I perform, therefore I am (exhausted)

Content Warning: Mentions of mental illness, panic attacks, sleep paralysis, and trauma.

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This breath—

a frayed kite string.

This heartbeat—

lazy finger-taps on a school desk

too small for growing bones.

I told my father

I’d die before him

at this rate—

the words fizzled

like salt pills

left sweating on the dinner table

between our talks—

our half-hearted negotiations.

Each night,

my skull turns into silent cinema:

panic attacks projected

in stark monochrome—

lightning slowed down,

cracking ribs

from the inside out.

I wake with tears on my cheek—

saltwater circuitry

mapping malfunctions—

and a phantom voltage

still thrumming

beneath my collarbone.

Then the ceiling lowers—

a cold anvil of air.

Sleep paralysis again:

mind a lit fuse,

body, quarry stone.

I scream—but the sound

won’t load.

Therapy tries.

It scrapes frost

from a frozen river—

a teaspoon chipping

at permafrost.

It is trying.

But progress is glacial,

measured in millimeters

of thaw.

By morning,

my bones feel like blown glass

fresh from flame—

fragile, gleaming,

shaped by heat

I never consented to.

I hate performing.

No stage lights

But the good old sunlight 

leeches my marrow.

But I perform

to survive—

a scarecrow

stuffed with its own straw,

bowing politely

in the wind.

The price of standing

is always splinters.

Over lukewarm tea,

I told my best friend,

“I’m having a midlife crisis now—

Statistically,

I won’t make fifty or even forty”

She smiled—

that brittle, concerned smile

That I always dodge

with punchlines.

A sugar cube dissolved

into the quiet.

“Well... at least you’re

admitting there is a crisis.”

I laughed.

“Great. Now I just need

a sports car and three divorces.”

She didn’t laugh.
But I did.

I always laugh.