Careful Stitches

I'm having panic attacks again. Not serious ones, honestly. For a long time, I didn't even know they were panic attacks until someone told me that the tightening in my chest was indeed, a panic attack. I just thought I was having my heart broken again and again.

You see, he found the pink flowers I keep in my hair, a seemingly innocuous discovery and I should have thought nothing of it. But I have a broken lizard brain. And my broken lizard brain told me that I shouldn't be leaving pieces of myself with anyone. You know, in that weird primordial sense. Because leaving pieces of myself means that I've spent time in one space. That means that I've taken their time and I've taken their space, and I really shouldn't be doing that. Especially now. Especially when I can break so easily because I'm barely put together. I'm a Yoko Ono bowl. I've been broken and fixed with gold and even though I'm patched up like a Raggedy Ann doll, there's still an aesthetic chasm in me. And that crack makes me broken goods.

And the world is literally on fire and the air is literally poison and all I can think of is how sweetly he lets me rest in his side when I can't keep my eyes open anymore and how kindly he welcomes me into his peace. I've stopped wearing my watch on his days. Time isn’t really a quantifiable unit with him, and I always feel like I'm running against the sun. He makes me smile wide when he gets me, he greets me with sunshine happy and I'm invincible. I smile with my whole mouth when he makes me laugh and for a second I forget that I am the most selfish person.

I immediately thought of the story he told me about his dad wanting to ride in the car with him and he worries about getting me sick. The cross-contamination and with the poison air and with the plague that's threatening to kill us all and we're so careful all the time with the masks his pretty mother made me and I hold them in my hands and look at the careful stitches and wonder how she can be so kind to someone she's never met and I worry about taking his time and I push him away and he pushes me back and I'm a thousand times scared because I shouldn't be worth the hassle. Or the effort. I want him to have normal friends and normal thoughts that shouldn't start with, what if she gets sick? What if I get her sick? Or friends that don't wake up and do a self-evaluation of their body to remind themselves that they're one whole person still. I sometimes forget that I'm not a lengthy investment choice. And it's probably not wise to invest in me for the long haul.

I know I'm a lot of person. I like to think God decided he made me concentrated. He fit a lot more of me into a lot less time. I'm like those frozen tubes of juice we used to eat out of the can with spoons in the summer heat. The sickly sweet juice that would stick to our palms and stain our lips red. I give a lot real fast, and it's not for everyone. Too much and you get diabetes and cavities. At least a bright red tongue. But I love with every part of me and I love ferociously and loudly, and this is where the dichotomy lies. How can I love someone entirely if I'm not whole myself.

It's one in the morning and I'm swallowing past the lump in my throat, my forehead is throbbing with the makings of a tension headache and I have sadgirl songs playing through my headphones while my fingers dance across keys as I make sense of my shaking leg and convulsing heart. My hands and feet have grown cold, my jaw shakes but I know sleep will elude me. I plot moments and ideas and run patterns like I'm trying to find a serial killer with red yarn on a corkboard and think of everyone I would hurt when life finally catches up with me. I think of watery eyes and desolate stares and trembling hands so often that they haunt me nightly. And sometimes it's paralyzing.

So I keep myself in the freezer. I'm cold solid. And sometimes, sweet hands take me out to thaw and I melt a little and I get a little fluid and I remember to love and feel and be a real human woman and I take up the corners of my container and fill it up and everything is fluid and soft and I drown everything around me, flooding the roots and rotting the good things I've planted in the ground. That's when I take myself back to the freezer. I stay there and get solid. I get cold. And I'm stable. And small. And I keep running against the sun, and leave the flowers I keep in my hair like a trail to see how far I’ve come. I keep reaching out my hands and I know that there'll always be a hundred hands grasping out for me. But I remember that I can't always hold them all as tightly as my fingers want to.