The Virus Inside Us

Dear Diary And/Or Whomever Might Find This:

The most powerful reminder I have of what life was like before the end of the world we used to know is the heart shaped locket burning a hole in my pocket. Although my body continues to cannibalize itself a little more everyday, my brain remains the same and this memory won’t soon fade.

A little over seven years ago, news broke that a deadly virus was spreading throughout the country but not to worry because help was on the way. Help never came.

The movies I watched growing up had me thinking that if an apocalypse happened, the world would be overrun by flesh-eating zombies. I never could have imagined that it would be our own guilt eating us alive, quite literally rotting us from the inside out.

At first the symptoms manifested as excruciating pain in specific body parts, but no one could figure out why it seemed to be a different body part in just about everyone they knew. That pain gave way to chunks of skin and muscle falling off bit by bit in the surrounding areas until there was nothing left but scraps of frail, fragmented pieces of bone. The rot always starts with a specific body part and then spreads to the surrounding areas, until eventually it reaches your vital organs and eats those too. So far no one under eighteen has gotten sick, but we don’t yet understand why.

The hand that my father used to hit my mother with was the first part of him to rot away into nothing. The foot my neighbor used to kick his dogs with is nothing more than a stump now, with more of his leg disappearing every single day. You can imagine what happened to a certain body part of the hockey players who assaulted a girl when I was in high school- all but one of them.

As for me, my right foot- the part of me that was to blame for hitting the gas instead of the brake on the night they changed my life forever- was the first part of me to start to rot away and everyday it spreads a little bit more. There’s not a moment that goes by where I can’t feel the gnawing sensation that is my skin and then eventually bone rotting away in that area.

The hockey captain wasn’t alone in seeming to be immune from the virus, and the rest of us quickly began to notice that certain bodies stayed fully intact while the rest of us were falling apart. It didn’t seem to matter that some of the owners of these bodies had done awful things. Turns out that the only people who are immune to the virus are those who don’t feel any guilt whatsoever for the wrong they’ve done in this life. And because the rest of us are being eaten alive by our own guilt, the ones who are immune have taken over any and all positions of power in society while our bodies are disregarded and deemed worthless. But I had seen what it’s like for the human body to wither away years before this happened.

When I was seventeen years old, I lost my mother to breast cancer. She took her last breaths with my father and I huddle next to her in her hospital bed. He was crying so hard and kept whispering “I’m so sorry, you deserved so much better” over and over. A few weeks later on my eighteenth birthday, the pain of her not being there with me was unbearable and I had way too much to drink. That night, as I was crying behind the wheel and so drunk I could barely see straight, I took away someone else’s mother.

I’ll never forget the way my own blood tasted in my mouth, like copper and salt. I’ll never forget the tiny hand dangling out of the overturned SUV, limp other than the tiniest twitch of her pinky finger. I’ll also never forget the sound that came from the front of the car as her mother cried out in pain and told me to save her baby. I tried so hard to save them both, but after I pulled the little girl out the car started to catch fire and I froze, overwhelmed by a kind of panic and guilt I couldn’t even put into words.

I locked eyes with the mother, and I remember seeing my own frightened face, almost unrecognizable to me, reflected back at me in her eyes. She grabbed onto my wrists and I tried to pull her out, but her grip on my wrists kept slipping because there was blood everywhere. I tried to grab her shirt next to pull her but all I succeeded in doing was ripping off her heart-shaped locket necklace and falling backwards. While I was on the ground, the flames caught up to her and were dancing all around her but in such a way that even they seemed hesitant to see her go. She started screaming at me to run before the fire got to me too. I didn’t know how to process the fact that she was being motherly to me in that moment even though I almost just killed her own child. In that moment, I felt like I didn’t deserve to live. I wished so badly I could trade places with her. Her last words were asking me to promise to take care of her baby, and I didn’t know what else to say but yes.

Suddenly I heard a small voice, crying softly for her mommy and rubbing her eyes. The little girl was conscious now and needed help. I could see that her left leg was broken, and I got up and carried her as far away from the burning car, gently pressing her forehead into my collarbone so she wouldn’t see. When I set her down on a patch of grass on the side of the road, she looked up at me and asked me if I was an angel. I couldn’t control the wailing that came from me then, because I felt like the devil in that moment. The horror of what I had done began to fully sink in as the cushion of the initial shock evaporated like the smoke now rising up from the car.

I don’t know why I did it, but when I heard sirens in the distance I panicked and whispered to her that I was so sorry and got back into my car and drove home. When I got into my house and saw my dad passed out drunk on the couch, the guilt hit me even harder because I realized that my sorry couldn’t fix what I had done, just like him telling my mom how sorry he was for years of hurting her on her deathbed couldn’t undo all that damage. My sorry wouldn’t bring back that little girl’s mother.

I sat on the floor of my shower for hours until the hot water ran out, replaced by freezing water that melted my hot tears as they ran down my face. I crawled under my weighted blanket and cried myself to sleep, praying I would wake up to realize this was all just a horrible dream. When I woke up the next day, the pain from where I hit my head on the steering wheel didn’t hit me right away, just a sharp pain in my left hand at first. I opened my left hand and saw the heart-shaped locket that the mother had been wearing. I had clutched it so hard the entire night that it left a heart-shaped indent in my hand. This hadn’t just been a horrific dream. I stumbled out of my bedroom and turned on the news and the first thing I saw was a story about what had happened, what I had done.

I remember seeing on the news that it had been the little girls eighth birthday, and that she and her mother were on their way to celebrate her birthday at the water park in our town. That brought back a vivid memory of pool noodles and swimsuits spilling out onto the street, the fabric mixed with broken glass.

Today I turned twenty-eight, and the little girl who was in the car that night turned eighteen and aged out of the system, well what was left of it anyways. The foster care system was deeply flawed to begin with, but now that it’s exclusively run by those who are immune from the virus and immune from from feeling any guilt for wrong doing or empathy or love for others, it’s only gotten much worse.

Today, I found her wandering the streets looking for a place to eat and somewhere to sleep. She was crying into her phone about how she’s all alone. I told her that a long time ago I had made a promise to her mother to take care of her, and that when the time was right I would tell her everything but that for now that she was more than welcome to come with me and that she would always have those things with me for as long as she wants or needs. I lifted up her hair with one hand and put her mother’s locket on for her, and she asked me how I got it with faint recognition in her eyes that look so much like her moms.

If you’re reading this, whoever you are, I want you to know that I woke up today for the first time since all this started without my skin falling off of my body and my bones crumbling. The virus has stopped spreading within my body, something I had come to believe was impossible a long time ago.

I can’t grow my foot back, just like I can’t bring back her mother or undo those years she spent in the system at the hands of people who feel nothing at all, least of all love. It turns out that the cure for the virus inside us is the love for each other that unites us. If you’re reading this, please be honest with yourself about what’s eating you and do whatever it takes to make it right. Today I got to start to keep a promise I made ten years ago. Forgiveness is a beautiful and fragile thing, like an injured baby bird learning to fly again. But it’s the only real cure for what’s eating us. The only other alternative is to feel nothing at all. And to be immune to guilt and pain is to also be immune to love and hope. I know which life I would rather live.