A Borde de Un Ataque de Nervios
by Stephanie Gerhold

It began with a tangled ball of string. Threads inextricably jumbled together as if a neurotic spider wove them and then feeling his work inadequate, re-wove, re-worked, re-tied each singular strand so that what remained resembled an anemone-like organism, its digits waving and undulating in the wind.

Squatter's rights have allowed this accumulation of filament to set-up camp in the periphery of my vision. Now still but for the gentle flow of my breath, I find myself contemplating it with the utmost curiosity, as if at the core of such an untidy knot lie the Answer, the one link that would bridge chasms, dam anxieties, unfetter freedoms, and satiate appetites.

Suffocated, smothered within these textiled bonds, the Answer waits.

This snarling snarl of fibers has propagated an extreme sense of loss--for what else is a ball of string but losses collected over time? The fragments and pieces of leftover dreams swept into a pile with the dust of aspirations and the crumbs of yesterday?

You probably sit here now, wherever you may be dear reader, puzzled, for I am sure you think (naively as I did once) that such a bunch of bits is easily brushed aside. Yet a color here, a scrap there, and upon a second perusal you see what looks to be a mosaic of fluff. A picture emerges fuzzy as a Monet until one removes to a distance. When combined, all the forgotten hopes, all the remnant fears reveal the intangible, the untouchable, and when you try to grasp it within your fist, the strands softly slip through your fingers.

"What is it?" You presume dear reader that I know! Ha! I tell you, just as lone Jonah found himself doomed to live within the belly of his foe until violence deemed otherwise, this longed-for Answer must also remain captive.

I think of this thing now, for I can no longer think of anything else. It has taken over my being. It wasn't enough that I was conscious of its presence while awake, but it ventures now to disturb me in every aspect of what I consider my Life at age twenty. I write "disturb" for it does just that. Don't roll your eyes. Put yourself in my position: If the one thing in your world that possessed the ability to incite terror, defy reason, and overthrow identity is a mess of string, a breathing mass of past, present, and future, your past, present, and future, how would you feel?