Attempted Escape: Anxiety Isolation during COVID

Pressure gathers inside my rib cage. Throbbing, aching then sudden numbness. I feel weightless as I sit, disconnected from my body. A prisoner of my mind. The room is pushing down on me, the shadows wrapping around me like a tight hug I can’t escape. The idea of shattered glass soothes me. Of throwing something so delicate, and watching it shatter into hundreds of tiny, glistening shards. I want to feel that force in my arm, I want to feel that power, the anger, the pain. 

I want out. I stand and I run, but there is nowhere for me to go. I am trapped in these walls. In these rooms. The window taunts me, showing me lush greens and deep blues. There is a promise or air, of breath and I can’t get to it. I grab the window seal and violently shake it wishing that it would rip off, but my strength fails me. Pulling, and pulling my breath getting heavier, my mind becoming muddy. I’m on a carousel going round and round. In the same place that I started. 

Alone I stand. Thinking of all the better time, of when I could go out into the world and not fear for my life. Of times when I smiled from muscle memory--my smile is awkward now, unnatural on my face, it doesn’t belong there. I think of a place far away, an open field, somewhere unknown to mankind where I could go and just exist. Where I could wipe away the blood that stains my fingers and banish the ghosts that haunt my soul. A place where I no longer have to feel anything besides the warmth of the sun and the scratchy, wet, texture of the grass. 

I’d lie there and become one with the earth. Let it absorb me in its cocoon where I’d be safe from the storms of this world. Catacombed away no one could find me, no one could hurt me. I’d be at rest. With the birds I’d fly free, feel the wind lift me higher into the sky. Maybe I’d laugh. Perhaps I’d smile. 

I’d drink from the crystallized spring which would cleanse my mind. Washing it clean and pure. Emptying it of all the cobwebs, decaying skin, dried up raisons, and faded, broken lights. Renewed in hope, in belief, in joy, in faith, in love--I’d travel on forgetting all about the past and those in it. I’ll sign my name in the dirt with a stick and declare for myself who I am. I will yell my name in the sky. I will reclaim my voice and my power. 

I will not let the chains continue to pull me down. No longer will the snakes lure me into their caves just strike me, leaving my body tainted with venom. Slowly breaking down. I’ll crush the heads of the snakes. I’ll have no mercy when they call out to me, apologizing and are begging for mercy. All they want is to trick me, to separate me from my God, from myself, to lure me into their traps and then to eat me. They act like they are freeing me, like they are enlightening me, like they are giving me the world but at their truest nature they are simply the devil in disguise, wishing no good upon me but only harm. 

I’ll bathe in the pond. My hair will spread around my face like a halo. The cool, cold water entraps each curvature of my body. My breasts float a top peaking out towards the sun. Here I am not ashamed. I feel beautiful as the water touches my thigh, my buttocks, my rounded stomach. My white stretch marks glisten in the water, making them look otherworldly and beautiful, like geo patterns inside a precious rock. My body is a vessel here. One that frees me to the opportunity of living for the first time. My legs help me travel. My eyes allow me to drink in the beauty. My oblonged forehead, with it’s widow’s peak it’s my mind’s castle. 

I dream of this place. When I think of it. I feel the demonic hands being pried of me. My heart resumes beating in my chest. I wish I could go here. I wish this was my mind’s eye. I want to wipe away everything in this world that causes me pain. I want to be noticed. I want others to admit their wrongs. For I am only one woman, and I cannot be expected to continue on in this world like this alone. I can’t take it. It is torturous, the worst kind too. The kind that is nearly impossible to escape. The kind that lives and breathes inside of you. How do you kill that, without killing yourself? Some part of you will die, if not all of you. But at times it seems so tantalizing, so succulent, so sweet. Yet, these words are locked deep within my intestines, never fully digested or realized. They never reach my lips. Because if they did, they’d take me away to a place where rats live and moss grows through the stone and wails of the weeping echo through the hallways at night. There I’d become something lesser than human, something not deserving of attention or redemption. 

It would be the death of hope. 

Yet part of me feels that I’m already there. That my life, this world is that prison. At times I just simply forget. I get high on medication and allow myself to drift away into medicated fantasies. It’s not until I come down that I realize that I’m still stuck in the same cell, with the same bed, all by myself. Despite my numerous escape attempts the burlapped faces always come for me. I reach the door, I can almost taste the air and then they grab me, knock me unconscious and I awake in a tattered white dress, with no bra, and day old underwear with a tray of unidentified beige mush by the door. I’m losing the will to run, to remember the before. At times, sedation is my only relief. Sleep, darkness, dreams. More medication. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever escape this insidious place and go to my meadow. But if you ever can’t find me. If one day I’m gone, that’s where I’ll be. And I’ll be happy and free.