It lingers, and I am aware of it every moment.  
A deep sigh escapes my lips, my fingers resisting this, my body screams now with no sound, to stop, insisting instead that I should curl up on the floor with my knees to my chest and weep, if not this – run. Run as fast as I can until I’ve got nothing left and shortly after the release pours from my eyes.  
It’ll come how and when it is meant to, meanwhile I must simply accept the discomfort and persist through it, and just fucking write anyway until the last word makes itself known. I do not call this anxiety any more, but rather something I am supposed to learn from, revealing through pain what I am to call to light, accept, and only then if God and timing align, let it go. I feel it move inside my chest, sometimes playing hide and seek, and can trace the energy with a finger atop my skin, and I’ve grown to be quite curious each time this happens. It is a beautiful process to witness, a messenger deep within that wants to be heard, felt, released, but in order for that to be, I first need accept how badly this can hurt.  

I’ve wrestled a great deal with death lately, I know how strange to fixate on this, yet I find myself mentally occupied with it often. It is not about my physical form ending, or even the signs of aging in my skin presently, but more that my soul recognizes the finite splendor of all of this and beckons me to appreciate it fully.  

The annual trip back to my homeland comes soon and there I will be with my dad, and in the moments we share witness time on his skin; it makes me take special care for remembering, memorizing him, so I have these things to hold onto later when he’s gone – someday hopefully many years from now. . . I wonder if he feels similar to me in that way, watching me grow up from afar, having children and building a life somewhere else, only to be the whirlwind week every Summer and that is that. I found myself an adult out in the world on some other path – I wonder if he thought, when I was younger, that I’d ever be the type to leave.  

I guess the thing that is troubling me most is that I know one day it will just … End. Will I be ready when that day comes, will I see it coming – well, that, yes, as I even see it now. Strange to face it, but necessary I think, that I meditate on things like hours and minutes, and how best to make use of them. For each of them IS this life, not some distant moment you finally start living but each breathe taken now.  

This pressure in my chest works against my desire to live in a way that honors what I know to be true, fixed instead to stop progress and cripple me; how can one rise when crushed under such weight? Little by little, sometimes these are the longest hours, indeed, but so too this is life. I just sometimes would rather not brave this, so often, and could easily lament how frustrating it is to feel like I cannot breathe.  

Weep, or run. Both.  
At least I got some words out first.