Prognosis.

Image: a close up scan of the Contagion.

How come diseases and syndromes sound more gruesome and painful than some of the symptoms? The sensation can only be described as relief and horror: the magic bullet – without a cure. The explanation. The release. The liberation. And the crashing walls. There is safety in the unknown. There is destruction in discovery.

Even the word prognosis sounds like an affliction.
"I have prognosis."
"Oh, no, I am so sorry. Is it contagious, fatal, painful?"
I have been diagnosed and it makes less sense in English than it does in Spanish. It sounds more like a funk song lyric than a physical malady. I have “hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic;” it is not fatal but it is the root of everything I have wrong with me except receding gums. Isaac Hayes is the diagnostic lyrical genius. Maybe I should feel more relief and clarity, but really it feels a bit like slow melodramatic drowning… compartmentalized and in slow motion. I want to reflect my anxiety off of someone else, but it is more like throwing trash into space-- everything just goes off into the void: inertia and lack of resistance. Polycystic-hyperbolic-fatalmistic-ism. It is certainly a syndrome… not contagious –mostly because no one can pronounce it. And, sadly, there is no outright cure. They don’t know the cause, despite how common it is.
And yet, nothing has changed.
Information is insidious and delicate for this reason.
Maybe the greatest affliction is merely the prognosis… and as soon as I recover from that maybe I will be cured.