Knots of Anxiety

I stood there in the middle of a ring of expended molotovs surrounded by my spinning blade barrier, dissolving force field, and constantly throwing kunai and drill blades as fast as I could when he sent me the message:

“Well she had that device implanted in her chest today”

I broke. I sat there staring at my little dude and watched, frozen, as he fended off the hordes of zombies coming at him. I broke so hard that I just sat there, disconnected, for a few minutes as an entire other life flashed before my eyes.

I could picture the three tubes protruding from her chest, an ugly and constant reminder that she was just as fallible as any other human. It was a harsh truth that I was being faced with at seventeen years of age. I wanted to run. I wanted to fly. I wanted to get away from this moment as quickly as I could but I could not. I stared blankly at my phone as damage numbers from all the attacks were screaming across the screen in a mind numbing blaze. In a blink, that other life and it’s bleak ending were over and I was back to the here and now.

Feigning ignorance, I asked “What’s it do?” as if I didn’t already know. I silently begged and pleaded with the universe to make it not true. Please tell me that this device wasn’t what I thought it was. The tubes where the nurse would feed the “medicine” to her system day after day. It was a special kind of hell. I still, after all these years, honestly and truly believe that it was hell.

“It’s for chemo” he responded after a very long pause. Knots of anxiety were born in my gut and refused to abate, growing ever more intense by the second until I felt as though I would pass out from the overload. From the realization that my past was his future and I hated everything about this thought. Silently I plead with the universe again, to let this woman be a survivor; a winner.

“Guess it’s pretty bad then” I said after watching my little dude get mowed down by a pair of giant robots. Under normal circumstances I would be livid at losing to the final boss of the level, but in this moment it was meaningless.

“Yeah.” I gave him my condolences and then sat with the ever present misery of the moment after shutting off my screen. It all just seems to futile, so pointless. So helpless. Why do we even do anything at all, I thought to myself on my walk home if this is where and how it all ends?

Maybe tomorrow the answer will finally come.