If you’ve never felt the crushing weight that anxiety puts on your body, making it near impossible to breathe, then you might never understand what I’m about to try to describe.
It’s standing in a crowded room full of people you don’t know. The air grows thicker and thicker until you have to try to swallow through that lump in your throat. So many faces surround you yet you’re so alone. For a moment it seems that you are drowning in the sea of people, feeling as if you are the only person truly there. But then the crowd parts and you see them, and they see you. And suddenly it feels like home. They are your breath of fresh air in a suffocating room. Everything falls away and you are free from the once confining crowd. There’s an energy between you two that distance and space can’t diminish, it pulls at you aching for you to get closer. As they smile at you it feels like you’re not alone anymore and never will be ever again. Just having their eyes on you gives you butterflies, suddenly making you aware of every inch of your body. And that smile, it warms you right up from head to toe. Your own smile grows so much you begin to wonder if your eyes still even open. But they are. You know they are because your one second of undivided attention from them is up. You watch as the light fades from their smile and follow their eyes across the room to something else, someone else. And that sense of belonging is ripped from you leaving a gaping pit in your stomach, a coldness in your blood that chills your bones. Not like the pressing anxiety from before, no this feeling is consuming like a whirlpool. She’s younger, prettier, has filler in all the right places. She’s the bright and shiny new toy. And even through the sting of rejection, through the choking grip of being alone again in that great suffocating room, you watch. Waiting for them to look at you again. Waiting for them to think of you again. Waiting for them to want you again.
Mystic River 