I don't know how to write about it. And when I try to talk about it, I cry tears as unwelcome as dead fish on the beach.
But it's happening again--the darkness descending, and it's not even a matter of breathing or not breathing anymore. It's much more simple now. It's a matter of counting the breaths like the petals on a flower, only I do not whisper loves me loves me not. Instead, there is silence as I pull off each breath and there is slow motion as it falls away from me.
Even work has become surreal to me. A sitcom without an audience laughing on cue. I feel awkward in my conversations, even though they are the same conversations I've had for months with the same co-workers in the same cubicles. I initiate conversations and panic two sentences into them, afraid that I won't perform them correctly, but I don't know how to end them without being rude. So I laugh and look around me for an escape route.
This isn't right. I breathe to myself. What is wrong with me?
But I'm afraid to know the answer to that. I can't bring myself to go to a therapist. What in the hell is wrong with me? But I'm so scared of therapy--for the first time in my life, and I've been going to therapy since I can remember.
I'm scared not to go to therapy; frightened that I'm not going to survive the next day, the next week, every night that follows every day.
So it leaves me here, near midnight, paralyzed emotionally like when I was a child and thought that if I didn't allow myself to think about the feeling of him touching me, I wouldn't know he was touching me.
After a while, that technique worked so well that I didn't even feel myself touching myself.
And so now how can I even entertain that as a possible solution? Not thinking about how I feel in a desperate hope that I'll be able to fool myself into believing that I'm surviving.
I'm not surviving. I'm detatching. I'm playing opossum. I'm turning my back. And it's very likely to kill me.
Maybe I'll be so good at it, that I won't even feel myself die.
I apologize for the melodramatic tone of this entry. I apologize for the sadness.
On a brighter note, Nico comes home tomorrow. I wish I had half her courage. She's the most intelligent woman I've ever met and the kindest, and I've promised her my life, or rather, not to take it from myself. She doesn't ask for much, does she? (I love her very much.)