Naomi

Sometimes I write as if all the anxiety is gone. It isn’t. I just don’t think it’s that interesting. I suppose I’ve also reached a plateau, after gaining so much ground, but life is asking more of me than I feel I have right now.

I’ve been thinking too much, and that doesn’t help. Which is funny, because I am fundamentally happy. I mean, I have pretty much everything I could ask for. I was sharply aware of this when I thought of a certain bench—the one I sat on the first time I called a friend when I really needed help almost two years ago, when I had nothing; the very same one I stopped to sit on this week with the boy I am seeing on our walk home from the pub, so we could talk a bit more before I went in. It’s inside the churchyard, which I supposed isn’t very romantic, but there were glimmering spots on the wide horizon, and the sound of the night’s last trains in the distance, and all my anxiety melted away for that moment.

These feelings can coexist. It’s just that sometimes your mind creates a black wormhole below your feet. When you step forward, the hole does too. There’s always the threat that you’ll trip and fall and take an instant shortcut to a place where you don’t feel so strong, a place where you’ve been stuck before. Familiar but unnerving feelings begin to stir—a slight weight on your chest, a weariness in your bones. You’re not sure if it’s real, or if you’re making it up—to test yourself, or to prove to yourself that you’ll never be completely free. You finally have some of the things you’ve waited so long for, but what says you don’t have it in you to ruin it all?

You fixate on this possibility. You lie on the floor on weekends, wondering if it is going to happen, and if so, when. It is blindingly futile of you. It is a strange thing, to be trapped by POSSIBILITY that lies around you in every direction.

It is still decidedly winter. There is the tiniest hint of spring in the air but still, when the sun drops earlier than I’d like it to, I become unproductive and useless. All I want to do is lie down and sleep. That’s what I keep doing, though I know better. ♦