Talking Helps
April 02, 2017 - 275 words
"When did you fall in love with him?" Anna asked her mother. She wanted to know. She needed to know. Especially on this day, when she realized she was falling in love with him too. That was a frightening thing to admit to herself, and a shameful thing to admit to her mother, but love hits like a lightning bolt ALWAYS. She suffered from acute anxiety, masked it pretty well but fought the demonic feelings like a frustrated soul in a labyrinth. Even her dreams made her anxious. Time to shut down. Her barriers were up like a castle gate. Nothing would get through. She was safe that way.
Once she had had a drug experience that exposed her, naked as a vulnerable fawn, and she hated it. No control. Everyone asking her if she was okay, if she wanted to talk herself through it. Talking helps, they insisted. Antagonized and frantic, she withdrew, away from the light and the life of her concerned friends and into the darkness where she could fight the ferocity alone. Somebody had checked in on her later. That was a confusing couple of hours. That night could be a chapter in her book that she would never get around to writing.
Love is like a drug, she realized in the moments it took her mother to answer. It carries you on these frightening waves of egolessness and psychic chaos and into some stormy unsafe sea where countless other travelers of the heart wrecked their patched-up vessels in vain attempts to return to land. "Actually nevermind," Anna said, just a few seconds later. She didn't want to know after all.