Anxiety

The rabbit lives a little ahead of itself.

Never quite in the moment it is in.
Always a few moments further on, where the danger is kept.

The body decides first.
A tightening before there is anything to tighten against.
A readiness with no event to meet it.
The alarm sounds, and only afterwards does the rabbit go looking for the fire.

It is an old instinct, and not a wrong one.
The rabbit is a small thing in an open field.
To survive, it learned to hear the danger before the danger arrives.

But the field is empty now.
And the instinct does not know that.

So the rabbit rehearses.
It runs each moment before the moment comes.
It builds the disaster in advance, in careful detail, so that if it ever arrives the rabbit will not be caught unready.

It is trying to be safe.
It is only ever trying to be safe.

But the feared thing rarely comes.
And the bracing always does.

This is the arithmetic the rabbit cannot solve.
It pays, in full, for a hundred catastrophes, so as not to be surprised by the one.
And the price is the same whether the thing arrives or not.

When one fear finally quiets, there is no rest.
Another is already waiting to take the space it left.
The rabbit thinks it is afraid of things.
It is not.
It is afraid in general, and the things are only where the fear goes to stand.

So the relief never lands.
There is no after.
There is only the next ahead.

And the moment the rabbit is actually in
(the ordinary, unremarkable, undangerous moment)
passes by unwatched.

The one place nothing is going wrong.
The one place the rabbit is never quite allowed to be.

It does not want to be fearless.
It only wants to be here.
To set the watching down for an afternoon, and trust the field to stay empty without being guarded.

The rabbit is trying to learn this.

But the body still listens for the sound in the grass,
and cannot yet believe that the silence is not the pause before something,
but simply the silence.