This Is How It Eats You

One: Meditations on Tension

First is the tingle in the fingers. Like they’ve fallen asleep. But you’re wide awake. Next the legs tighten up a bit, like you’ve been walking up a hill at a pace just a bit faster than you are comfortable with. You are sitting in a chair. Alertness runs through your body. You are being stalked, every nerve ending aware. Goosebumps, cold sweat, a shiver. The chest tightens and this is the when the first notes of panic ripple through your mind: this feeling that you are having a heart attack or, worse, that your body has forgotten how to breathe. Your DNA file, encoding this most basic of functions, has been corrupted.

Oh shit. Oh shit.

Is your hand shaking, like maybe you’ve had too much caffeine? But you haven’t; just the cup and a half you have every morning and that was hours ago. You get up from your chair and almost fall over; have you also forgotten to walk? What if your body has forgotten how all the parts work? What if your body has forgotten how to live?

The Panic Bird has arrived. That voice ricocheting in your skull, informing you everything is bad, everything is bleak and by the way you are dying. If not now, soon. It’s all a matter of perspective and of course, it is inevitable. The Panic Bird (thank you Sylvia Plath for naming it) has many tongues, many inflections. It raises the volume in your head but never into cacophony because it wants to make sure you are feeling every moment of tension. Every second as your body seesaws between explosion and implosion. Tension.

This is how it eats you.

Two: The Weird Body\Unbalanced Pieces

Bodies are just so fucking weird. Sacks of meat that somehow manage to generate ineffable awareness out of stellar ash.

It’s impossible to read the damn things. Muted signals: did you tweak a muscle, are you losing your breath, do you have cancer? Arthritis? What are the signs of dementia? Take every single thought a hypochondriac has, twist them into a braid of white noise and turn it loose in your head. Good luck getting a signal out of that noise.

What happens when your fingers stop working, how are you going to write then? Imagine being locked inside your own head, no outlet. No, wait, don’t imagine it—you’ve been there. It’s not pretty. How fast is body modification technology gonna mature? Not fast enough to help you. Maybe your kids. You’ve gotta keep those fingers working. Those same fingers that never could play a guitar. They don’t bend right. They can type, though. You’ll need them to keep typing. You don’t want to ever have to dictate. Who the hell would take dictation from you?

Your knee has never forgiven you for falling off the mountain at 18. Sometimes when it aches you stare at it, expecting to see bone burst through skin. Your bones are alien. They don’t belong to you and they are getting tired of being subsumed in a sack of meat. They’d like to see the sun. Is that really so much to ask? Every day your skull reminds you: I live inside your face. But for how long?

Ring of fire: plate tectonics and seismic activity, just above the belt line. A thin ring. You picture a strand of wire, heated until reddish-orange, slowly tightening beneath your skin. What’s it cutting off in there? Can it slice through bone? There is so much you don’t know. You’re on a journey of discovery. You wonder at how it can stay so sharp, so hot, when surrounded by soggy matter. Buddhists never talk about this. Maybe this is why they are so eager to leave the body behind. It’s not the most effective of machines. And only the privileged can afford tune-ups.

Let’s mix and match: symptoms for the color of the day. Is your mind, excuse me, your anxiety, causing the physical symptoms, or vice versa? Just full of questions, you are. Try an exercise: walk up the stairs picturing every muscle, every nerve working in harmony to make each step happen. They know how to do that without you directing them…or at least being aware that you are directing. (If the file is not corrupted, it will be. We have arrived at inevitability once again.)

The weird body, mixed and matched unbalanced pieces. It’s not working right. You’re not working right. There is only one thing to do: hide it. Above all, hide it.

This is how it eats you.

Three: Opening the Doors of Perception and Finding an Overflowing Toilet

Like every dive bar you’ve ever been in. Put your hands on the center of your skull and tear it open. Starlight is a dim overhead bulb. The universe surrounding you is tired graffiti. There are no good one-liners and the drawings lack even crude poetry. The loneliest crimes take place at rest stops, the emptiest dreams their companion.

