It’s amazing how you can agonize over a decision to the point of physical illness—
aware, suddenly, of the acids burning through your bowels—
awake, again, stuck living your life in a moment that only exists as a projection.
Play, rewind, pause, play.
A private performance of failures and fears.
A multiverse of miseries.
There’s permanence in pain, but the sickness will pass.
Anxiety is a shapeshifter, a doppelgänger.
It disguises itself, in the cleverest of ways, as conscious thought.
But even knowing it’s true name can’t make it go away.
You have to dig at it, expose its roots to the open air,
and watch as it slowly suffocates.
Don’t clean up afterward, either.
Leave the corpse rotting in the garden.
Feel the chill winds singe your exposed nerves.
Because that’s the real you, down there,
not these mechanisms of survival
under which you’ve been buried.
