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He was consumed by an anxiety that he could never live up to what he had been, could never succeed in expressing, with hints, or still less with explicit words, and perhaps not even with his thoughts, the fullness he knew he had reached. – Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino

If this is not perhaps a perfect reflection of the nature of my anxiety, then I know not what could be.  It is a subtle anxiety, a dark passenger.  It is an old lover that, in those quiet moments, slips in to your bed to ravish you while your guard is down.  It is the scent you can never remove, it is a second skin.  It is a shadow that grows in the light and consumes in the dark.

This anxiety of never being understood–never being able to make yourself understood.  The anxiety of being ever-alone.  And it is an ache that is greater than any pain known to man.  The aching of the soul.  Desiring.  Longing.  Longing to find company, to find conversation, to find a familiar face–to find someone with the same demons, with the same weight. 

My soul, my self; I am consumed.  I wish I could describe what it is I feel.  A heavy fog in my mind, rendering me unable to see clear.  A pressure within my chest, and that feeling of sinking in to the earth.  The dissolution of any emotion-for better or worse.  The dissolution of all things I recognized and identified with.  The dissolution of identity.

I eat more, I sleep more, I fuck more.  The delights of a slim diet, the discipline of limited sleep, even the desires of making love—they have been drained and degraded. Passionate kisses are nothing more than skin on skin.  I lay beneath the bodies of my lovers, eyes clutched shut, forcing myself to focus–focus on the sex, on the motion of his body, the pace of his breath… focus on anything but the growing distance, anything but the emptiness of it all, anything but the ugliness of the act.

The ugliness of the act.

Perhaps I should withdraw from sex then, you say, but the exile from human touch does nothing but irritates my already frustrated soul.

I need to wake up but I don’t know how.  I need my skin to start feeling the blood flowing beneath it again.  I need to shrug off this sleep my body has slipped in to.  But how?  But how?

I grow discontent.