What is it?

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 and taking the universe with me, a supernova of creativity, dangerous. I truly don’t know the difference, though, and that is what scares me so much. If anyone knew.

I sit at my desk but inside this body I can begin to see the silent outline of my spirit. It is not sitting, it is standing, it is 87 feet tall and shear and stretching up to the sun, reaching with a long pointy arm through a hole that has burst through the top of my head where I usually place my crown. To hide it.

I am standing on a tall cliff, I am not human, I am ether, I am sun rays, I am breath.

I become self-conscious of what I am feeling and quickly tuck back inside myself. I roll my fingers back in and wrap my arms around myself in a mental straightjacket, zipped by someone else’s definition of reality, of safety.

I am not safe, not to myself.

My fantasy is too wild for even a story.

I fear there is no point to any of it. It is too big and wide, it is the universe, unfathomable, hold onto reality, hold onto reality, you are still here, at least in part, enough to fake your way through it all.

No one has to know. Slow your heart.

Let’s go back to that thing. What is it? The thing you feel.

Is it another world? Do you feel the galaxies that exist and spin inside each one of your cells? Has one just exploded?

Swallow it down, that is not happening, look outside, the reality is what you see, describe what you see, describe the colors and shapes you see, don’t close your eyes, you are still OK, don’t close your eyes, don’t let them blindfold you, don’t let them turn off the lights, you will not go blind, you will not lose touch with the world out there, you do not want to see what happens when they turn the lights off and you are left alone with nothing to hang their concept of reality on. Nothing left to hold onto. Just drifting. Blackness. Freedom.

Will you fly or will you fall? Hold on one more day. You are not ready for you yet.