the withering

...Haven't been sleeping well. I find myself waking up every 90-120 minutes hunched over with my head in my hands. A sore lower back tells me that I sleep sitting up most of the night, which is odd because I never catch myself rising from bed.
The dirty mirror tells the story: I look like shit. Blue bags of blood droop below my eye sockets. Bloodshot cobwebs span the whites of my eyes.
I feel like shit.
This nightly ritual is a sign of something. Stress. Loss. Something. I'm uneasy right now. An ill premonition has been floating over my head recently so I've been preparing myself (whatever that entails) for bad news. Something is brewing in the spaces between life and light, and my attempts to sway the unknown are (as always) futile. The tide rolls in only to recede. I'm fading in. I'm fading out. I wish not to be bothered in times like these. No phone calls. No questions. No surprises. Nothing. The is The Withering and I will let its wicked vibration run its course and pick up the pieces later.
I feel like a beleaguered circus performer on a tightrope miles above and I'm looking for something reassuring below - a net - a person - some kind of safety device. I need a pair of warm hands alive with pure and pulsating white blood cells to heat these hands of ice. The right hand furiously scribbling words on this clean page. The left hand trembling and empty.
My cold belly is churning with fluids of flame stabbing and scurrying. Stabbing small intestine then scurrying...Stabbing spleen then scurrying...Stabbing liver then scurrying...Kidney to liver...Stomach to large intestine. Imagine an astronaut in his hovering pod viewing an electrical storm firing in clouds over a covered continent below. Balls of lightning like flashing neurons strike a desolate prairie, then a city, then a valley. Flash then scurry.
I feel things inside. A bag. A sac. A placenta filled with a still and defeated fetus that failed years ago. It's quiet and motionless floating in fluids void of nutrients, minerals and preservatives. The things not nurtured are the first to die and something has indeed died inside. Was it aborted? An accident? Would it have been stillborn? Was this form of undeveloped pink flesh innocence? Honesty? Childhood? Manhood? Love? It has died and can no longer move but if I press hard enough, a memory of movement, a once living ghost creeps into my mind. This memory is blurred and distorted; a vague image of a mysterious presence plunging murky depths. My only hope of identification lies in its ability to resurface and flash a ghastly face but it is gone forever, eternally buried and drowning in fetal fluids.
I wish not to have this tiny, lifeless body of rubbery bone and slick skin removed from the shallow pit of my living carcass. It should linger and nest; it needs to remain to remind me of something sweet that was once alive and left unmarked and untouched by this world; a mass of malnourished jelly that once thrived for reasons beyond its comprehension.

mc