It's a slippery white-and-black thing, I imagine,
Nestled along my sternum between my ribs, wrapped around the core of me,
This thing that snakes through my body and enervates my limbs,
Fills up the bottom of my consciousness with phlegm and black bile to leave me with only a shallow mind.
I'd like to take it out myself. Part the skin and flesh so gently,
Slide past subcutaneous fat and membranes I can't name,
Work my fingers around to disentangle it from the rest of my viscera, take the squishy mass in hand
(It's no larger than my palm, somehow)
And pull it free, feeling its intricate roots forcibly detached from every corner of my body and mind,
The itching full-body shudder as they slither back from whence they came,
Being drawn in to that central point and then out into the gasping light of day,
Dripping some unspeakable fluid like a parody of a basket-star as the inside of me shifts around
And breathes once again in the space that was robbed from it by this thing.
It has no life of its own, no broader purpose, simply lies there limply in my hand, tendrils spooling out wetly between my fingers
An accident of psychobiology, a pearl without the shiny veneer of nacre to lend elegance to the oyster's trauma.
Every atrophied nerve, of course, is bewildered and screaming,
Unable to comprehend life without its sickly paramour,
Casting about blindly inside too-large flesh-paths for the fetters before which it remembers nothing.
It will take time--to reestablish connections, to fill space once again,
To become whole.