It is easy to forget sometimes that thoughts and fears are not even an inch high off the ground, that in one sense they don't even exist at all.

But when they come in in the night, they take you in your innocence, and they wake you with worries about the chink in the curtains, the spider that is crawling across the wall but is not, the boyfriend that you call a liar but who is not.

When you wake, they are encrusted about you like sleep in your eyes, hanging over your head like 38 degrees in the height of February.  You wake, and you remind yourself for the eleventy-seventh time that they are not real.  They are not even an inch high off the ground.

You do things that people recommend, like take those voices of destruction and give them a Mickey Mouse timbre, or relocate them somewhere else in your body so they're further away, or closer.  Anything to displace them from the rut and help you realise again ... again ... afuckingain ... that they are wraiths.  That they are not the boss of you.

Never did you really realise that there were so many of them before.  They have come out from their recesses.  They come out whenever you are physically impaired in any way - an unfairness if ever you thought it.  They weave their way round your legs like demon cats, wraithing bullshit into your head.

They keep trying to get you to kill the wrong thing.  They whisper their lies that things are different than what they really are.  They whisper so insidiously that if you didn't know any better now you would maybe try to kill the wrong thing.  The things that they whisper to you about, instead of the whispers themselves.

They try to get you to kill the wrong thing.  But you're onto them.

You know it is a good thing that they have come out from the recesses.  Here, they are out in the pure air and here, you can melt them down, slowly slowly, just by staring at them, like a candle.  They dwarf just by you watching them, but it's a very slow process.  Longer than it took the Wicked Witch of the West.

You are very tired.  You want a holiday from your brain.  Because there's just so many of them, sometimes they swamp in like syrup and flood the room.

You think you shall take Jesus for your animus.  You do not know what you think of the way Jesus has come to be viewed by goober Christianity, but you sure do love the feel of him.  You ask him anyway to come and take them away.

You do the things that are required for you to do, the meditation, the exercise, and the fog begins to lift.  You understand what people say, that old cliche about suffering creatives, that you need the suffering to send you to the page.  You think it's bullshit, but you understand how the cliche came about.  Because it does do that, to a certain extent.  Because the page and the clay are two more things that quell them.  Somehow, the energy expended in these negativities gets to channel itself when you send it all off outside to play in the fresh air and make something creative.

You have this untenable thought that life will not be able to be enjoyed if any of these fears remain in any form whatsoever.  That if they ever return ever again, that life cannot be enjoyed right now because they are going to return some time.

As if you're not the boss of them.  As if a fear about future fear which is about past fear is anything to be ... well, fearful about.