So many of your dreams these days end up with you needing to find a bathroom. Which you inevitably do, but the toilets are always in odd open spaces. Sometimes they are nothing more than holes in the ground, part of a weird communal shower room. Plugged, overflowing, gross. There are never any stalls. This is general admission all the way and the eyes watching you wear the guise of those who bullied you when you were young. But you know it’s not really them: it’s an indifferent universe, observing the results of your uncooperative body.

You wake before relief. The discomfort is carried into the day, lingering.

This is how it eats you.

Four: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Atheist

It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. The finish line is undesirable but you can’t run backwards.

Anxiety exists because there is an endtime. You don’t know what comes after that endtime. You’re walking past the orchard a half mile from your house, it’s raining, you’re cold (why have you never been warm for the last four months?) and as you instinctively place your hand against your torso, feeling its tightness, you think: it must be nice to pray and think someone – human, consciousness, entity – is listening. How many find faith somewhere between 40 and 50? You are closer to the finish than the starting line. Maybe it no longer matters if you numb yourself with false comforts. Except, dammit, you just can’t. You never could. Fucking Sagan, man. He got you good.

Still, on some level you think everything must be cyclical, there is no true endtime even as the most miniscule components of matter break down. There is no true nothingness because every creature that has ever lived cannot fathom nothingness. You can’t meditate on or give into that which does not exist any more than you can fathom infinity. (Is there a difference between infinity and nothingness?)

Now the rain is coating your glasses and you didn’t wear a baseball cap. If you do have a heart attack next to this orchard, your body tumbling off the side of the road and landing against the rotting fence, maybe your elements will come together again in some other universe someday. Too cold to be comforting, it’s the best you can do.

This is how it eats you.

Five: That Text Never Sent

You’ve written so many. Composed them in your head, anyway. Composed them while walking, taking a shower, driving your car, cooking dinner, trying to fall asleep. Subject matter: checking in on those close to you, checking on those far from you, story ideas, lines of poetry, incisive insights about obscure albums two other people in the world care about, dreamtime dreamlines. You think: wait, I can’t send that right now. It will hold in my head until I’m done with this thing.

It never does.

You’ve written seven stories with a character named Text. (Seven is a magical number for you, even though you don’t believe in magic.) These stories are not related. Most of them are not good or executed poorly. To the reader, of course, there is no difference, just the inescapable fact that they suck. Which is why none of them have so much as been shown to friends, much less submitted for publication. A few of them were abandoned before they could even limp to the finish. Why they all have a character named Text isn’t a mystery, though. You think it’s a great character name. Meta without being meta. Implies something a little off, pinprick stars, half-erased and off-screen. Text is always a flawed character. You never like him.

Maybe it’s time for Text story number eight. Text, the great composer of texts never sent, a modern incarnation of Bellow’s Moses E. Herzog. Starting from an occasional text thrown in the middle of a descriptive paragraph, growing like a parasite until the end of the story is nothing but texts Text never texts. This is how it eats Text.

This is how it eats you.

Six: The Smell of Burning Tires, Or: I Don’t Look Like Garm, But I Did Stay at a Holiday Inn Express Last Night

5-HTP. Magnesium. Ashwagandha. Holy Basil. Hydroxyzine. Poetry to delay the inevitable. Plastic bottles encircling standing stones covered in dust. Capsules poured on sacred mirrors. Gummy gut punches.

This is how it eats you.

Seven: What is Breath?

What is found in the stomach archives:
The girl who spun off into oncoming traffic.
The dinner the husband and wife should not have eaten.
The medication left on picnic table.
The fallen-down moon.
Yellow silk pajamas, the kind no one wears anymore.
A tomb of guns.
A ring of burning encircling the waist.

What is not found in the stomach archives:
Pattern recognition.
Past prime pickled radishes and coffee grounds.
The end of everything.
The beginning of everything.
A pizza slice of sun.
The poisoned soil of Verdun.
A fish tank half-buried in the gravel pit.

This is how it eats you.