Long Shadows
Quinn Grzywinski
I am sometimes gripped by this strange, gut-wrenching anxiety: that what I am currently experiencing is not “real life”. This anxiety can reach me anywhere, and can be prompted by anything. On the train, when a distant building draws my attention. Walking through the city, where some smell or sound makes me recoil quickly from it. It can happen when I’m surrounded by people and it can happen when I am all by myself. It can even happen in my dreams sometimes, even if I can’t remember the source of the panic when I wake up. The symptoms of this anxiety are always the same, though they can sometimes differ in their intensity. My head swims as some dark notion presses its face against it. The ends of my fingers and toes grow colder, and I cross my arms or stuff my hands uselessly into my pockets. The air in the breaths I take becomes tiny and poison, so I instead hold my breath, trying not to make a sound. It’ll only last for a minute, but within that minute, I become completely convinced that somehow, what I see and what I think and what I feel do not exist in the way that they are supposed to. I am hurtling through somewhere dark and cold, and my feet lift clean off the surface of the earth and land somewhere I cannot move 53
