This is Me: Anxiety

It’s been 45 minutes since the clock so kindly told me it’s past 2 a.m. Ten minutes since I closed my eyes and five until I maybe die. Is time so tangible that we can taste it? When I wake up in three hours, I’ll have a film on my tongue the flavor of stale spit. Is this the savor of 6 a.m.? Or, maybe, it’s the mouthfeel of several hours in. In three more again there will be a scent on the air of cold coffee I haven’t touched and keyboard keys not budged since I sat here. Or, perhaps, it’s a Saturday and the flavor will be of faux meditation on the balcony accompanied by Youtube teens and indolent me. Downward facing dog until I have to leave and Instagram filters to foster platitudinous soliloquy.

It’s 32 more minutes passed and Saturday is falling by as it often does: a morning spent in the shade, in the breeze, pretending I can read with anxiety until, eventually, I stand to walk the dog. It’s afternoon and my tongue tastes like fresh spit because I haven’t eaten anything yet. Under the sun, everything feels hotter and I wonder if my dog is getting older. His tongue flops and bounces with each sauntering step as he rushes to keep up with me and with the smells of green grasses and stale pee dripped on shrubbery. We sit in the shade and listen to songs sounding from car stereos and I don’t know how much time has passed because I don’t have my phone. Maybe it’s been a decade since we stepped off the balcony. Maybe it’s been an age. I wonder what ten minutes would taste like if I had the prescience to take a break. We stand in the shade and walk through the sun and everything feels hotter when it’s weighed by the eyes of a stranger.

We get home after 68 minutes have passed and it tastes like I’ve done nothing today but I stink and I’m sweaty and I want to wash my face. So we sleep, but my heart races. My legs stick to the leather couch and there are pools in the pits of my knees. I don’t ever remember my dreams. When I wake, my tongue tastes like hunger, but my stomach undulates and won’t eat. If I do, I taste 23 minutes passing and nothing of the egg and the meat and the pancake.

It’s four o’clock when my anxieties ease and I realize I’ve wasted the day. This triggers another wave and I wait for this soiree, this cascade, this screenplay to cease. The light goes down and I start to clean. The phone rings and I let it. The movie plays and I get it: this is me. This is anxiety on a Saturday evening. I’ll go to bed early and I’ll wake up late. And when it’s Sunday and my tongue tastes like a second, I’ll wish it was Saturday again so I can try to win this fight against my brain. To get back the age when two days tasted like a fortnight, when childhood was just a pastime.

Stay gold,
Sabrina