It comes. Like a guest I'd forgotten I was expecting. My hands are scrubbing homemade tomato sauce from a beaten old aluminum pot when the angst rolls over me. My hands keep scrubbing.
I watch myself as if from a window, my soul thrashing, smashing dishes, screaming into an entirely silent plane between the boxy walls of a room I've never seen. In my head, my soul looks just like me: drops to my knees - onto a cheap tile floor - clutching arms folded into straight-jacket embrace. I am staring down at my hands, stacking clean dishes on the far side of my outdoor sink.
I submerge myself in the quiet. Any noise might seep into this twisted other place where my psyche throws itself against the walls of my skull.
The crickets chirp, their music drifting on the warm breeze, palms swaying shadows against the ebony sky. I am struck by the calm: how it somehow makes the panic sharper, maybe in the same way a cell phone ring slices through the sobriety of a funeral; like how that moment reminds you that life is still happening, even though it feels like everything is ending. Except in this moment, I am the Big Bang, and all is stillness.
I keep touching myself, running my hands over my arms, picking at mosquito bites and the same scabs I keep picking that will soon be scars, and it might just be to remind myself I exist. That I have extension, which - philosophically speaking - means I have mass, that I am comprised of matter, that I exist; and by this definition, to exist is to matter. And I matter.
This is a story I tell myself every day - especially on the days no one else tells me - but on those days my psyche starts throwing pots and pans against the windows I’m convinced are the insides of my eyes, trying to break out of her
cage.
When the panic started, I did the thing I sometimes do when I am at my house and the panic arrives: I went to my Place, I turned the lights off, I lit candles - in that order - I let the tears fall, and I listened to the quiet.
I am happy. I did not ask for this. The existential crisis, the grief, the sadness, the panic, the tumultuous sorrow does not care. It has never cared.
It is a visitor that is never welcome, and thus it always overstays.
Sometimes, I am washing the dishes, and the crickets are humming softly, and the wind is winding its way through each finger of palm frond, and there is a tornado inside me, and my face is a frozen mask of calm, my hands keep scrubbing, and I watch as this familiar stranger crashes over and over against my insides, as my body moves from task to task as though there isn't an entire other entity present, and the incense
has already burned out.
Of course it has.
There was nothing left to burn.
