thinking out loud, you said, I'm overwhelmed

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some cataclysm to rear its ugly head and send me back into prior paralyzed depths of my ridiculous anxieties, to return to the space I took so long to get away from.

I watch myself more astutely, now. Sometimes it's to keep a lie alive; nouns are edited and verbs omitted, timestamps skewed and intoxication temporarily ignored. More often, though, it's to spot the signs in case of disaster; am I sleeping enough? what's my diet like? why am I worried about what I'm worried about? Sometimes I feel like a miner who too focused on the canary, runs the risk of falling down the mineshaft.

I brush against them, sometimes, as I root for missing socks, the lone rigid object in a drawer full of fabric tubes; the childproof lid and orange bottle reminding me of a simpler time when all I had to do was take with meal and do not operate heavy machinery. I don't have a record of those days; they passed in a vague haze of office work and utter apathy punctuated with occasional bus treks from Langley to somewhere that didn't suck and periodic episodes of catastrophic doubt. I don't miss them.

I wonder, sometimes, if the easiest thing would be to start up again, to let the days wash over and by me in some obscene parody of a time-lapse montage as I sublimate my own desires and let my life be lived for me again, because today was a bad day and school is hard and work blows and I can't keep this up and and and everything is no good.

Then I remember the bottle, and I remember how I stopped feeling like things were so bad, and then I stopped feeling like myself, and then I stopped feeling altogether.

The bottle stays in the sock drawer. I will only throw it out when it is an empty gesture, not because I might need it and can't be trusted not to cave, but when I don't need it and have no use whatsoever for it.

That day is getting closer.