I know I’m dying, ie that I’m mortal. Sometimes my left tit hurts or something and I feel fear, I think about the Dying-fact, my mortality breathes down the back of my neck. If someone were to tell me I had cancer, I’d feel terror.

My friend is someplace between fear and terror. I can feel it.

This is a friend we’re talking about, an extremely dear one but not a boyfriend or a lover or a husband or anything. He has a wife. Presumably she knows which end of that spectrum he’s at right now, if it’s still just fear or if it’s officially terror. I do not know where he is. Oddly, even before he felt any fear, I felt fear all the time about him, for almost a year now, since I emailed him one day on a hunch and asked if he was having any trouble breathing.

[Unless they’re something Significant to you, men don’t have to tell you when it’s time to worry and how much. They don’t keep blogs, literally or metaphorically. You can’t even trust them to tell you when there’s nothing to worry about, cz they always say that. You’re never going to know if Death is breathing down the back of his neck, so you worry about it ALL THE TIME to one degree or another, until you start to wonder if you should break up with him but he’s not your damn boyfriend. If I had ever been Anything to fph, then if there were something to worry about he’d have had to mention it, that’s what I really wanted, so I could just think, when he’d disappeared and depending on my mood, either “he’s an asshole” or “aw, isn’t that cute, he’s building someone a deck”. I could stop losing sleep.]

Since I don’t know if Scarecrow is at terror yet, I am terrified just to be on the safe side. I’m breathing calmly into the middle distance above my bed, sleepless and composed, coolly terrified. It’s sinking in. I am afraid that long before he’d ever be dead, he’ll ‘go dead’ cz after all he’s not obligated to call me, so I won’t know if he’s terrified or not. And then to be on the safe side, I’m going to be continually terrified like I am right now. There’s no way around it unless I stop giving a shit, and I have zero desire to un-Love people so that’s out. If he’s fine, I’ll get a reprieve, but we’re all dying. . . .

[ha. I’m not the girlfriend, I’m the Terrified.]