The following was written because I just don’t know what to do with my health anxiety. I have listened to every Song Lyric Sunday post to this point. Today everyone brought their A game — like they do every Sunday and damn did I need it.
It is a fist
no—
a wire pulled tight through me,
twisting,
tightening, refusing to let go.
Left side low—
a knot with teeth.
That is what it is.
That is what it feels like.
And somewhere in the background of this body,
there is another kind of waiting—
a small thing on a scan,
1 cm of uncertainty
told to be watched,
to be measured again in a year,
as if time itself is part of the treatment.
My back answers it—
echo pain,
a second place where the same message lands.
I try to outrun it with breath,
but breath catches—
snags—
like fabric on a nail.
Everything narrows
to this one bright, brutal point.
No past.
No after.
Just now,
just this.
And it isn’t silence that holds it—
it’s music.
Sunday again, doing what it always does,
arriving like it was already playing before I pressed play.
Lyrics slip in without permission,
threading themselves through thought,
as if the songs know the shape of what I can’t say cleanly.
I’m not just hearing it.
I’m inside it—
inside the timing,
inside the words,
inside the strange accuracy of sound that finds me exactly where I am.
I don’t know how it does that.
I only know it does.
If I could open myself
like a window
I would throw it out—
this sharp, relentless thing—
watch it shatter on pavement
and not look back.
Instead
I sit inside it,
name it,
shape it into words and music—
because sometimes sound is the only place it loosens,
even a little.
Even this much
is something.
As always, more to come.
J-Dub's Grin and Bear It 