When I fall ill, the world folds into a smaller radius.
My body becomes the only landscape I can travel,
a dim geography of aches and soft alarms.
Art slips from my hands like a bird startled mid-flight
and I am left with nothing but the echo of making,
the longing for creation humming quietly below the fever.
In these hours, I trace the pain as if it were a line of charcoal.
It begins in my left ear: a thin, trembling thread,
vibrating with its own fragile pulse.
It moves slowly
almost shyly
across the terrain of my skull,
dragging a translucent veil from ear to forehead,
as if it were sketching its own portrait inside me.
I watch it, not with sight but with a kind of inward listening,
a cartography of discomfort becoming a reluctant companion.
I practice shaping this trace,
giving contour to the invisible,
as though pain could be persuaded into form
and then, gently, into meaning.
There is something tender in following it—
like keeping vigil with a restless ghost
who only wants to be acknowledged.
And still, I forget to call the doctor.
I forget the rituals of the ordinary sick:
appointments, waiting rooms, white coats.
Perhaps it is because I already know the prescription
the modern liturgy of “mindfulness” and “drink more water.”
Both of which I hold, like small domestic incantations,
yet neither of which feel like answers.
So instead I lie quietly in the half-light,
listening to the slow migration of pain,
letting my body draw what I cannot.
Healing becomes less a cure than a kind of surrender
a soft returning to myself.
And in this stillness,
even without art,
I am making something:
a fragile, flickering memory of endurance,
stitched into the geometry of my own body.