- illness has always been the jester to my kingdom.

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Smoke had engulfed the room and trapped each word begging to be muttered into lethargic throats, kept tight and straight with starched collars, until not even faint strums of music were traceable- a blank canvas lay In front of us- collectively we did not know how to handle paint so we kept silent in our pools of individual misery. How could it be so that humanity’s finest, all residing in the same languid room, could not handle the agony of time? Situations appear, that is living, yet our hibernation in quiet seemed to be similar to the summary of our personalities, far beyond a mere situation to brush off with a dismissive glove. Each man held our hell as personal, soon we realised what we had come to- we were neglecting our humanity in favour for the illogical- we were men of science, philosophy, mathematics, art, but nothing more than subject archetypes. Our faces, obscured by the hazy mist of luxury, grew pale and worn with the everlasting realisation that the walls to our gardens had been coated for decades in thick layers of lead, fortified with tungsten and steal, and guarded by the precious feelings of contribution and importance. I soon was aware of how much humanity I had dismissed for the iron of my cage, the sickness seeds had been planted.

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Strolling home in the lurching night lent nothing more than deep introspection to me. A moon high above, faint through the dense clusters of clouds, placed a hand on my shoulder to whisper curses into my ears- I had ruined myself for so long that I had come to believe my life was a perfectly planned, linear path constructed by highly sought after virtues, and that my stress and greying hair and gaunt complexion were my sacrifices for something so much greater than myself. How foolish to believe that I was something of inhuman importance, my sacrifice to be meaningful and sincere whilst not breathing natural air- I was not God, but I was the Frankenstein of my own creation. Thunder shattered my brain, the greatness of my own mental Zeus hailed punishment against the rebelling forces of sickness. My own war clanged like spare change as I continued to roll my rough complexity around in hopes of a harmonious smoothness to defeat this horror of knowledge. I could have turned to God. Clapped my hands together for the stars to attentively hear my woes, weep in realised idiocy, even beg for forgiveness or a pardon to alleviate the weight of my own rejection. I had rejected once and held no shame, this rejection seemed to be a means to freedom. We all knew that freedom was self-made, that’s why we delude ourselves with quips and quotes on how choice lay in our cupped hands without acknowledging the human limit of the present. Victims fall to this wave of pestilence and seem to revel in the reading of philosophy to cure their doubt- thinking is a bullet that never misses and hurts every time. No other man can save you when everything is true.

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Once home, candles lit to show a grand, shelved wall of mahogany wood and golden embellished books, all on a variety of cryptic, covert titles in dulled Victorian tones, my eyes rested on the pages at my desk... The weight of literature fell away, experience seemed to eclipse the discourse of all questions profound and unfathomable. My hand writing, cracked loops of black symbols, slid off the paper to wrap around my neck. Cold to the skin, my blue fingers reached for my pulse. Lowly, exhausted thuds echoed through my touch. How cold I had been for so many years, my fingers could not even attempt to clasp the sand eroding the reality of my failure. Now my face is carved, not moulded on the river side, and my lips rest together like worn scissors, and my hair is beaten to stand on end as a way of spitting on conventions, and my eyes are colourless, dragged with great strength to sight as if it were a chore. My glasses are thick now, resting on my hooked nose, for I cannot stand the thought of looking outside or anyone looking in.

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I laughed that evening. I joked about holding the axe above my head, walking Russian streets in January, standing in court with the sun in my pocket, procrastinating on historical works, and enjoying all wine to insanity. Literature had formed such a profound connection to my life that I lied myself into believing I knew my future. Life is fiction. That may be why my colleagues became professors, a desperation to have your personality archetypal and served as a divine banquet so the fear of discovery is lessened, meaning fed through credentials and belief in a greater picture.

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Pleasure arrived at the door of my evening through a generous glass of white wine served by the butler, smiling with eyes closed as if my thank actually said anything other than mandatory politeness. Glasses held my hand whilst my eyes analysed bold spines lined before me. Sick to find my view once overwhelmed with knowledge now two dimensional, everything I thought I knew was plucked out of my skull as if Descartes ordered it himself. I had read every book, all new and bursting with ideas and views, and understood every word apart from dance. Dancing was irrelevant to thought and teaching. Dancing meant less time in my office feeling something greater than myself.

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Dancing is the medicine we always needed.

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Sleepless nights, starvation, determination, destruction, all melted into the word punishment. Ruthlessly chipping away at myself had forced me to be nothing more than

a concept clutched to the heart but never gifted to the brain. How foolish. Before me I had the dripping pool of a rejected self.