It didn't take a Harvard Medical School degree to detect you and I were not lovers destined to wed but two viruses doing their best to infect each other, two fevers that'd spread, different symptoms of the same sickness. Past cure I am, now reason is past care. Did I really wish to die? The doctor dismissed me with the professional ease with which one might swat a fly, as if for the fly's own good. So what if you loved me more intimately than anyone ever would? A cancer cell could say that of any body it refused to let go. Once the heart was infected, how could it be corrected? So what was I waiting for? The truth is, the doctor smiled, the microbe adores the flesh it's dating.
Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Bursk. Reprinted from The Infatuations and Infidelities of Pronouns with the permission of Bright Hill Press.