The thing about a Leper Colony is no one pretends they are well anymore. When you're first diagnosed, you hide it: a long sleeve shirt, excuses about eczema flareups, suddenly a fan of dim, "mood“ lighting...like anyone would: Denial. When you've stripped Pretending of all its fanciful, glittery clothes, and you're standing stark naked...everything jiggling and dangling...your last desperate attempt to belong compels you to blurt out and hope-to-fuck they buy it: "I'm NOT NAKED! I'm NOT!" That's Denial.
But usually, pretty much every time, denial delays the inevitable. You ARE naked, so at some point you have to look everyone in the eyes and say, "Well, Hell! I'm sick. Shit-ass sick!" Not the expected and accepted kind of sick: common cold, diarrhea, influenza and even herpes (the mouth ulcer kind). But, the kind of sickness that demands a covering-of-the-mouth, a turning of the head, the shedding of tears. Not a fatal illness...worse, a living dead illness! Your heart beats, your synapsis fire, your feelings ebb-and-flow but you must still say goodbye. You must leave.
To the Leper Colony...a community of Dehumans, where the outside world can't see past the rotting flesh enough to unwrinkle the disgust in their noses. It is pungent. And this dismissal of all that was human - that IS human, more than the illness itself, gnaws away your life. A Touchless Prison restrained not by steel bars but a void of contact...no tender stroke on the cheek, no motherly embrace, pats on the back, intertwining of hands, sweet lips of a lover. The void creates a deafening silence, "Look at how disgusting you are!"
But then one unexpected average day a fellow Leper gently rests her deteriorating hand on yours - a simple gesture with profound implications. In that moment rain clouds form in the parched desert sky for her touch, her rotting, disgusting, infected touch...is exactly that -
A touch...
As real
As warm
As intimate
As comforting.
Comments