The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Pardon me.

I'm in a bit of a phase right now. It's not a phase I can ignore, either, because it's not just about anxiety this time. I feel it in my gut, in my arms and legs, in my back and head. It's physical, too. I can feel it. It makes me anxious, makes me sad, makes me want to stay in the dark until it's over. I hate these times. I hate feeling like there's nothing good in any of it.

Yes, there is a gall bladder operation pending and yes, it will hopefully take care of those pesky nighttime attacks which keep me up for hours and flat for days but I'm still bothered. Since accepting that this is indeed a physical issue, I've been feeling like I'm falling apart, like there's a more serious issue under the surface that no one has noticed, yet. I've been what if-ing for a few days now, wondering if I'm having one of those slow-moving heart attacks, wondering if I'm full of tumours or on the cusp of exploding with infectious disease. What if it's real? What if it's irreversible? What if, what if, what if...

Oh, there's a serious anger in me. Why have I been living a life like this? Why have I been afraid of taking chances? Writing about it doesn't make it less true and thinking about it doesn't make the next step seem easier. There's nothing in me which wants to move on, you see. I want to be the complete person without having to go through the steps to become her. It's too hard, too painful and there is so much uncertainty in me. I can't imagine being anything different than this. I can't foresee any kind of radical change within which will allow me to live the life I'd fantasized about for so long. I am filled with dread, loneliness and fear, and it used to be that his words would soothe me, would brush my dishevelled ego from my field of vision and leave me feeling free from obstacles and errant hairs. I need him to talk to me, but he's heard my side of it many times before. He's busy, he has his own mortality to think about.

I am readying to explode into a storm of hot tears. I know they are building behind the dam. I feel holes in the structure about to give way. I can't imagine living without fear, without pain, without worry but does anyone? Am I lamenting the loss of a life which no one has? Why the fatigue and the listlessness? Is it real or just my body's way of giving in to my rampant mental melodramas? Where is the warrior spirit? The woman with the steel jaw and the tongue shaped like a dagger?

In bed, a voice says from the dark corner.

I often wonder what keeps a person breathing when they learn that their life is coming to a close. I always try to imagine what they hold on for, and feel badly that I wonder. M's mother is ninety, can hardly sit up, can no longer have a conversation, can barely chew her food and she continues, and she battles, and she wages that battle from an adjustable bed while staring out the window at a white-grey sky. The friends are long dead, the husband gone for more than three decades, the son living far away so that he will not have to fake adoration. I do not wish her dead, not if she doesn't want it, but I wonder how satisfying her life is when all of her dreams, all of her efforts have culminated into a shared room without a picture on the wall. No furniture from an old house, no photos. Clothing which doesn't fit well, trinkets that have no meaning on a borrowed dresser. The past ninety years have come to this, nothing more than a sleepy waiting game in which there will never be a winner.

And here am I, far younger, seemingly fortunate, and all I can think about is the end of it all, the pain of this life and the agony of being frightened without reason. I am aware of all the wasted moments and I know that I haven't been living and it brings me down. I don't know if the pain in my middle is the stab of regret or the sorrow of wasted opportunity. It could be something horrid, or it could simply be the anxiety taking a different approach to things, a louder position so that I don't miss a word of it.

Shut up, you motherless bastard! I scream at it with my insides. And then it yells right back.

It's a phase, I'm hoping. I don't want it to be more than a few days of wondering.