A is for Anxiety

Anxiety is stupid

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Author Note: I am engaging in the Alphabet Superset Challenge to create something every week for the next 26 weeks in the order of the alphabet. I’ve chosen to focus on poetry, because I haven’t really written any in a while. Wish me luck.

Anxiety gnaws at my brain
and its teeth gum at wrinkles
annoying, obnoxious
aimlessly whispering what-if demons
as if I hadn’t already considered
all the possibilities, real or imagined.

A trauma response, they say
and I nod, because I know
always the choir of insecurity
assurance that I am unworthy
assumptions that I’ve forgotten
another futile wish I make.

Anxious, trembling mental fingers
amble through clustered memoria
an urgent war between understanding
and wanting to repack the boxes
already leaking with unresolved issues
a lost cause, trapped, frozen

An overwhelming rush of failure
attached like a lifeline of first trauma
abandoned, I struggle to understand how
apparently easy it was for you to leave me
and if my mother didn’t want me
asking anyone else seems pointless.

I sigh and opened a door in the frozen section.
I just wanted a damn pizza.

©CL Huth, 2023