Anxiety

He looked up through the yellow haze. A searing hot bolt of adrenalin shot through his body, starting in his shoulders and moving down his lanky arms and into his thin, billowy fingers. Down through his chest and into the deepest depths of his stomach, radiating outward, shaking his tree stump legs, and emanating out of the tips of his toes directly into his exoskeleton.

When this twinge passed, he felt his heart pounding against the inside of his chest and saw his stomach inflating and deflating rapidly as his breath got shorter and shorter. His clammy hands clenched tightly as he strengthened the grip on his destiny.

He knew there was no turning back. That he had to press forward. His legs tensed and straightened like he was going to push right through the floor. He arched his back, and a stream of hot, excited air rushed into his lungs, expanding them outwardly until they were pressing against his beating heart. He could feel the electrons in their highest state of energy circling around and around as the pungent, spicy air scorched his throat.

He exhaled deeply, ushering in a new state of calm. He felt in control again. He was resolved in his purpose. Then another wave.

This time he felt fear. His breath shortened again and he could feel the droplets of sweat rolling down his sides. Suddenly every pore in his face opened wide like a great damn and water came rushing onto the surface of his skin. His eyes were stinging. He methodically removed one hand at a time away from its strangling grip and wiped away the acid sweat that was now falling directly into his eyes from the pools of his saturated eyebrows, like rain water overflowing a gutter filled up with leaves.

He started to have second thoughts. Maybe he shouldn't be doing this. Maybe he was going too far. He thought about his wife. His kids. What if there was an accident? He shouldn't be acting so carelessly, so selfishly, with such immaturity. What about the strangers all around that could be affected by his choice? His anxious fearful excitement quickly turned to vapid uncertainty, then to deep, bitter regret. He had made the wrong choice and now he knew it. But it was too late. Or was it? He had to make a decision now. He could not afford to lose another half second as he hurdled forward in the vessel of his indecision.

It may have been the sturdy, unrelenting pressure to make a decision that unfixed his mind from its position in space-time. Or maybe it was his subconscious covertly removing his psyche from the situation to protect its own fragile character. Either way, his thoughts shifted away from the absurd position he had put himself in. He was conscious of the fact that this was happening to him, but he had no control over it. He was now just a passenger in his own vehicle. Nothing but a messenger of the universe, delivering orders to his own body, and receiving them back from himself, absent awareness. He acquiesced all control to this unnamed, but well known force, and his entire being swirled around and around, down to the bottom of the whirlpool of thoughts that were swirling in his head. He was pressed right against the precipice of consciousness, and he vaguely knew that it had taken him in, where he would be a prisoner within himself until this dastardly force chose to let him free.

Random thoughts were now passing through him at greater than light speed. Quantum realities shifting, and changing the very nature of his existence. He thought about the crisis in the Middle East. Then about why people seemed to be spiritually insignificant.

He thought about how people become either a boy or a girl, and that maybe since subatomic particles can travel through time and space that the stem cells that form penises and vagina's may be privy to some futuristic information, and knew whether the fetus was male or female. And that with hermaphrodites the stem cells were misinformed by the futuristic information, and didn't know which direction to go, so rather than making the wrong choice, they just became everything.

His thoughts then exploded into a stream of consciousness on the food chain. He thought that humans were the only carnivores that don't eat animals of higher intellect. That it would be impossible to do so, and that maybe that is why we do not progress spiritually. Maybe we should eat smarter animals.

Then he thought about how about America had become a nation of masochists, and that everyone was submitting with gleeful obedience to the pop-culture goddess. He envisioned other men, the same ones he worked with at the brokerage. He thought about their conformist executive haircuts tickling her chin as they suckled her nipple and consumed her homogenous melancholy venom. Was he immune?

He thought that people were obsessed with fame and notoriety. That they would do and say anything to be a working part of the machine, not realizing that the machine is actually broken. It must have been made in China.

On and on and on. Round and round and round he went. His thoughts emerging out of nowhere, growing into great seas of contemplation, and then dissolving back into nothing, all in less than a hundred billionths of a second.

Some indistinct factor of time passed by. Slowly he was regaining his perception of time. His thoughts became less random. He knew he was climbing out of the abyss. He remembered that he was sweating. Now his eyeballs felt like they were melting. Like salt on a slug. He wiped away the stinging water, and suddenly he was back, hurdling forward, his decision not yet made. It must be too late. He had to keep going.

Another wave of fear. This time resolute.

He was going to surrender to destiny, but was still afraid of the consequences it may bring. Anxious volts of energy went pulsing through him. It felt like electric shocks. His temples bulged in an out, following the rapid pace of his pounding heart. Every muscle in his body took turns contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing, like an orchestra was playing cruel, evil music in the synapses of his brain. Causing it to send violent orders throughout his central nervous system, wreaking havoc on the systems of his body. Devastating the infrastructure of his skeletomuscular city. Sending poisonous gas through his respiratory channels. Dumping industrial waste into his circulation. Boring out his excretory ductwork, causing it to dump massive amounts of the sweat that now soaked through his clothing. Releasing acid into his stomach and making it ache and burn like he had just been stabbed. Re-routing his digestive sewers until he felt all the days' intake rumbling and stirring, about to explode like a volcano of bile and rotting meat. A terrorist attack on his own body by his own mind.

He was near panic. He had to do something.

Suddenly he saw the yellow haze that lit his world during this torture turn red. It was a stunning, deep red. Vibrant and overpowering. It was a kind of red he hadn't seen before, he thought. But he must have. He knew he must have. But this time it seemed different. Instinct took over. Or maybe it was inertia. His thoughts devolved again into random contemplation, and he thought that instinct must be some form of inertia, protecting him from the impending doom that always seemed present.

His entire body tensed, his foot pressed against the floor but seemed to meet no resistance. His back was arched, his head back, his arms stretched straight out. His face was wrinkled and tight, and seemed to be competing against his hands to see which could implode first, as the muscles tensed and contracted as if they could actually slow his momentum.

He realized that for this entire time he had been sitting in silence. That his ears had not allowed a single sound to penetrate their rigid drums. Or maybe his brain just refused to acknowledge the sounds that his ears allowed to intrude. He couldn't tell. Either way, sound was now flowing through him as he heard his tires screech as the braking force distributed itself, presenting itself as a painting of solid skidded rubber on the hot surface of the street. The mirror image of its tread.

He was still. No longer hurdling forward. He was rendered immovable. He had done it. He sat there stopped at the red light.

He exhaled, releasing the poisonous anxiety that had built up in him. He sent it spiraling away with his long outward breath, hoping that it would not invade some innocent bystander with its ruinous potency, but that it would rise into the ether, its energy to be used for some other, more noble cause.