50 Things That Make A Fighter

The Beginning of the End

Have you ever felt a burning sensation in your chest? Not from heartburn or that huge Philly cheese steak you inhaled earlier that night. The one where it's like a serrated knife was being shoved into your back. Like how it felt when you saw your boyfriend kissing your best friend. Or when your parents told you not so gently that they were getting a divorce. Little wisps of tears threaten to break your resolve and want to run out of your eyes and down your face and down into the pool of grey water filling the trench you seem to be stuck in.

Sometimes you're not even in a trench. The tears are nowhere to be found, confused and trying to huddle together to do something they can't register responding to. There is no tangible ground, or water, or pool. Just an abyss of nothingness that you think surrounds you but, instead, is ripping you apart from the inside out.

The burning starts to spread, sending sparks racing to the edge of every nerve of every appendage. The tingling feeling that your body is overwhelmed yet somehow missing everything. The spark lights a fuse, a finite thread that you don't know the length of. The spool could roll for days, or end up unraveling in minutes.

And that's what makes it worse. It could be an atomic bomb that blows with the predictable aftermath, or worse, it never detonates. The toxic chemical compounds of anger, sadness, confusion, and everything else mixed in. Now you're envisioning everything that has never gone your way. For some reason, miscellaneous events are dumped into the mutant bowl of anguish churning in the part of you that you can't point out right now. That biology test you failed last semester, the carnival fish you could never win as a kid, the jeans your mom said were too tight, the time your friends didn't invite you to a party.

Suddenly your whole body is in flames and you're a boiling pot of melted memories and you can't even remember what happened thirty seconds ago to send your head and your heart into this explosion of turmoil, but that hardly seems important at this moment.

That disarray and cacophony of emotions. The fallen apart mess you become in those two and a half minutes of torture. It's a natural disaster of epic proportions that wipes out the helpless population of rational thoughts from your mind.

Two words seem inadequate to title it.