Elixir – Jasper Kerkau

My tooth became abscessed. I awoke to find my jaw swollen, infection having taken a deep hold on my life. It seems paralyzing at times, the pain leaves me gasping for air, waiting on antibiotics to work some kind of supernatural magic, to beat back the horror and restore order to my life. It comes in waves of overwhelming pain, stinging, agonizing moments when I lose context of everything else around me. This too shall pass, I tell myself over and over again. I realize that I have been doing this all year, just taking the horror on in one wave after another, waiting for a fix, waiting for something to make things better, and, alas, it is all so fleeting.

There is an infection in my body that is eating away at my soul, it burns, and I toil, waiting for a respite, waiting for a chemical to produce a reaction inside me that will make everything more palatable. They say two or three days for my teeth; it is four to six weeks for the other. The other is what I am waiting on. Having suspended my disbelief I have prostrated myself to their concoctions to clear my mind, to draw out the infection in my thinking, to purge the pus that is sitting in my skull, deterring rational thought. I want to be like one of the happy people. Soon, I will have a life of leisure, jokes and backslapping, fun at the beach and balloons for the kids. Everything will be okay. I know they can make it better. I know this throbbing will stop, the ache will be destroyed by their elixir’s. I have faith in the mortal and the pestle. Tomorrow night I will sleep without the pain in my tooth, next week I will dream without the pain in my heart. They will fix me. Surely, they will fix me.

[Jasper Kerkau is a managing editor and writer for Sudden Denouement and editor and writer for The Writings of Jasper Kerkau.]

Author: Sudden Denouement

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