First there is the numbness, the sense of the surreal. It isn’t happening. It can’t be happening. There must be a mistake.

But it persists. Going to bed at night, limbs unruly with exhaustion, unable to handle one more gesture, doesn’t make anything different in the morning.

It’s all still there. It’s all still real.

The days pile up, too close to one another, jumbled, and the concrete starts to set. Then the swell begins to rise, to draw higher and broader, no impediment, not a break-wall for as far as the earth curves back onto itself. It is born and it is borne and it breathes life into itself.

Anger.

That is what we call it, that is its name, but five letters cannot contain it, cannot express what it truly means. Its beckoning fingers break through the shell of invented impossibility, making small cracks at first, letting the murky light of reality through. And the shell disintegrates from the pressure which causes the heat, leaving you exposed with nothing but the heat.

It’s basic physics.

So there you are, uncovered, in the glare of the reality that can’t be real, absorbing more heat than the body, than the human essence, can stand. So the heat goes in and the heat comes out, and it has no purpose, no direction, no form.

It wants a form. It tries seeping out in minor irritations at a chair too hard or too soft or with arms that feel closed in. It tries to create a torrent aimed at any larger, amorphous target, a deity, the fates, the laws of nature. It tries to volley itself among us, so it can grow and create more of itself, like a virus of the intangible.

It will come to visit, it cannot be stopped. The question is whether it’s allowed to stay.