Emotion Sickness.

Y'know that feeling, when you've been reading, or turned around in a vehicle for a while, driving through the mountains or during turbulence in an airplane.

Where everything unsettles, just a little, but you're not quite sick and not even queasy. Just at the edge of it, where you know you have to push the sensation deep down, past your throat, past your heart, into the base of your gut, or you'll be sick all day? Motion Sickness.

That feeling that builds in your stomach and stays there, resting like a viper waiting for the moment when you'll let it control you?

There is a sister to that feeling, that breeds in the heart. It builds and quavers and waits. Just this side of heartsick. Not even quite uncomfortable. It's just at the edge of all that. Emotion Sickness.

And it curls around your chest and nestles against your soul like a viper waiting to strike. Every muscle tensed. Every moment waiting, and watching.

"Open up to me," it says. "For one moment pretend you can feel again, and I will fill that void you have created with longing and desire. That vaccuum in your being, where you have pumped out all feeling and all need through cold, heartless, cynical force of will, should be filled again with my poisons. With anger and fear and doubt."

"Let me kiss you. Let me kill you."

The viper waits for me.

Emotion Sickness.