Fear

It starts out as butterflies, harmless and light, fluttering through the tips of your fingers, your toes.  It works its way up to your stomach, and suddenly you've got an infestation of the critters in your gut.  It's not that bad. 

Slowly, the insects transform to amphibians, crawling out of your stomach and lodging themselves deep in your throat. It gets bigger, slowly growing to put a strain on your esophagus, making it harder and harder to guide oxygen into your lungs. With each aching breath you feel the molecules of air squeezing one by one, squealing against the ball in your throat, somehow giving your heart the power it needs to pound straight out of your chest. But really, it's not that bad. 

There's a moment of relief when the ball disappears from your throat. But only a moment before it drops back down into your stomach, the size and strength of a bowling ball. It pulls at ever fiber of your body, stressing every string of muscle to an inward pulling.  Unable to relax, unable to release the anxiety, your throat begins to pull inward, making you wish there was something lodged in it to help it expand.  Your brain is begging you to quit, but it's not that bad. 

Suddenly, every quiet squeaking, every minuscule sound, shoots through your body, pulling everything tighter and closer than it was before. When you think that there's no way you could possibly shrink anymore within yourself, the sound of distant, identifiable footsteps pulls you in further. The hairs stand straight on the back of your neck, on the tops of your arms. They're trying to escape from the torture, just as you are. Your face is wiped of color, leaving a ghost in your complexion. And it doesn't get any better. 

Your arms shoot up and, in confused disarray, grab onto each other in search of something familiar, in search of something constant, in search of something; anything.  Nails digging into your skin, you cause this pain to yourself in a failing attempt to aid the entity possessing your body. Your jaw clenches down, your eyelids plaster together. But it's still there. 

Frozen. A statue on the outside, and a raging storm in every pore, you cannot move. You cannot breathe. You cannot un-see. The lifeless demon wreaking havoc on your brain forces you to give in.  You are powerless as you kneel to his mercy.

But merciless is he who sends salty rivers flowing down your face. He who forces the bowling ball up out of your stomach, transforming it bile on the floor as a new one takes its place. 

We all know the monster, sitting under our beds, peeking an eye out from the closet, whispering in dead of night. We all know the monster, keeping children up long past bedtime, morphing the strongest of men to malleable balls of clay, running through our wildest nightmares. 

We all know the monster, who lives inside of all of us. 

We all know the monster, and the monster is

fear.