a march from february
It is February in Vancouver, and the sky is tumultuous. The gathering clouds loom dark and volatile. The rain is unceasing; the rush of the wind feels almost painful in the way it steals air from the lungs. This is winter’s last sigh, tired and lingering, before it gives way to spring. It is as arresting as ever, the temper of the sky, the cold that seeps into your bones and lives there, as if to remind you that any change, even the turning of the seasons, requires a certain discomfort.
This winter feels endless, stretching in all directions, an expanse of dark days and darker nights. Time folds in on itself when there is nothing waiting on the other side of waking, and the exhaustion of existing takes on an almost physical shape. The pressure of gravity feels immense, condensing in my spine, and I have never felt more like a shell: a mechanical articulation of tendon and bone. So when I am told on a Monday that I meet the criteria for two anxiety disorders, the apathy slips on like a second skin.
The revelation does not feel like a cosmic event.
It feels like finding something I hadn’t worn in years, buried in the back of a closet. A thread of possibility that had lived in the periphery, out of sight and nearly forgotten, slowly unspooling in the way a sweater comes undone with enough time and neglect. It still fits, though it’s frayed in places no one can see, and wearing it feels strangely both novel and old. The diagnosis settles into the warp and weft of my existence, familiar before it has any right to be: uninvited, and already mine. The law of eventuality. A natural, inevitable conclusion.
The problem isn’t the diagnosis but its design. It’s an insidious rot that creeps in through the interstitial moments. It’s waiting for the insecurity and doubt to arrive: twin ghosts that haunt the shape of every thought that’s ever formed, writing and rewriting the ugliness down to the last cell until the world has approached a tolerable level of unhappiness. It’s a study in self-loathing: the tireless work of building a case against yourself, the certainty that all you can do is fail to live up to expectations, because all that’s underneath is the conviction that the verdict will always be the worst one. Like muscle memory, it gets easier and easier to consume the poison; I know it by how easily it fits in my mouth, by how little effort it takes to swallow. The toxin dwells inside like a stubborn seed. Untouched by digestion, it grows and grows, coalescing into dread, insinuating itself beneath the ribs, the sternum.
Nobody thinks to look for the decay because there is no structural failure in anxiety. Years of accretion—of learning its anatomy, how to obey its laws, read its maps, speak its languages—and the body no longer knows how to exist without apology. It lives in the bones, sustaining itself by hiding in the recesses of every movement, in the worn grooves of habit. Time marches in a circle, the forward motion a distraction from stagnation. Around and around, where the only moves that are available are the ones that exist within a set of predefined parameters. The choices still feel like choices, so we don’t call it by its name, because naming the thing gives it mass. The avoidance is so practiced it’s developed its own reflex, so integral to the body that its absence becomes the problem.
But sometimes, the absence of everything is wanted, and the signal in the brain goes offline.
It feels like watching someone else’s life from far away, the moments transmitting hazily like a film buffering on a poor connection: time skipping, edges blurring, audio drifting. The present dissolves into distant static, as if the noise inside had overflowed and drowned itself out. Awareness recedes, loosening one piece at a time, and the lungs expand now that there’s space to exhale without the constant white-knuckled grip of performance and control. The world retreats and becomes wonderfully devoid of meaning.
It’s not total oblivion, but it’s enough. To surrender choice. To be absolved from thought. To be released from the weight of someone else’s regard.
I become amorphous.
There’s quiet. The mind finds nothing and goes nowhere, the way a violin finds its home in the hollow beneath the collarbone as if the space had been carved for it. Time moves differently depending on how close you stand to the desolation—it could be a lifetime; it could be a fraction of a fraction. Like the flicker of a match, the mind resurfaces from the fog, dragged up from where things go to be fossilized. The black hole evaporates. Sensation rushes back in, overwhelming, and each piece of tension in the muscles rebuilds as if it had never been permitted to fully atrophy, climbing until even breathing takes everything I have.
The vanishing wasn’t the collapse. This is.
Incrementally, the demands of the world return, the cuts reopening before they have a chance to close. The body rearranges, becomes smaller, rationing its presence as if it had entered and lost a negotiation over why it deserves to take up space. The tongue remembers how to read reduction in a language that isn’t its first—fluently, instinctively, more native than any other. It recalls the grammar of value and the syntax of worth as if it had invented both, along with the knowledge that you’re only allowed to want what you can afford. The mouth reforms around the shape of immolation, of giving up pieces of yourself to keep impossible things, and the taste is familiar before it knows how to spell the word. The poetry beyond linguistics demands the same lessons: giving more, giving up, giving in. There is no moderation, no luxury of enough—only excess, overcompensation. Conditioned not to reach for more, the way a mole burrows underground, never once questioning why its entire existence fits inside a tunnel, held captive by its instinct to dig deeper, deeper. The language is as ugly as it sounds. It says a cage is not a cage if you built it.
Worse than that, worse than anything—it sounds true.
I read about apoptosis once, about how the body knows to rid itself of damage, of the parts that are unwanted and broken. Programmed cell death, a necessary ending. It’s self-preservation, organized and organic, in the same way neuroplasticity allows the brain to reorganize its neural pathways to compensate after injury. Neither mechanism can describe what it’s like to live in a body and live in a brain that has to live with anxiety, but the very notion there is a biological impetus propelling and ensuring your existence is something. It should hardly matter that there’s evidence of resilience in our cells, that wanting to want isn’t a crime. Survival imperative or not, it bites down anyway, and the teeth reveal something that is more than a chemical imbalance, more than a biological rounding error, more than an assembly of our ruined parts—it reveals a person.
Somewhere above it all, the stars move still.
It’s March, and Vancouver has finally received its first snowfall. Salt scatters along the pavement like stardust from long-dead suns, light from a supernova reaching eyes that don’t know they’re witnessing an ending that has already happened. Grit finds its way into my shoes, wedging between my toes, digging into my heel. Each breath emerges in a plume of condensation. My face is as frozen as the ground below. It’s still cold.
But somehow, just around the corner, cherry blossoms are blooming anyway.