Anxiety said let’s disappear
My first Easter Sunday since leaving the Church,
and her voice was so loud. Hissing in my ear,
Anxiety seduced me into the woods.
She promised silence from shame if I just ran
far enough. A half-formed text to my husband,
a lie that I went for a run. Tossed my phone
into the backseat of the car. This was how
I untethered. How I wandered to the bank
of the Oconee River. This was where I prayed
at Anxiety’s altar. My knees in the dirt, my fingers
slithered over the dry grass. Anxiety asked,
do you want to swim? Fickle goddess, she wants me
alive and dead. I couldn’t silence her song:
the rattlesnake’s warning, the hornet’s buzz.
I watched wind shuffle the leaves. A sparrow
flitted above. The sun didn’t smile or wince,
it just was. I breathed like my lungs would bloom
into daffodils. I breathed like a stranger to spring.
Anxiety coiled herself around a tree, impatient
and bored. She sharpened her teeth with a stone.
I take Anxiety to online therapy
and five minutes before the appointment
she sits in my lap, purring, sedated.
I expected a tantrum, but she doesn’t even bare her teeth.
My therapist appears on the screen, cheerful in her pink cardigan.
Anxiety wakes and blinks up at me. Her pupils swell
before she sinks her claws into my thigh.
My therapist is talking, but my brain
is filled with slivers of glass. Visions of my car: crushed
and rolling across the highway an hour from now, on my way to work.
I interrupt her to say that I’m cycling through vivid scenes of my own death,
and I don’t know
how to stop. She tells me to picture a conveyor belt in the grocery store.
The thoughts of death are gliding past.
I see them as a bag of limes, a jar of peanut butter,
a gallon of milk. Notice the thoughts, but don’t touch them.
Let them pass by and drop off the belt. Anxiety lines up
a set of kitchen knives. All the blades point at me.
A loaf of bread grows patches of green mold
on its way to the cashier. Bananas crawl like slugs
across the tile floor. My imagination wriggles
free from my control, and like a tadpole, grows legs.
Back in my body again, my therapist asks
how often I fantasize about death. Twice a week?
Every day? I didn’t realize that was the word for it: fantasize.
I want to feel ashamed, but I’m still just afraid. I fantasize:
in the shower while shaving my legs, in the kitchen eating a bagel,
on my commute, in the elevator when I’m alone,
in the bathroom brushing my teeth before bed.
Anxiety climbs my skin. She howls and howls.
–
Rachel Pittman is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University. She holds an MFA in Poetry from McNeese State University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in miniskirt magazine, Gingerbread House, Grimoire Magazine, and Strange Horizons.