She says her arms are threaded up, that it feels like the threads are pulling through her skin. "Now imagine the thread unraveling slowly, and that's what my anxiety feels like. And the threads go faster and faster, and then I just fall apart so quickly."
She has scratch marks on her cheeks because scratching her cheeks feels good, but then she has to make the scratches even. One scratch down on the left, one scratch down on the right. Again and again.
She pushes her teeth because her teeth "feel weird."
She had a panic attack, hyperventilating outside of the school office, crying and gagging.
She is eight-years-old, and it isn't fair. It just isn't fair that the world assaults her this way. The fear and the tears in her green-brown eyes. When she's happy they look like the light shining through an overhead canopy of leaves in the late parts in summer. When she's sad they are a torment, a storm rolling over mountains.
But I don't want to write poetry about her anxiety, about her innocence, about a childhood laced in irrational panic.
Yesterday she did her multiplication homework and put her spelling words in alphabetical order. She played Crossy Road on her Kindle. She ate a hot dog and pretzels and read the second Percy Jackson book. She stepped gingerly through mud on a walk and caught a toad in her hands.
Yesterday I watched her run fearlessly into the darkening night, her purple-sequin cardigan dipping low on her back, baring her pale, delicate shoulders to the descending cold.
She could raise a whole city on those small shoulders. She could balance the rising moon.
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