within

She floats in the fog, drifting… a whisper through a world that isn’t quite real. The fog is so cool, so comfortable – it crept up so slowly on her that she didn’t notice it. And now it consumes her existence and yet, she still does not notice, for she can’t remember a time that was free of the fog.

The fog is a light blanket, pressing against her nose, her ears, skin, eyes, it muffles her senses. It isn’t unpleasant. Oh no, it’s quite wonderful, actually. Wonderful to not feel too sharply or think too deeply. She used to think that most of the problems in life came from feeling too intensely. She doesn’t need those emotions to define her existence. All she needs is… anything that leads to nothing. Like the fog.

Sometimes, she feels the panic. There are sudden feelings of oppression when she lets herself forget her own assurances or remember the before. But even the panic isn’t sharp and intense – the fog doesn’t allow that. The fog, her best friend. It is more of a vague anxiety, a nagging worry. Yet she knows, intellectually, that it is a panic. In these times, she desperately misses those unnamed and unnameable concepts, those ideas whose names she’s forgotten. She cannot be content or secure in the fog, which suddenly seems to fill itself with shadows that even she—a whisper—can see, and feels vaguely frightened.

But these panic attacks come so rarely and go so quickly that she hardly remembers or cares. They hardly cause any thinning in the ever-thickening fog.