FEAR

Fear tastes like copper. If its strong enough you can feel it burning the back of your throat, taste it coating your tongue and smell it seeping from your pores.

Sometimes fear is brought to us by a person or place, sometimes from our own imagination or after scary ghost stories around a campfire and sometimes its embedded in a memory that only takes a sound, a touch, a smell to bring back. And with that memory comes the fear.

You can feel it in your pounding heart, feel it as it clogs your lungs, stealing air from your body. Feel the weight of cold steel coiled among the knots in your belly and taste the bitter copper of it as it rises up the back of your throat like bile to coat your mouth and tongue.

For me, with the fear comes anger. Anger at the fear, anger at the thing that triggered it, anger at the person who caused the original memory, and mostly, anger at myself for giving in to it. Not just the fear, but the memory itself, for allowing it to come back and haunt me. 13 years. 13 years past and still it can be triggered. I can become an angry, fearful, untrusting, hateful female in seconds at the whim of my past.

Is it any wonder I think I'm broken? Any wonder I worry about being more of a burden than I already am? Any wonder I sit and ponder why someone would put up with it all, love me at all, stick with me for any length of time? I often get sick of myself so why should I expect others not to get sick of me as well?