The end of potential

Sometimes late at night I wake up and my heart is racing. It feels like a hand is holding my soul high up in my throat. It feels at this moment that it could simply fly away. That the membrane between what is living in me and the body that will remain when it is gone is so thin that it could slip though. It makes me want to cry. I feel like something large and dark is about to take over me. I know that I need to push it back, push it down, hold the living in or I will be consumed by nothingness.

In these moments late at night I am keenly aware that I will die.

The consciousness of this, the knowledge that some day I will no longer be, is a dark thing. It sideswipes me in moments of still and quiet. Standing at the sink drying dishes a sensation will pass through me and I suddenly, incontrovertibly, impossibly fully understand my own mortality. I will know it in a way that feels old and forever and it makes me want to cry. It feels like it is expanding and unfurling like a million tiny insects swarming away from me and I will never be able to catch and contain them all again.

And then just as quickly I am standing feeling the echo of the deepest kind of sadness and drying a dish. The darkness is somehow reigned in. But I can sense it will return again without warning.

As I type this I cannot quite grasp it, or rather I have too much control to let it free. In the warm and fading light of day I am too settled and centered for it to paralyze, run through and over me. Even as I try to recall the pressure in my chest and the rising panic and clutching of my throat I can feel the instinctual muscle that wrestles it down.

As a child I used to have panic attacks about infinity. They felt exactly the same.

I remember the sensation of my younger mind trying to hold the idea of an infinite universe. The looping expanses of space twirling and unspooling would slip past the bonds of my brain's ability to conceive, my desire to know and form a boundary around the concept the very limitation that prevented me from fully understanding it.

I felt this tug of war then, the need to know something fundamentally unknowable.

       I feel it now in my desire to tangibly feel a loss of my own understanding.

            Will it hurt when I no longer know that I am?

                 Will I feel the lack of being?

                         I don't think so.

                              I don't think so.

And this is harder somehow. Because I cannot grasp the nothing.

I just keep trying to understand

      how can it be that everything around me
                                                                will just
                                                                         go on...

                                                                              And that I.... 
                                                                                         will  not.
       
                                                           I will just end.

                                                                     And when I end that will be it.

I don't believe that I really feel death yet. It is still too abstract a thing. It creeps up in strange flashes of hypochondria about a mole or a bump. I think about it idly as a definitive ending of a storyline between a romantic lover or turn in the events of my life in regards to a friend. In this way it is dramatic but unreal, like an idea of a story line or the loss of a character's plot and development, but it isn't palpable and close and real.

I have lost some people, but they are people who were a long time in the losing. Grandparents already fondly thought of in the distance. People I loved in ideology more than in the present tense. I cried for them, for the hollowness these bodies contained, but I did not (do not) wholly understand the gravity of the loss.

What I do feel is the fear of wasting time.

I fear missing out. I fear having lost my chance. I fear that by picking one path I will have made a mistake. It oddly holds me in place, this indecisiveness, afraid to lose what I have. I worry it will go without my realizing. Something deep in me believes I must look at all the things that surround me to ensure they haven't gone away without my knowing.

I cannot look at this fear directly. When I name it, it becomes small, silly, trite. But it continues its gentle hold on me and it feels as if it too comes from the dark place at night that wakes me with a hand around my throat. I want to see its eyes. I want to hold it by the shoulders and shake. I want to let it know that I am in charge and I believe in myself and that I do not let it convince me to doubt my choices. I want these things and I fear they are not true.

I fear that at the end of it I will wonder what I have done with my life.

I fear that I will wonder what it all was for.

I fear that I will have regrets.

I fear that I will have lost something beautiful.

I fear that I will know the answers when it's too late.

I fear this.

But I still can't quite wrap my mind around the answers, that beautiful looping symbol keeps slipping out of my grasp and the darkness of un-being continues to hold me in a tight embrace that I cannot hide from at night.

Infinity and Death!

I want to talk to you.

I want you to answer me.

I want to make you knowable.

I want you to tell me it will be ok.



Please.



Please.



Please.