my anxiety has been in control more often than not lately

i couldn't tell you why with precision but i can show you a thousand paper cuts on my lungs and the an equal number of compact weights hanging from my heart. all of the things i care about beat like butterflies with sharpened wings. it hurts to breathe. it hurts to care.

and i am so mortal, so human, so at the mercy of metaphor just to understand what i feel or think or am.

am i more than the sum of my weaknesses?

Life is speeding up. I don't know the exact cause but I am certain that the trees beside the road don't stay in view for as long as they used to.

If my brain had a mouth, it would be full. I have so many undigested thoughts. Today, the mouth of my brain is chewing on anger.

I'm learning to accept that I have so much anger even though no one wants me to be angry. When people ask me how I am, I want to say "roiling"--which is a word that for a long time I thought I had made up. But I didn't; it's real and it describes the river inside of me better than my own name.

I don't tell hardly anyone about my anger because I don't know what to do with it. And even though I don't know what to do with my anger, I already know that too few other people are trustworthy enough to share it with. I am not supposed to be angry. I will be told about forgiveness. I will be told about peace. But there is no peace and forgiveness comes later. Right now, I have the pain and the pain produces anger.

I don't want to be angry forever. But I want to be angry long enough to understand what is happening inside of me and why. I have met too many humans who tried to suffocate their anger rather than live with it. None of them are happy or whole. And I, greedy thing that I am, want to be both even if it means that today and tomorrow I am angry.