foxtongue | reading this hurts less than living it

The bus travels over the Lion's Gate Bridge and I think, unbidden, of last year, a trip up a mountain, falling down in snow, the beginnings of what turned out to be love. Inside the suddenly knotted fist in my chest, I feel a spike of cold, hateful self betrayal, and my throat pointlessly closes up. "Limbic system," I recite in my head, "amygdala, the hippocampal neurons that are associated with emotions and memory. Stress response. Low order post-trauma. Fight, flight or engage. Possibly vestigial dopamine, triggering a surge of adrenaline and noradrenaline into the bloodstream." The words are clinical, chosen for distance, for a way to codify and distract my complicated grief. I want this banished, but the only person that can break the spell keeps me bound. They hide. They give nothing. "A bodily state of anxiety", I think. "The deadly effects of adrenaline during emotional suffering may be due to a direct attack of adrenaline on the heart."