The fever broke at three a.m.
and left me soaking through the sheets—
a battleground of cells and blood
and everything that bleeds.
I thought I knew this body once,
thought I held the reins,
but something got inside the walls
and rerouted every vein.
The white cells charge. The white cells fall.
A war I cannot see
while doctors trade their clipped-off words
that never once include me.
They scan the maps of flesh and bone,
point to what went wrong,
as if the body were a house
I’d only rented all along.
Six months of pills that stain the tongue
and make the edges blur,
six months of watching who I was
become a smear, a slur,
and the nausea rides shotgun
all day without a break,
and people say stay positive
like that’s a choice you make.
I counted ceiling tiles in rooms that smelled of bleach,
mapped the fluorescent flicker-light
that stayed just out of reach,
while they hung a bag of chemicals
and fed it through a line,
and called the poison medicine
because the dosing was refined.
There is no one moment you get sick—
it seeps across the line,
you’re fine and then you’re not quite fine,
you’re not quite fine,
until the morning that you wake
and can’t remember what
it felt like in the body
that you had before the cut.
The body keeps the score.
I keep the charts. I keep the counts.
I keep the brittle smile,
but underneath the reckoning,
the debt I never spent,
the body writes its own ledger
in the tissue deep,
in the hours I couldn’t sleep.
The body keeps the score
and it intends to win in the end.