Still.

The inability to go through today without the aftertaste of yesterday in your mouth and the uneasy panic for tomorrow in your gut.

The inability to feel a simple emotion with regard to someone, instead weaving sticky webs of guilt and memory and irritation and bone-deep affection.

The inability to put a thought into words, sentences running off, cutting short, forming a spliced train that winds through desolate landscape, pretending that it has a destination. Imagining someone waiting at the platform, ears straining, heart pounding.

The truth

was like a sword. My skin would have parted at its touch. It would have let it through to reach my veins and muscles. I lifted it high and gazed at my blurry reflection with my blurry eyes in its gleaming surface. My clothes were no barrier and this I knew well. My stomach would swallow this also, as it had swallowed dirt and tears; for as long as I could remember I had swallowed nothing but fear, and it never occurred to me I could fight it instead.