He's An Old Friend

Worry comes to me in the night time, to talk and to speak and to explain the difference betwen the two. He pours himself a water from the sink and watches me closely. He can be as large as the sky and as small as the dirt on the kitchen floor. My mouth opens but words don't come out; Worry makes its way in and nestles, couch surfing in the sanctuary of my innards, making his sorry self at home, leaving signs of lifelessness everywhere. I pick up after him, caps from beer bottles and relics of the past, ticket stubs from places he went without me. How does Worry travel so far and still manage to come home? He leaves the bed cold and my fridge empty, my stomach full but my appetite dissatisfied. He makes me meals that I never taste and leaves his stench in dirty laundry all over my frontal lobe. We have breakthroughs together over wine in dirty glasses, but he points out the mess and we start all over again. You can medicate anxiety but you can't erase the patterns that have followed you for a decade; there is no such eraser. Goo-Be-Gone doesn't hold a candle to this melted wax all over the carpet. I can't eradicate the scent of Worry from this place. He is everywhere and in everything, invading me with impregnated thoughts of weight loss and hair color, appearances and motherhood, responsibility and joy, tipping scales with sugar and yeast, fermenting the age-old voices into whiskey that goes down like nail polish remover. I would stop inviting him over, but he's an old friend. He fills me up and keeps me company, even if it's the miserable kind, and Lord knows I spend more time with him than I do with my own self, but I lost my own self in the dishwasher and the dryer, and she won't come out unless I put these fingers to the typewriter, and even then only in trickles. Worry bleeds on the paper and we start all over. I bandage his hands and we start all over. I kiss his wounds and we start all over. He says he'll never leave me, but it's all I can do to keep myself from drinking him down deep and then out the door for good.