Content warning: war, suicide, and anxiety.
I wonder if it’s been that kind of fear that takes days to fully plant itself in your body. Imagining everything in anger, every sentence the beginning of an argument, steeling yourself that you will reject kind touches from anyone.
The way people talk, like the world’s ending, and laugh it off as if fear isn’t a ghost you thought you’d shaken off your back. But it’s actually a living monster lurking in the shadow that has overcome your body before, waiting to do so again the second you turn around to face it.
And knowing that pain is too much, and sometimes you imagine the weapons in the kitchen, and if everything is over anyway, why do you have to be there to see it? Why not end it right now?
So when the war started (on Anne’s birthday, no less), the monster was back, and the fear overcame my body, and I just knew my life was over. All of our lives were over. It would never be safe to go anywhere again.
My whole body was on fire.
People have been begging me for years to be an empath, speaking of bodies piling up in God knows how many countries I am evil for not crying about more, not caring that I will drown in my own tears if I do, knowing I will join them, knowing that I already had, and for years I’d been wondering if they would finally be satisfied if I added my corpse to the dead, and now I would finally know.
I imagine asking the terrorists to let me die fast so that I can at least avoid feeling the fear. I just want to die before I have to feel the fear.
The fear is everywhere.
And it’s hard to write a poem in the hours after you find out you’re going to die, because those thoughts happen so fast, and you have to pick the clearest ones out of the ashes of EVERYTHING IS OVER afterward. The piles of debris that can only be summarized as: I might as well just die now. I can’t do fear.
And I knelt to pray with my family as if nothing had happened.
The devil lives in hell where the fire is, and he planted it in my body, where it caught in a wild Californian rush once I realized I couldn’t shake it off by going on an angst-filled walk outside, nor could I bunker down in my house for the rest of forever.
And I knew I had to be the one to pray, and we had to hold hands, and I had to be the one to tell God that we were gonna be fine because suddenly I knew with a profoundness unlike any other. But I didn’t.
And if the fear is a wildfire, the strength is a flash flood.
Because it came so fast that the thoughts had a full minute tops to rush through my head, nothing sticking except for the cleanliness that covered the ground once the wreckage was over.
I can’t go yet. I have to stay here.
I don’t remember how I knew, just that I did.
And the flood released itself from my body through my eyes in a great sob.
I sat silently for at least five straight minutes because I didn’t know what to say. My parents were probably used to knowing they would die tomorrow; they grew up in the 80s.
My mother said so many things, but the only thing that’s left is that she’s not dying tomorrow. I’m not dying tomorrow. She needed me to stay, and she wasn’t the only one.
She asked if I wanted to die tomorrow, and I said no, and it was true, but I do sometimes wonder if I want to die so I don’t have to feel the fear. I don’t do well with fear.
But it didn’t go as I imagined. I leaned into her touch and cuddled her and let her play with my hair. She rubbed my shoulders in that special way that makes you realize how constantly sore you always are. It made me want to rub my parents’ shoulders every day. I wiped off the tears that I cried onto her knee as I lay there. We rubbed circles into each other’s skin. We stayed there forever, and she didn’t leave even when she was in pain, the way mothers do. The images in my head were not visions, just hallucinations. And as quickly as I had known I would die tomorrow, in fire and violence, I knew I would not die for decades to come.
The miracle was on its way, and I could not leave.
And my mother read to me about Elisha and his chariots. And I saw everyone I’ve ever known and loved sitting around me in a golden halo, from my grandparents to that recently fallen pop star. The sweet temptation to ask my best friend to send over the poem he wrote about my legion of angels so I can recite it like scripture.
My feet were planted so hard on the ground that I could not fly away to heaven. And my mother said that we had to feel this way sometimes because the world was so dark. But it was not hopeless, because there was so much good. And she even said that some of it was me.
I have to write the story. I have to prophesy the miracles.
Elizabeth Day is an author, poet, blogger, and playwright from Las Vegas, Nevada. Her work has been featured in The Just Girl Project, Empyrean Literary Magazine, Contemporary Jo, Hey Young Writer, and Fterota Logia. She is a student at Southern Utah University studying English education with a creative writing emphasis and double minors in theater and film. You can find her on Instagram @itsanadventur.
Featured image by on Unsplash.
