I can hear cars on the road. Mechanically they hurry past; crude and clumsy textures with no persistent beat. A wall of percussive sound with no distinct notes or melody. 

Today I awoke to find a rampart forged of mist and fog staring at me from across my backyard; inaudible, unmoving. Unwavering in its density and impinging on my world with its weight. The cars hurrying past. I stood, somewhat rigidly, staring into the grey void threatening to engulf me; my clothes wrinkled, my hair bedraggled and knotted from the uneasy dreams of the night before. Dishes lay heaped in the sink to my left, shoes stockpiled in a characteristically insouciant manner to my right. Disorderly as it may be, my near nano-scale, disaster of an apartment, provided refuge from the encroaching brume and rooted my body to the earth; my thoughts with it. Soberly I closed the door, retreated to my bedroom, and slunk under the covers. 

However sleep delivered no solace from my unease. Panic struck. My mind reeled. My limbs seized. My body lay there motionless; paralyzed and helpless while my anxiety cocooned me just as the fog did. I dreamt of babies. Of diving into icy lakes, legs tangled in seaweed, my lungs collapsing under the pressure of being suspended under hundreds of meters of glacial liquid. I dreamt of the prairies. Of being enveloped in tall grasses and endless blue sky. I dreamt of emptiness and solitude. Those same prairie grasses on fire, the heavens thick with smoke and ash, filling my nose with a suffocating redolence until finally I dreamt of nothing except an overwhelming darkness. 

When I awoke again the fog had lifted but I was met instead with a pounding between my eyes and a gentle nagging in the pit of my stomach. There is something so fragile about the way the blood pulses in my ears when I have run out of things to distract myself with. 

I promise to not let this get the best of me.