The ache

Oh, that pain. The one that comes from your guts and tears at your jaw, bursting open your ribs and kicking through your sternum.

Is it stress? Tension? The pizza? The whiskey, or maybe that last coffee? Or the accumulated guilt of years, trying to rend stomach from oesophagus - rupture the aorta and stop the heart? Something is hitting the brakes while I'm doing seventy in the fast lane.

Whatever it is, I wish it would get the hell out and leave me alone. It always comes when I most need to sleep. It creeps up under the tongue that was secretly clamped to the roof of my mouth, forming a perfect vacuum and setting me up for a fall.

It knows the harm it inflicts by keeping me awake. Playing the long game. Wearing me down.

Now my molars clamp on to my tongue and I have to break up the fight.

I try meditation, but just it isn't me. I promise to buy a marijuana pipe, but paranoia's no friend of mine. I tell myself I'll go running, but I'm hundreds of miles and a day away from all that.

So I grab a pen and attempt to exorcise this demon, squeezing him through the ball and onto the page. Exposing him for all to see, to be held up to ridicule in the cold comfort of day.

I wait for the tension to pass. Gulping antacid by the bottle, praying to God to let me off of this lynching tree, to piss on the flames and let me be.

But the demon gives me no peace.