What a Racket

 

It’s funny how it hits.
You think you’re ok, but that insistent drum of anxiety plays in your stomach and gets louder and louder until it rings in your ears.
And deafens you.
I didn’t realize there was a scream in my throat.
But there it lives.
It just doesn’t have the courage to release itself.
Is today the day?
This life is not the way they sell it.
Everyone is in crisis.
Everyone.
I don’t feel good. But somehow I feel it’s never my turn.
Never my turn to say: hey, I’m struggling.
Well, here I am.
Struggling.
In the airline safety videos they instruct to attach your air mask before you can help another person put theirs on.
I think I don’t know how to do that.
Since my mom was dying, I don’t know how to exist in that space.
I don’t know how to help myself when another person is holding on for dear life.
And watching it slip away. Helplessly.
Did I think I wouldn’t be maimed by it?
That it wouldn’t fundamentally change me?
I’m strong, I said.
It’s not happening to me.
But it was happening to me.
Peace was being robbed from my life.
Hope was being robbed from my life.
Normalcy was being robbed from my life.
Escaping slyly through a side door.
Leaving me in a perpetual state of high alert.
Watching those other shoes drop on the regular and accumulate at my feet.
The Fixer.
But how can a broken thing fix anything?