Inside an Anxious Fire

You never expected your life to turn out like this. You never imagined that every morning, when you wake up, you will feel far more exhausted than when you laid down the previous night. Every morning is resurrection, not rejuvenation. It’s not an immediate resurrection; it’s a nerve by nerve, muscle by muscle, organ by organ manifestation of your previous body. Consciousness comes last, and it’s ripped out of the Styx by a drunken, indifferent God and stuffed into your head before you are thrown back to your bed, tumbling through pregnant white clouds and bouncing off the wings of passenger jets.

This is your morning.

You’re saved from your dreams (of losing more family members or loved ones or your fear of being trapped in this town or fear of never following your passion) by your waking nightmare: anxiety.

You shuffle off your blankets, throw your legs over the side of your bed, and stare at the carpet, trying to regain your composure, familiarizing yourself with your surroundings: there’s the dresser, that’s the nightstand, shoes, mirror–is that me? Is that what I look like?–and you rub your eyes, hoping that when you open them again it will be twenty years later and life will make a bit more sense. But you open them to the same room you closed them in, and the same thoughts stalk and strike your serenity.

Coffee used to calm your nerves, and warm your soul, now it’s an arsonist pouring gas on the wildfire thoughts. The pill you take to survive every morning makes your heart beat faster, or it feels like it’s beating faster. But you drink the coffee anyway because you think, fuck it! I have to enjoy something in this God-forsaken world! And then you’re surprised, for some reason, when your thoughts swarm in your mind, and hijack your amygdala and crash it right into your lungs causing shortness of breath.

This is just your morning.

This is just the beginning.
​
This is you opening the polished onyx door, and walking inside the fire of daily existence.