Controlled Fire

There’s something quite surreal about closing your eyes whilst you’re sitting in the passenger seat of a car, going at 80mph. In that monent, absolutely anything could happen and its completely out of your control. All your trust is poured into that person sitting next to you. For me, my heart starts to race and there’s a voice inside yielding me to open my eyes, but i know that if i can hold on for a second longer, the panic fades and I feel alive. The adrenaline kicks in and overpowers the fear of the unknown, the fear of not being in control. You see, that’s always been a problem. Being in control. Whenever I’m not in control, i lose myself. There’s a deep feeling in my stomach, i feel my anxiety growing to the point of suffocation, spreading like wildfire, filling my lungs with smoke. It feels like trying to breathe under water, being weighed down by fear. So I keep control. I don’t let the fire build. I keep my mind open and my mouth closed, and let my anonymity do the talking. Admitting this as a weakness would be social suicide, and after working so hard to build and maintain a “got-everything-under-control” attitude, it would ruin me. So I build a different fire, and close my eyes in the passenger seat at 80mph, letting it suffocate me enough to make me feel alive.