A cold, alien chill shoots up our spines. What chill, what alien that it is a chill, frightening, threatening being? How, alien? Who am I that something not me can enter being, unwanted, unwelcome?

The body, full of spots of hot and cold and not so hot and less than cold, is alive. Food we take in our mouths becomes thermal energy, reconstructed by the body to provide heat against the colds of day and night, animating us, we move and think and be. What colds, what hots are us; which alien?

Alien? Alien! Some external notion, ever suspected or thrust away? Persons, sickness, retches, the colds of total shiverings, all me? What alien? What me? Some feelings of body I read and like. Others I don’t seem to like? Me? Alien?

Who I am, who am I not? Other persons: bodies, minds, they affect me, taking over thoughts, creating desires, fears, angers, loss of concentration. I want…I don’t…want. What edges, where is the me which is not anyone else? What love, what hate…them, my self?

Mothers’ work! All of us, all our flesh conceived by others, still imagined. The me I love, the me I love less, not so separate.

The me I am, the me which is other which is else, spinning webs of self-trap, imagining that I am hermitted in life. What family, what friends, where does love begin and fear end? What is lust, sickness, that I fear my own feelings and call them alien?

Kill the aliens; kill the fear?

The problem: my chill and rear.

The solution…?