drowning

It started many generations ago, I’m sure. It feels old, much older than me, even older than my parents and grandparents. They’ve all felt it, I’m sure. I’m living it out now and it feels like too much and too deep and more real than life itself. It is that inner monster that grows indignant, unleashing thick, ropy saliva of dread at the exact moment I want it least. Still here after decades of psychotherapy, meditation retreats, yoga, hiking in the sunshine, strong bonds with friends, fists full of Xanax, and gallons of liquidblissanxietysoothertensiontamerrescueremedy tinctures. I wonder where I’d have been without this self-care, but in reality I don’t have to wonder. I know. I know because I’ve gone there. It is a raging river twisting in ways that make it impossible to navigate beyond the present. Knowing that thrashing about in the cold water pulls me deeper in. Knowing no other way. Frantically trying to grab hold of something, anything. Reaching out to the slick boulder then inhaling too much water as I get tossed around in an eddy. An eddy, moving in the opposite direction of the main flow, this is my state. As I’m in it I don’t know anything else. Don’t know how to survive. I don’t know that the thoughts that push forth are concrete blocks dragging me under. In the eddy, I have no tools. An anxiety-reducing asana is whirled around so quickly it looks like the once secure and safe home being whipped away by a tornado, just splinters and bits of tattered photographs just beyond grasp. Too much water, too many seething currents ganging up and rendering my survival impossible. Sinking down, down into the calm, into the dark; free at last. I can still feel my hair swirling around in the tumult above. The calmness at the bottom draws me down. Too afraid to live. Too afraid to die.

I am perfect, it is just my mind.