Love and Health

"I love you" by Alice & Dana

Last night, I dreamed I was a leper.

I was herded like an animal into a fenced place, a paddock of pain and protestations. The disease was surreal, and not the way it looks on the skins of scarred souls on television. I had sores all over my feet, and they spread to my knees, and my thighs, and my hips. I escaped and ran in the streets trying to find a pharmacy, a cure, but I did not come to you. I did not want you to see me thus, and I did not want to touch you—I feared touching you, giving this curse to you. But I think you were searching for me, because you adored me.

Somehow I found myself returned to the paddock, and as I was fenced in I watched the bubbly red sores spread to my belly and my breasts. Perhaps it wasn’t leprosy, but a form of the bubonic plague, or a bloated sort of measles. I didn’t know, and I was too afraid to hurt, to feel the pain. A doctor came to me, and in the surreal way of dreams, he gave me a surreal solution. If I underwent some X-rays, he said, that might burn away the sores, and I would be okay. But then he looked at my body and walked away. He said I was too covered and it was too late.

You found me then, as I feared and knew and wanted you to, and you embraced me, but I broke my heartstrings and ran away. I would not put you in danger.

I woke up then, sitting up amongst the sweat-drenched sheets and listening to the train-whistle of my ragged breathing. I saw the moonlight swinging itself along the threads of my quilt, and how the mandarin-orange digital numbers of my phone spelled out 4:00 A M, and how your eyes smiled at me from the photograph in the dim corner. I ran my hands over my belly and felt my smooth unbroken skin. On this first-to-last day of December, I have never been as grateful to awaken.

Love and health. The rest is rubbish. It is history. It is secondary. If we’ve got those two, we’ve got all the rest—and if we haven’t, we’ll get to it if we have to. Love and health, my love. That is all we need, and if we have it we have all the riches in the universe.  Happiness is that simple, that haphazard, and that blessed.

I need nothing else in this life or any other: I have you.

"Angreek87"