Panic

You gasp, you struggle, but its like the air is too thin. The room's only dimly lit, and everyone's either too loud or too quiet to quite understand. They're agitated, or ignorant, and either way, you're afraid.

Its the feeling of the insane, curled like a fetus, greasy strips of hair hanging down your shoulders, that everything is sliding sixty degrees to the south, the air, light, and clarity have slid down the slope and into some dark hole.

Holes open up around you, your vision narrows, and all along, there's an ill rock in the pit of your stomach, forcing your last meal to press hard against the sides, to bubble and froth like ice cubes dropped in a half filled glass.

Butterflies, they call it, until you've half your mind on not throwing up all over yourself, half your mind holding on for dear life, wishing it had a joint or an inhaler or enough tranquilizer to down an elephant, trying to shut up the other half, which is screaming, over and over, that the walls are closing in, there's no way out, and it'd be better off dead.

You're breathing hard, gasping through your nose, and even though the lights are out, and there must be a million megawatt spotlight shining directly on your back, you're certainly sweating like the room's become a sauna, sweating in all the regular places: your feet, your face, your palms, your belly. Even though the lights are out, and you've driven so far to the flight side of things that you could dig yourself out of a concrete cell, even though you can't eve see anything but the rims of your glasses, anymore, the conversation continues around you, banal and dry and utterly unaware.

The world just teetered on the brink, stepped off the edge and swung out into oblivion, and everyone around you continues like the foundation's still sound, so you reply to a question, first lamely, and then with more zest, struggling to force the froth back down. You'll later lie, and say you're fine, because how do you articulate that there's nothing beneath you but a yawning abyss, and your brain's been cut out to make space for a pack of yelping pups during the thunderstorm?