Recently, you have come to know fear. Before this, you have often been afraid, but you were not on first name terms with fear. When afraid, there was a solution, fear has its own dimensions, these seem to be both spatial and temporal, this is why it can be said that you live in fear - for as long as you experience it, you are inside it. It is bigger than you. You live in its grip, waiting. It disrupts time. It lives in your body. It leaves you standing in the shower unable to remember how to wash. Your brain becomes an unravelling thing, you forget what you’re meant to be doing every time you try to do anything.
You can not listen to songs above a certain tempo; perhaps you are trying to control your heart. You remember hearing Liev Schreiber recount the proverb there’s nothing as whole as a broken heart. You do not know how broken your heart might become. The not knowing causes the fear to intensify. You have never been patient and all there is to do is wait. You sit on the balcony in the dark. There are no stars, only a moon. This is the wrong way round to you. Under your breath, you hiss at the sky, I don’t believe in you and yet who is it you’re talking to. There is no absence, only the presence of this fear. You wish for faith, but no longer have the capacity to believe in anything. If God exists, he’s a fan of the cruel joke. He is not someone you’d care to befriend. You worry that in saying this you will jinx the outcome.
When you make plans, lists, phone calls, it goes away for a time. This is what it will have you believe. But as soon as you’re alone, it’s still there, a wall you run up against and can’t scale. You remember dealing with fear before; the way you retreat, go quiet, exercise the touching belief that intellectualising it will dissolve it. But you have never known fear of this size. You suspect what you knew before wasn’t fear at all.
When you get dressed, you load yourself with talismans. What is it you don’t believe in?
You realise too that no matter how recovered or stable or sensible you have become, this is only because life has been easier for a time, and now fear is a solid object, you want the obliterating force of your previous coping mechanisms; you begin to suspect you have never once in your life developed a positive one.
The only way you can sleep is to listen to music on your headphones. But only a handful of voices help, and you have small hands. You cannot focus on books. Films are difficult. You cannot write full paragraphs or long sentences. This is how you remember you believe in art.
You are pretty sure you do not have the stomach for this fear. This flipped coin. You do not want to think of the heads or tails of it. You have looked at statistics and probability and numbers and this has made the fear white hot and too big for one body. And your body is not large. The fear has grown so much that you would like to vomit it out, to purge yourself of it but you know it would leave remnants, and these would be a fast growing parasite. You cannot seem to warm yourself up. The fear has stolen your own heat.
The fear has disrupted time until what is happening is also what was happening, and what was happening has both happened and is still happening, and happening all over again for the first time but there will be no last time; you have never known before that it is possible to be so many ages at once or to exist in so many incarnations. You would like someone to make sense of this but it is too nonsensical a thing to say to anyone, so you keep quiet. It is this keeping quiet that allows people to say things like but you were always the sensible one as if they never met you but only their version of you.
On the fifth day of fear, you wake wanting to paint a wall. You mean this in the way you have written it. You simply want to take a roller to a wall and paint it. You would like a room in need of decoration and you would fix your mind to it and perhaps in doing this you would outwit the fear. Now you have written it, you realise how curious a phrase fixing your mind is. You would like to know how to plaster, you think. How to make a surface smooth and perfect. How to start something, be occupied by it until it is done, and have something to show for it. Instead, you are occupied by this fear. It has taken up residence inside you where it lays siege. You consider taking up Lego. You wish you were a practical person. You should really use your hands more. Not just for hitting keys.
You would like someone to make you laugh. You would like to laugh until your sides hurt. You would like to feel something else more than you would like to feel nothing at all. You hope this is what they call progress.
You begin to write in lists. You worry you are writing poetry after swearing you never will but you don’t understand stanzas or meter or rhyme so you are not. You are simply stopping the fear for a while. You do not think about taking up sucking your thumb again, you simply realise you have, and you are twisting your hair as you do. This twisting is so severe you break your own hair.
You know the fear is a right and proportionate response to the circumstances. You know it will be there for a long time and you know you must find the stomach for it. Two days before the necessary fear, you were alone in a hotel room when you became certain you smelt your grandmother. This only happens in times of stress and you found it curious, because you were not stressed. You were washing your hair and you were about to meet a friend and you’d had a good week with work. You laughed when you smelt her Elnett hairspray, her Imperial Leather soap, you said to the air, full of the sound of the music from your tinny portable speaker, what are you doing here. You suspect now you know. You realise your grandmother knew fear. It does not matter if you have the stomach for it, you must learn your capacity.
Somehow you climbed inside my mind and pulled the feelings out, transforming them into words. This is exactly it. Perfectly horribly it.
You nailed it. This. Is. The. Feeling.