Luna was brighter than most people around her at any given moment. She was intelligent, yes, but more than that, she made anyone near her feel lighter, further from sorrow, if at least for small moments.

So it was ironic that the darkest disease had rushed through the airs, burst through her apartment, and entered straight into her body.

Now, what’s sad for Luna is that she was too honest. She lived in a nation where disease was seen as a commodity to profit from. I shall not name this country, but you may very well guess.

The problem with her honesty is that the doctors didn’t believe that she was sick. She told them, time and again, what she was experiencing, but the physicians didn’t listen. She was in the prime of her life, and, though she had some character flaws she was working on, she didn’t deserve what was to transpire.

The more they didn’t believe her, the most honest she became, sharing more and more details about her past, her present, her travels, and her problems.

This was a curse that seemed to fall upon her from the clouds, much like the disease. She had never been doubted so fiercely by anyone.

She could not fathom it. Why would they not diagnose her?

Why would they let her decay of body and mind? The questions haunted her day and night.

She was stuck in an in-between space that was closing in on her more and more as each day passed.

The symptoms were self-evident. Her friends were aghast. They advised her to change doctors until she found a decent one, and when that was of little help, they changed their tune.

“Stop doctor-hopping, Luna. They’re going to start thinking you’re a lunatic.”

She had no more words for her friends anymore. She had become a burden on them, though they would not say it. She sensed that her deterioration was slowly becoming off-putting to them, and that they were frustrated that their advice was only making her more ill.

So she became a hermit, like the pet crabs she cared for in her youth.

Once a beautiful young lady, with a prestigious education, sharp mind, kind heart, and an, until-then, inspiring history of resilience, she slowly witnessed in horror her life becoming needlessly stripped.

They took her apartment. They took her car. They took her friends. They took her cat. They took her body. They took her mind. She held on by the slimmest of threads, for they could not relinquish her spirit.

For four years, she dedicated her life to finding the name of the disease. She was trained academically in literature in multiple languages, so she used that to read medicine, of which she had known close to nothing.

She read thousands of medical journals. The doctors didn’t answer her questions, and when she asked them scientific ones, they simply didn’t answer and looked at her as if she had gone mad.

Perhaps she had become mad, perhaps it was a symptom of the disease, but I believe madness for Luna was the most reasonable explanation for her situation.

She could not be rude or aggressive to doctors. Despite the ugliness she had witnessed, and the scars inflicted upon her beautiful body and soul, she promised herself she would never lose her kindness. She reasoned that if the disease robbed her of that, it had completely devoured her and life was no more.

Perhaps it was an unreasonable decision, but she was only human. And she desperately wanted to stay that way.

After years of voracious reading of medicine and disease, of pharmacology and diagnostics, she was unable to see any doctor in her state. She knew too much for them, which had become another curse.

For doctors in her country were very arrogant whilst also very insecure. She would have to find the diagnosis on her own.

And she did.

She did so by requesting a test that had never been run on her. A specific blood test that should have, given her travel history. The doctor thought she was mad upon requesting it, but hey, at least he got a financial kick-back to run this test.

When the result came back positive, every muscle, tissue, cell in her body screamed. Screamed for finality, for a route of escape. She spent the weekend in a state of delirium, for her body, mind, heart, and soul could not fathom how they missed this diagnosis, for she couldn’t contain the extreme exhilaration upon finding the answer that was coupled with an extreme sense of permanent loss of time. The scarring was the headiest notion to battle.

She collated the evidence in her medical records with the corresponding medical journals that agreed with her illness.

She thought she could finally move on.

But they wouldn’t prescribe her the correct medications. The disease was an ancient one, and she was happy it was curable. She needed to be on two medications at the very least, but they would only give her one.

The more she sought help, the more the doctors evaded her.

Were they frightened that she would litigate? Were they truly in cahoots for her to perish? She tried her hardest to keep clear of mind, at least as clear as one in her situation possibly could. But it didn’t add up.

Had she discovered the name of the illness at any other moment, she would have fled her “rich” country to any in Latin America. She spoke the languages of those nations and had lived years there before, for study and work.

Unfortunately for Luna, a global pandemic hit within days of finding her diagnosis, a pandemic the world hadn’t seen in a century. Her once powerful passport was now essentially just an identification document.

Her friends from college tried to help her, but they too were frozen in their home countries. Her extended family simply could not understand, and trying to make them understand would only render her more ill.

Her mother and father had abandoned her when she was a child. Her brother was battling an addiction to a heinous substance that her country knowingly let proliferate.

She thought about the Greek myth of Cassandra, a woman cursed by the gods to correctly prophesize coming events only not to be believed by anyone.

During the past half-decade, she had fought off the incessant thoughts of being on a slow-moving train that was edging closer and closer to a disastrous crash.

She decided to let go, falling asleep, whispering, “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment and cast lots…” over and over until she floated peacefully in dreams.

She looked so pale, so beautiful, so still in the light of the moon.

                            ***

We all start out the same.

Pushed through organs.

Screaming to our first air.

What happens to us

after, though

is anybody’s guess.

I try to hold onto moments that made me sense what words won’t show.

Ugly, decayed, cruel, we battle against.

But time has it out for all of us.

Perhaps you will make your dreams.

Perhaps you will discover new ones.

More likely, though, you will learn life is not about your dreams.

Nor survival.

Nor bliss.

We are mis- educated to reason while covered in skin and guided by instinct.

A person can- not be sane.

Our minds our Hearts our souls

were not meant to adjust.

I, for One, only find solace in Song.

Repeat Repeat Repeat they instill.

But one can only do the same thing over and over with two possible results: loss of soul or loss of mind.

I fight, Near to the Wild Heart.

With all the hurt. And tears. And screams. Like being ripped from a mother’s arms.

Which truly did happen to me.

Maybe God sees. I hope. Otherwise, I could never stop screaming.

Then suddenly… it’s over.

When I was a child, she used to chain my hands to the chicken pen only after my sister went off on the yellow bus.

She was a grandmother, but not mine.

“Why do you do this to me? I do not like it,” I told her.

Her back was to me, and I saw her eyes looking up toward an aeroplane flying above us. While staring at the engine in the air, not moving her stance, she pulled her arm backward and lifted the nail from the latch that kept the pen locked.

Slowly, the hens and roosters sauntered out.

I wondered whether anyone in the sky was looking down on me, could see me here on the ground. I wondered if I one day could fly like they did. I wondered if one day Manda and I could escape.

She turned to me.

“You pretty little gay boy, what shall become of you? I know you are too scared to tell anyone. Don’t worry, I would be, too. We’re together in this.”

I didn’t know what that word meant. I knew I was a boy. I knew she was a woman. My wrists bled.

I had stopped speaking. The birds started to swarm the aged woman, both on ground and in air.

They pecked her feet, and sparrows swooped upon her, disorienting the woman. They ripped her hair out. She was lucky to have adorned bifocals, for they started to crack against the incessant pangs of the beaks.

She fell.

The roosters came, followed by the chickens, and they stared at me, unmoving.

I then saw a black and white car with flashing red lights pull up into the driveway.

Manda looked at me through the backseat window.

I don’t remember much else of that day, besides seeing the back of the grandmother not my own walk with the men to the car.

Her hands were chained.