Words

I feel it. It starts somewhere between my heart and my stomach. It’s a sick ache. Pent up like tears. Push it down. I swallow hard. I don’t want to see it. I am afraid it. Yet it grows. I feel it growing until it climbs from my gut up my throat and wraps its hot claws around my neck. It chokes me, piercing my breath. No, I cough it out, I exhale sharply and send it out into the universe. It drifts gently back to me like a magnet, so I banish far from me with a scream. But as I open my mouth, it dives around my air and sneaks back inside me. I immediately feel it. This time it has traveled upward. It has contaminated my mind, brushed a wet, heavy cloud over my thoughts, over my discipline, my order, my punctuation, my ability to draw a line between reality and fantasy. I have never been good at telling the difference, so I hold on tightly to what I have been told is reality. It is the string connecting me to sanity, the only thing that has kept me from exploding into myself...