Vapors

I still feel like I'm teetering on the edge of some high place. After the hell I had surpassed, I've begun to think of myself as someone who will steadily face each setting of the omnipresent sun.

Lately, the feeling that this may not be the case has been nagging me like some persistent echo.

In January 7, 2007, I wrote:

You probably know how it is, when that tiny wail clamped inside your chest balloons into a huge lump of painful, ear-splitting screams. For some of us, it's easy to let it out. Never mind that the odds of being heard by the people two doors away are ninety-nine to one. It's as easy as one, two, three, scream! Then it's all over and you feel a thousand times better where it used to hurt like needle-pricks.

For the less fortunate ones (namely, the repressed), shouting is out of the question. The thought of it just never comes, simply because it's not the natural instinct. We probably never learned the trick as children.We feel the gargantuan pain (and we're talking physical pain) shooting up from the chest to the throat and we push, push it downwards so that the effort makes breathing difficult. But we don't stop until we know for sure that we've dug deep enough to bury the scream.

And, with it, the pain.

And then the tears never really come.They have retreated, pushed down, as well. And we think, what a feat it has been, what sweetness in the strength of temperance, one more victory for the taking.

If it's victory or something else, I can never really be certain.