Nothing feels wrong in my body.  Not now, anyway.  Nothing ever seems to be wrong in the daytime.  When evening comes I try to hide it with worldly dampers.  I smoke it out, scare it with fire.  I drown it with burning liquids, meddle in mind-bending herbs and mystic pulsing stones, overwhelming scents, and tingling salts.  I look for answers.  I look for antidotes.  Amnesia, insomnia, orgasm.  But instead, at night, when everyone else melts into pillows and beds, I expand.  I stretch.  Each day I am exhausted.  Each night I am electrified.  “Did you get any sleep?” I don’t know.  I thought I was having a nightmare.  But I wasn’t asleep.  It wasn’t until I tried to wake that I learned, the aurora was lurking just beneath my skin, pulsing with white-hot light, energy which flows straight through my limbs, eating at the life within me.  Racing up and down, back and forth, along my spine, through my ribs, bones illuminated, skin about to burst.  I don’t know where it goes when the sun comes up.  Body aching and shaking, dreading the next shock treatment.  I am a lightning rod in the nighttime, a conduit for the energy others’ bodies reject.  I absorb it.  It consumes me.  Some nights I fight back.  Some nights, before it drugs me, I try to break it down.  I contract.  Toss, turn, twist, squeeze.  But my hands cannot clench tightly enough.  my toes curl so they strain.  Wrapped in my tightest clothing.  Lie under weights, crush it, kill it.  I can only squeeze so hard, but it will never suffocate.  Some nights I am too weak.  When I am sick, vulnerable, it strikes.  Night terrors.  A dying man on a dirt path.  Blood.  A blinding light.  Cries, screams, begging for help.  Helplessness.  I cannot help.  Then the man is lost, I cannot find him, and panic, dark, search.  Lightening.  Sobs.  Time is running out.  I never find him, not once, because after hours of searching I recognize the pain and the screams, they’ve never been his, they are mine, and I wake, they are real.  Tear stained soaked asphyxiated pillow sob.  Hot shower, cold shower.  Purge my skin of the terror, it won’t, I can see it, waiting, on the back of my eyelids.  It teases.  A light show of whites and blues, stars, hyperspeed.