It Will Find Us

I must tell you now, it will find us. It will not be the spark of metal in the night, the pool of warmth wasting away on asphalt. Despite your fears, it will not come pressed against a car in a poorly lit parking lot, your cheek a dark smear on the glass, the stars staring dumbly down. It will not be the delicate pop and whisper in the night, one pupil dilated to bring on a longer, shivering sleep. You will not clutch your heart in the lukewarm tub, left hand going brightly numb as the weight of oceans crushes your ribcage. Sadly, you will not scream the name of your beloved while kneeling in the turmoil of a bank lobby, the hiss of radios wild outside.

I wish I could say you would clutch the hand of your youngest while a kind-eyed nurse administers that sweet final injection. I cannot even mention the possibility of the dark heady smell of burning oil, the constellation of glass spread before you as you realize the radio plays on but something vital inside does not.

It will not come any of those ways. Instead, it will come down a brightly-lit corridor and it will not reason, it does not know. We comfort ourselves with the words, as the incantations our watchwords, chanted over and over again at night; virus, prion, bacteriology, deoxyribonucleic acid, immunosuppressant, and so on until sleep finds us again. Despite this, it will find it's way out of the shaft, the airlock, the sliding glass doors. You will carefully tape the windows and doors but even then it works within you, as in your neighbors, your children. And before it's over, you will beg and beg for the claustrophobia of the car trunk, a warm tailpipe burning your leg. You will count and re-count the small blue pills, even before the television reports flicker out. But you too will start to feel the tell-tale signs and know that nothing nothing nothing you have ever thought or dreamt will ease this end.