crash

I've almost managed to tune it out completely.

It plays constantly, but I move so fast, it fades into the background.

The faster I move, the farther away it seems. The more normal it seems to feel.

If I don't stop, it won't catch me.

And if I take a moment to breathe, it will consume me whole.

And so we keep going. Going, going, going. And it's never gone.

It's loud.

It consumes me at every moment, so loud I can barely hear myself think. I just have to process louder, think louder, talk louder, be louder than the loudest thing I've ever known.

From time to time, I'll sit down and can ignore the noise. Pretend like everything is OK.

It's not until I'm truly by myself, until I truly have nothing else to do to occupy my time, does it take over.

Like waves, the noise inside my head crashes over me, time and time again. It's overwhelming, it's too much to handle, and it doesn't ever stop for long. It comes to be too much where I can't hear anything else, can't see anything else. It's just everywhere. And it never ends.

And if I stop and sit there for too long, I will drown.

There are times, though, when all is silent.

Those scare me.

Times when I listen to the right song. Times when I'm with my friends and having a good time. Times when my dog is cuddling with me and everything just seems OK.

Perhaps the most terrifying of all are the times when I'm the most vulnerable, but I feel completely protected. When I'm content to lay there in silence, and have it actually be silence. To make it feel like the noise never even existed in the first place.

Like none if it was ever actually there. And it just feels so...right.

I sit there and wait for the next wave to break, wait for it to crash into me. And wait for my safety and protection to turn back into drowning. The anticipation of the ending of that feeling lasts a lifetime.

And that's what scares me the most.