Storms Without Rain

Anxiety does not arrive with the thunder of Thor.

It slips beneath the skin,

an unseen tide

rising through the ribs

until my lungs become strangers

and my throat is pulled tight

by hands no one else can see.

Anxiety for me is a silent strangling,

where every swallow

feels borrowed.

The world begins to dissolve.

Colors lose their certainty.

Voices stretch into echoes.

The floor forgets how to hold me,

and reality fractures into sharp,

glittering pieces I can no longer gather.

The cruelest thing about the mind

is that it knows every door

to fear,

every memory,

every fragile corner

where doubt can bloom into catastrophe.

It whispers,

R U N.

Though there is no place to go.

It screams

YOU’RE DYING.

While my body fights

to remember

what living feels like.

And still,

I wear a steady face.

Because the loudest screams

are often the ones that never reach the air,

and the deepest wounds

are carved by a mind

powerful enough to make imagined storms feel more real than the sun.