If there was only one feeling I could use to describe my life, it’d be anxiety. Not the type of anxiety that swallows you whole, the blissful sort that keeps you from making decisions. It’s the kind that holds you by the hand and takes charge, as any good adult should.
My anxiety is far less benevolent. It teeters on the edge of sublimation and totality, walking on the knife’s edge. It’s suicidal. It doesn’t know what it wants, if it should stay or go, which makes it all the more unbearable.
It leaves me with just enough common sense to recognize it for what it is, I have just enough agency to do something about it, and therein lies the most sinister part about the whole affair: I am imprisoned by choice.
It’s ironic in a cosmic sort of way, in the same sense that twinkling stars are only beautiful because they have already fizzled out and died. At the onset I already understand what “choice” must be made, if I am even capable of making it at all. This is my dilemma, this is the truly sinister nature of my anxiety.
The knowledge that I can “choose” what to do next, that I am aware of what happens and what could happen, that responsibility is absurd. It is unfair and unbearable and unreasonable and entirely incoherent. It is the choice I am forced to make each day that I don’t kill myself. It is the decision between watching as things happen to me and allowing them to happen to me. It is the responsibility of deciding what it all means, if it even should mean anything, all the while knowing that this strife is more or less internal, with little bearing on the outside world, let alone acknowledgement from it.
I understand that this panic is neither good nor bad. It is amoral not because it isn’t real, but because it’s the end result of a particular set of circumstances. The solution to an equation of stimuli, a byproduct of something entirely unhuman and consequently apathetic as a result. Personification makes it easier to grapple with.
Here, I’ll show you.
First it snakes around my heart, like rose vines without the flowers, bleeding green snakes without all the hissing. I can feel my heartbeat slow as it sets in, the black panic that floods my bloodstream. Before long my chest is tight my stomach sloshes and churns, waves in a storm.
My thoughts become the next affliction. They race and start to gather speed, exponentially, it feels like. Time slurs and stretches, contracting at awkward angles and I can start to see myself in the third person. A pan-out shot of the most uninteresting scene imaginable.
I remain unbearably conscious of it all. My common sense reminds that this is just another flight of panic, another familiar house-call from the same unwelcome guest. The part of my mind that is gripped by panic, that has been roped into small talk with someone it has no interest in speaking with, succumbs to the parlay. The anxiety hasn’t even taken off its coat yet, and here I find myself watching hopelessly as it seduces the “weaker” parts of my mind.
I am a cuckold made to confront the unimaginable, at the threshold of his own home.
But what kind of host would I be if I did not entertain my guests, no matter how disliked or intrusive they might be? The only difference between civility and barbarism is that civilized folk endure the formalities before fucking you. We make war at the dinner table, gaining ground over who passes what dish to whom, redrawing the frontline based on how things are said in response to what.
I have to resist the temptation to be consumed. It’s akin to l’appel du vide, as the French have coined that peculiar desire to jump near the edge of teetering heights. It’s incoherent. Just as this imagination is.
I am at once the bitter husband and the unsatisfied wife, the responsible one and the wild one, the decision to mitigate what damage has already been caused and the choice to lose myself in the riot. Of course, it knows this. And I knows that it knows this.
Above the layers of personification there is paralysis. The gods beyond the authority of kings. There, in the first level of an ever expanding hierarchy of madness, the first court of another thousand, is the knowledge that this is all in my head. I exist here, again, as bailiff. The panic argues its case as the prosecution and whatever agency it has seen fit to spare me is made to fight as the defendant, its back against the wall.
At all times, all parties are aware of what the other knows. I know that that this stratification is imaginary, that this machination of buffoonery is just a way to cope. The defendant knows that this is just another episode, that it is not on trial. That it is not guilty. That it was never guilty.
The prosecution knows that it is not real. That it is not an inherent part of my identity, of my personality, of what I perceive myself to be. It knows that it is not apart of this complex system of thought and self-perception. It knows that it is inherently irrational and the byproduct of chemical imbalances within the brain.
And yet these three argue all the same. They spar and fight and cry as if I cannot dismiss them on a whim. But if I could do that, there would be no need for such theatrics.
I am made — or I make myself? — to choose between a losing binary. Unfettered terror or the nauseating work of resistance.
At all levels of the meta, I refocus and go through the motions of what I have been taught.
Name five things you can see. Four things you can hear. Three that you can touch. Two you can smell. One that you can taste.
The trees outside my window. My blinds. The angled ceramic of my blinds. The wooden clothespins that bind my drapes together. My hands, trembling.
The mechanical gnawing of my keyboard. The panting whirr of the ceiling fan’s motor. The creak of my bouncing knee. An uneven breath, either the product of fear or asthma or both.
My keyboard, again. The parallel indentations of hardwood floor boards. Mousepad.
Sweat, nearly stale from a day’s worth of work. Hair that has yet to be washed.
Blood, metal and all.
And then it is gone. One moment I am grabbing a dish, the next moment I am passing it to an empty chair.
The vineyard is gone and my chest stretches to fill the spaces that were taken from it. I can still feel where the thorns had dug themselves in, though. That feeling never leaves.
My mind goes blank. Utterly, completely, blank. There is no color, no noise, no feeling. Sublimation. Like closing one eye and trying to describe what color it sees.
What color is absence?
I am left to clean the table and wash the dishes. The parts of my mind, the bits of my consciousness that fell prey, they slink off quietly to somewhere else in the house. This place is vast, never-ending almost, but it’ll never be big enough to fit the three of us. Myself. The missus. And the elephant in the room.
I pray that this is the closest I will ever come to infidelity. To understanding what it feels like to pretend not to know. To act as if we have been divorced in everything but name. To pretend that I’m fine with knowing that someone else is doing the things that I can’t, that they are exemplary where I am mediocre.
And then I begin to wonder how I might describe this panic. How relatable it might be. Why I always start with the same description of my chest.
Maybe the next one will help me detail it better.
