Frozen by Frankie Vancise
It wasn't like being frozen.
The opposite maybe, or just something so different the word seems to flow wrong. Time didn't stand still, in fact it sped up: I suppose later when I heard the words ‘tunnel vision' a clearer cut definition formed. The focus shifts from whatever is happening, although never completely, onto getting out: being somewhere alone, or even just breathing a bit more heavily and more frequently than everyone else.
Thoughts like that tend to make it worse.
It’s when I notice the change in breath, the fidgeting, the warmth, and worst of all my heart. When it beats past my muscle and past my ribs and straight through my skin and everyone can see. When breathing turns to panting and suddenly air can't, won't, come quick enough to keep my feet planted on the ground and my fingers out of my hair.
When everything is going too fast and for once, for once, my mind has nothing to grab onto: any ledge scratched free and every crack and bend too full of salt water to provide a grip. When the world speeds up to the pace of my heart and I fall. I fall so hard that the edges turn black and the memories of slipping hands and meaningless words fade behind.
When I want to stay, when I want to feel and learn and know and anything that keeps me from falling. When information becomes gold and new things become even more precious because they create ledges and crack and dry up water with cold facts or warm feeling that are never quite understood.
So no, I don't freeze. I can never freeze, because it isn't ice but fire. Panic is fire, and it burns you alive. It takes you whole and doesn't leave a trace but a blurred black edge. It swallows you and doesn't let you go until It is done, and you're left with whatever It leaves you with.
Panic is fire because when you're burned you feel it after it's passed and it always leaves marks that don't quite fade. It's fire because the wound hurts, nothing like a calming warmth that takes over after the cold, but the harsh sting of touch on a wound that only a person burned the same really understands.
This is what panic feels like. However, every fire gets snuffed out, and every wound heals. Scars stop being something to fear and begin to be proof that survival is possible no matter how much fire is walked through to get there. Those moments when breath escapes faster but not fast enough are still the scariest things imaginable, but time starts to bleed in; time that speaks soft words and loosens clenched fists. And a girl stands up tall. She puts on her lipstick, ties up her boots, and she walks. She walks and walks because it isn't like being frozen, and it never will be.