The Apple of Anxiety

There is a lump in my stomach.
An awful sharp ominous lump that always seems to be buzzing, rolling around in my gut. Like a bruised apple trapped in a faucet and the more I think about it the more the liquids in my stomach seem to feed and nourish it; helping it grow, but the water keeps on running and the line keeps on climbing until it pushes it up through my body. I can feel it, uncomfortable in my chest, causing each breath to be too heavy for me to muster oxygen through it.I am glad though that this lumpy bruised apple hasn’t quite made its way to the back of my throat. It hardly ever does that. It just lingers, dense on my lungs as if with each intake of air my insides crush it into a chunky paste. Thick and viscous. Unforgiving, like acid it burns and I can’t get rid of it.
Not without giving in.
When your mum might tell you as a child not to swallow the apple seeds otherwise you’ll have a tree sprout inside your belly, the fear, that childhood fear subsides.
Not with me.
I still find myself crying and hyperventilating over things when that apple tree has got stuck in my chest. I’m just without the pigtails and sticky hands. Instead a grown woman whom nobody takes seriously after I’ve burst into tears from staying too long in a bustling room full of overly opinionated-shouty people.
I wish I could reach into my mouth, down into my throat and into my chest to prize the rotting fruit from my lungs and throw the disgusting apple that I carry around with me, all day, every day at them.
And they may say that I make them sick.
But I am barely ever sick. Sometimes though when the apple has made its way up to my air pipe and I can feel it pressing against my uvula, and the blurry sink seems so far down even when I’m using it;s sides to hold my convulsing body upright above it, I am sick. And the apple chunks turn into thin air and I find myself choking on that instead. These episodes come few and far between and the rotten apple does vanish for a short while afterwards however there are always some seeds left over that restart the cycle.
It is relentless and never ending.
Similar to the way my cat pounces on me every morning, demanding to be fed. If I do not move, she is relentless and never ending.
I wonder what the t hings was that the cat was so curious about and why it killed him. My cat isn’t curious about my apple. She is accepting and rubs her fluffy body about my ankles in effort to comfort me when the sink is blurry and far away.
People aren’t like that. Although they are still relentless and never ending. Not every person, but some constantly replant this apple into the pit of my stomach. I hope that one day, before they give it to me they might take a leaf out of Cousin Eve’s book and take a bite before they hand it over.
Just to be curious.
To have a taste of this apple of mine.