Panic (on the streets)

Shopping. Just walking, looking at things, books (you love the scent of fresh paper), erasers (fruit or plastic, take your choice - no, that one's gooey artificial chocolate), magazines (glossyslick pages slide through your fingers, the edges sharp and cool and faintly sticky from someone else's hands) -- and suddenly your breath won't leave your throat -- it's caught, stuck between lung and mouth, but you can't bring yourself to let it out though you have to try, so onetwothreeonetwo too fast, too shallow, non-sustaining. Your heart sends blood searing through your veins, racing against nothing. It stutters: beat-thup-thup-thup beat-thup-beat, an endless staccato of fear of life and death in equal portions. Your eyes dart upward, vision blurring, halos gleaming around the lights. The shadows in this bright store blind you, root your feet to the carpet, push your hands into your pockets when you want to reach out and grasp the shelves just to have something solid to cling to, monkey-like.

Nothing is wrong.
There is no problem.

You have been here before. You can feel that unthinking scream building to a steam-valve shriek in the back of your mind. You know what to do.

Find something, something small and quiet, simple illustrations, black and white -- easy. Repeat the words you see under your breath until that thing in your head quiets, calms, lets you lock the cage and creep away. You hold your own hands, feeling how cold they have become, testing the quality of your sense of touch.

This place is not a place you love, but at least for you it is not a labyrinth. You are lucky. You know the way out.

What do they know?

I'm reading library books -- shoveling word after word down into my craw until it fills, but it never fills. All I want is language. It feels good, and I revel in the opportunity to gorge myself sick.

Soon there will be more, and I will consume them whole and digest them slowly and soon -- so soon -- I will begin my own quests.