Consumed

Panic; anxiety and pain and sadness are my fears. They are consuming, monstrous, destructive. The crushing pain like your heart is being crumpled like a sheet of scrap paper, the breathlessness like you've been punched in the stomach by hulk-like fists, the overwhelming, all-encompassing feeling of utter futility-of having no power over this unfathomable, crushing weight crashing down upon you. The tears that roll down your cheeks turning from a shower to a raging storm as you lose the ability to keep them silent, to stop your face from wrinkling up and noises like that of an injured animal escaping you-crushed out of you by the pain that you can't sooth because it seems to radiate from the very centre of your being. You feel like you would give anything, that you would tear the beating heart from your body just to take away this feeling, to relieve the pain, the weight, the breathlessness. The puffy face from the crying, the unpleasant stickiness of the congealed tears on your chin, the sicky feeling in your throat from all the gasping and heaving and sobbing.
But it is not the lack of control, nor the crushing pain, the hiccoughing cries, the sick feeling afterwards nor the sheer hideousness of the experience that is the worst part-it is the feeling that caused it-that one little thought that can cause an anarchy of emotion, physically and mentally, that is like a ravaging natural disaster upon the terrain of your body and soul.
And after the crying is over, and when the jumpy, heaving breaths have subsided, when the tears have dried- sometimes the rawness, the emptiness and that thought that triggered it; they linger on. This is why pain, however 'temporary' is so feared, so very devastating.