I had just moved to a new city in the middle of the pandemic.
It is in moments of deep change when it feels like I’ve actually never really noticed what it feels like to be alive. Hypervigilance. But it goes beyond that, it’s not just that I feel like I’m experiencing life for the “first time,” but also that all of the things that I’m noticing could lead to my eventual demise.
It is like the phase before the panicking, where there is enough “you” left somewhere inside trying to fend it off. You see the panic rolling in like a tsunami and you’re holding onto the most stable tree trying to convince yourself that you won’t be swallowed by the wave.