I play thumb wrestles daily with the knot of hot, feathered anxiety that sits between my stomach and the muscles of my diaphragm.
It's annoying. Irritating. It creeps up in the back of my mind when I'm doing other things, thinking about things.
And then I realise I'm feeling anxious, and I try and trace the thread of thought back to where it began.. where that hot anxiety begin to creep from my middle, up the back of my neck to sit and poke me from the base of my skull.
Most of the time,that thread of anxiety leads back to.. nothing.
My brains still working on it, I think. That pointless anxiety, it's a feeling that I have to go back.
Back to the suburbs. Back to my busy little life, which I look back on now and don't know what it was so full of.
My mind is taking it's sweet time to realise that I don't have to. If we like it here.... we can stay.
And like it here, we do.
As I think I've mentioned, I never had big plans. But they felt big.
Now, my plans are even tinier, less ambitious, less consequential.
It's all quite simple. I feel like, for now, that I've run the gauntlet of what life has to throw at me. For now, there is no reason to stretch, to push. No reason to think I have to return to any kind of life I had before.
I think, for now, it's enough to just be. That's all I want from life, for the rest of it. To just be.
To appreciate the simple things. To be happy. To raise happy, resilient children.
To buy a house, make it a home. To take care of my kids. To write, while I enjoy it, as much as I can, and be grateful for the extra cash I make from it.
That's all. Not just for the next six months, not just for the next year. I never have to push, or feel like my life experience isn't complete, ever again, if I don't want to.
This is it. All bets are off. As far as living on the edge goes, I've fucking done enough of it.
I think I just want to be quiet. And happy, as much as I can be. Inconspicuous, in real life, in a way I'm blessedly not online.
To heal, slowly, so the wound closes up right. The way I'm beginning to.
And that.. that's enough. If I want to live the quiet life, if I want to be a goddamn hermit, I can.
I'm just going to live the simple life. to remind myself it is OK to relax. It is OK to be happy. that creeping, seeping hot anxiety, I don't have to have that hanging around my neck for the rest o my life.
I just need to remind my mind, to train my brain, to let it go.