Saturday, May 28, 2011

Journal 26 The Fear

I had a 'good' cry tonight, the kind that sneaks up on you, at first just a few teardrops, calmly, while lying in bed reading an old letter from M., but then the anxiety kicked in, my heart felt torn in half, and all the faces of people in my life seemed to swirl up in front of me, all wanting something, and somehow, through my sheer mental exhaustion of just-getting-through-the-days lately, I have failed them all, on some deep level.

I have this terror that I will get through this 'stage' and that things will not improve. Ever. It's like the episodes in my life, thus far, stacking upon one another into a taller and taller tower, a house of bad cards, building a precarious structure, have been bending in the wind these last few months. When my anxiety mounts, I try to calm it by harking back to last year, same time, same season (completely different weather, but that's another story) and I tell myself, see, a few months later you were FINE, you recovered, you could socialize, engage, emanate energy, and genuinely enjoy life. I just feel like every episode of odd luck I'll call it, tends to add to the swaying, and I really ask myself--will there come a time where my insides simply give up and stop trying to control my fears, my anxiousness?

When I think back to my post-traumatic-stress-twenties, after the robbery, living alone in a tiny basement, I wonder why I wasn't more terrified. I just didn't know enough at the time. I had just escaped a possibly violent death, but I didn't cling to life all the more robustly--instead I curled away from life, not wanting to jeopardize the dizzy sense of safety I felt at home, alone, underground. I lived in my journals, in my cd player, in my rollerblades. As a poignant poem I read yesterday declared, the writer tried to bicycle away loneliness.

Is that what I do when I run? Truth be told, I don't even let my thoughts unfurl there anymore, either, perhaps accounting for my body-pain and my slower and slower times.
Tonight I'm not trying to understand, deconstruct, or interpret. Those are the Thought-things.
Tonight is Feel-things. My mother's resigned, sad voice on the phone today. My guilt as a daughter. My missing M. terribly, more so than I even allow a corner of that missing to waft into my addled head. My fear, that one day a terrible death waits for me, or for others I love.

My fear. I didn't even know enough to be this afraid years ago. I had to learn to be this afraid.

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