Thump Thump.
Butterflies crawl in my chest.
Thoughts swirl around in my head.
I can’t focus or see straight.
This is anxiety.

And it’s not something I
talk about often, though it’s
more common than one might
think, where my heart pounds so
loud and anxious
thoughts threaten to
drown out everything
that makes me,
Me.

You see, my brain sees simple
things incorrectly.
Texts and sometimes the
thought of leaving the
house sends
adrenaline coursing through my
system like
a thousand shots of caffeine
into my bloodstream.
The logical parts of me fled on the
first flight out of town,
leaving me to feel the tremors and
full force tsunami
on the ground.

Anxiety is a lot like love,
but it’s a battle not a dance.
A lifetime, not five minutes.
Unlike love, it’s often violent.
But just like love, it’s quite silent.

Anxiety feels like hunger, but stronger.
Like fear, but it lasts longer.
Writing this poem has quelled the
qualms that anxiety often spells.

I wish that I could be honest
about this part of me. But it's
one of those things you’re trained
not to talk about from a young age.
Because unless you’re depressed,
medicated, or heaven forbid
you’re not seeing a therapist,
then it’s not bad enough to qualify.
It’s not big enough to report.
I’m not suffering enough.

But if you could just feel
my heart beating fast.
If you could interpret the swell
of my tell-tale blush.
If you could whisk your fingers
through all of my thoughts.
If you could only
hear all of the things I’m feeling
but can’t quite express.
Then you would know that my
silence is telling.
I may be smiling, but currently I’m
fighting for sanity in my own mind.
The mind I feel is no longer mine.
I’m walking a dangerous
tightrope *****.
My mind is a minefield of poisonous
butterflies.
They threaten to swallow me alive, so
I tread the violence quietly.

I fear when I expose you to this
side of me, you’ll only see anxiety
or that maybe I’m lying.
But anxiety is not me.
I am more than mixed up brain signals.

The rest of me is cardigans in the summer,
because it’s cold inside.
I am mock converse and ponytails and
words on paper,
thoughts poured out,
slowly.

I just feel anxious
Sometimes.
More than normal, actually.
But I’m dealing with it.
And I’m no less me.

We’re under a vast illusion.
Somewhere along the line we
came under this impression and
somehow we think that
we’ll always have it all together.
Always have all of our
strings wrapped
perfectly around one finger.

That the earth will always
spin the right way.
That the weight of the
metaphorical world won’t tip our
planet’s axis .2 centimeters to the right,
uprooting the ground from
underneath of all of us
suddenly and all at once
the balances shift,
Kristallnacht.
A German word.
It means, simply,
Crystal night.
The night of broken glass.
The night of broken people and
shards of lives.
The night everything fell
apart, suddenly and
all at once
the scales re-arranged themselves,
Kristallnacht.
Mid-way into a thousand year
reign of 12 years.
The end of the beginning and the
beginning of the end.
The definition of destruction and the
physical representation of a
bubbling and spontaneous
hatred.

You see, we’re under a vast illusion.
We think that the world will
always look this way,
That we’ll always be
young forever.

You see, she used to run through
meadows, picking
wildflowers and daisies,
blowing dandelions and making
carefree wishes.
Running barefoot,
arms splayed out,
heart all akimbo through
fields of forget-me-nots,
singing about how he loves her,
loves her not.
Not a care in the world.
Then the riots started and
she couldn’t explain why
the meadow she used to
run in was suddenly full of
stones with names tattooed on the
front with a date.

Overnight, the balances
shifted and that 6 year old
girl seemed to age 10 years.

She saw it all.
Beautiful faces, beautiful minds.
She saw the world fall apart like
fluttering hearts and
butterfly wings at midnight.
People coming back together
in a huddle of broken
promises and forgotten hallelujahs.
A 1000 year reign cut short.
She saw the end of the
world as she knew it.
Saw the careless hatred
decimate her carefree meadow
of daisies.

She began to sing a new song.
Picked a handful of
forget-me-nots and
chose to love
like she did
before the night the world ended.

I am a vast dichotomy of tasteful ideals.
I desire to dream the dreams most people deterred.

Paintbrushes touch canvases then lift
as if unsure if they should grace the world with their
beauty or hold back with chagrin.

Bodies burrow under blankets with
banned books instead of men.
I warm myself with beverages in a coffee mug on a
rainy day rather than
a body lying next to me.

Nine years of
age is too
young to understand that the
distance that separates us
is only
One ocean.

I sit at a table among
present company.
It's easy to say
away my nerves.
But the butterflies
won't stay at bay within me.

It's been nearly a
month now.
And I mark my days in
numbers.
Almost as if to remind me,
that my days are also numbered.
The numbers mark a new phase of my life, a new
place of development.
And the numbered dates are
in a way, comforting.
Number, slash.
Number, slash.
Number, slash.
The pattern repeats
consistently.
In a way it's almost
invariably and monotonously
sickening.
The numbered dates remind me that
Today
is exactly like Yesterday,
and Tomorrow is
exactly like Today.
It's this sick and twisted cycle that I
can't seem to break.
So I think for now,
I'll spend all of my
Todays thinking of
three reasons why Today
is not Yesterday.