The eternal edge

Do you ever feel your spirit just break? You crumble from the inside—you can actually feel this happen—and you become nothing but a stupid swath of pitiful skin wrapped around some tired bones.

In the space where other people probably have memories, I have an accumulation of regrets. The ridiculousness of it all sometimes cracks me, and hysteria wells up. I can hear the scream inside my skull, feel the rasp in my throat as if it were something audible rather than imagined. I can feel the rage enveloping my lungs, while I consciously work them like a bellows to keep clinging to life, forcing my breaths as the confused resentment-terror rises.

They say that if it doesn't matter in ten years, it doesn't matter now. This is meant to give you perspective, to realize how insignificant a present injury really is.

Let me tell you, it matters after ten years. And as the decades add up, the injuries compound.

I've had trouble identifying the emotion that governs my "attacks." It's not quite panic. It's not quite anxiety. Not even just anger. It's a kind of rage-despair-drowning, as though myriad indignancies have pushed me to the edge of a maw of pure desolation, and there is no immediate way to step back. The breathing is like the equivalent of frantically waving one's arms to prevent physically toppling into the chasm. As though I'm drowning, my respiration instinctively stops, closing some valve to keep out the toxic surroundings. Forcing the air in, forcing it out—it's necessary, but it's like breathing something viscous, something that does not contain enough oxygen, something that only staves off suffocation for another moment.

So there you are, flailing your arms at the edge of the cliff, not quite falling, but not quite managing to catch your balance. Maintaining yourself in this frozen moment of uncertain teetering.

The Underworld's torments described in Virgil's Aeneid are most remarkable to me for one particular quality: they are eternal. Tityus's body, flayed open over nine acres, is constantly devoured and yet constantly renewed, so that the torment never ends. Three poor souls were fated to spend eternity beneath an enormous overhanging rock, that was forever on the very brink of falling and crushing them. A moment as frozen as teetering at the edge of the cliff, yet the doom of being about to fall is eternal. It's mind-blowing.

iam iam lapsura cadentique: just on the very, very edge of being about to slip and fall.

That edge. That edge is a beautiful moment in Latin. Being forever just about to slip. It's the moment before ultimate certainty, yet that moment is eternal. That is a beautiful image indeed. That is perfection of language. The rage-terror-drowning itself is not beautiful.