On a bus across the city, university to main station, sometime in late June, I spent five endless minutes alternating between three thoughts.

One. Why do I feel like crying?

Two. I am going to throw up.

And three. If this bus doesn’t speed up, I’ll miss my train. (And if I miss my train, I’ll have to wait another hour for the next one, and I won’t be home until after dark, and I’ll be too tired to work on my paper because I’m barely ever not too tired to work on my paper, and then I’ll fall even further behind, and I’ll fail, and the entire past three years will have been for nothing, and I am going to throw up.)

It kept circling back to the nausea, this frightening fullness I felt to the depths of my stomach, this close to overflowing, and it was only once I ran from the bus stop to my platform that I realised it wasn’t really nausea. The thought that kept coming to me did not yell, ‘I need to throw up.’ It stated it like a plan, a solution: I am going to throw up. As soon as I would arrive home, I was going to lock myself in the bathroom of an empty apartment, just in case somebody would come home without my noticing, and I would push a finger or the rear end of a toothbrush as far into the back of my throat as I needed to in order to alleviate this fullness.

I’d felt this feeling before, a pressure under my skin, veins too full with blood stumbling over its own feet to keep moving, creating torrents in a sea of the fearful, echoing the thunder of frantic feet chasing towards exits in a panic while remaining unaware that they’re the prelude to a stampede. I remembered, in that moment of running between bus and train, just modes of transportation taking me from one dreadful scene to another, that feeling. The screaming under my veins for someone to open up more exits, God, why won’t you open any more exits? I remembered the cold of a blade promising relief and the guilt I felt when I drew it back instead, ignoring the pleading calls for help. I remembered the fear winning yet another time and the relief I felt in a later, clearer moment that I’d put the knife away and let the screams die down. It had never occurred to me those previous times that there could be another method of giving way to the pressure, one that left no scars on skin or blood in the kitchen drawer.

Half an hour passed aboard the train, in which I kept myself from going now, finding a bathroom and letting myself overflow into the dirty metal toilet—the only way I had of holding myself back was the worry that I might miss my stop if I were to lose track of time.

The apartment, the entire house was deserted when I arrived. Silence echoed through the stairwell as I climbed up to the third floor, a strange sense of anticipation, almost excitement growing in me that simultaneously made me faster and feel physically sick for the first time that day. I made it to the bathroom, door locked, knelt before the toilet, and—

Nothing.

I pushed my trembling finger deeper in, convinced that if I made my stomach contract time and time again, something would have to come up, some of that sickening surplus of whatever it was that was filling me up all the way to the base of my throat. Some of it had to make its way out and spill down onto the ceramic, had to take some of the pressure out.

It was some sick twist of fate, I thought, that now that I’d found the solution, a way to open the gates that wouldn’t show to anyone on the outside, the gruesome gates were stuck shut.

The simple fact of it is that my stomach was entirely empty. I had not eaten since the morning, and it was nearing nine o’clock, the sun setting behind the ceiling window and tinting the sky a beautiful, bloody pink. As those things happen, though, I did not care for simple fact in the critical moment, and so I sat back, crying because as if following the lead of my own mind, my body had now betrayed me also. I had the strange, soapy taste of my own finger and the plastic note of my toothbrush souring my mouth, a soft burn in my throat and a sore stomach from useless contraction—my knees were already beginning to bruise, tender skin vulnerable like an overripe peach, and I felt hot all over, only the bathroom tiles cool under my palms.

I picked myself up from the ground that night, washing my hands and face and going back to normal after a little under an hour.

It was only two days later that I sat stuttering before my doctor about thoughts haunting me through the nights. I said I was terrified that I might release it all, that I might decide to end the feeling of plethora, the plethora of feeling, by becoming empty altogether, letting all those runners escape from the confines of my veins; I felt I was terrified I would be sent away, deemed as hysterical, hypochondriacal.

In the mirror in the consulting room, I saw my hand moving of its own accord, scratching the skin under my collarbone raw as I tried to talk through trembles and sobs and blind fear. It wanted out again. They were screaming again, right there under the irritated red again, running, trampling over each other as they looked for an exit. It seemed, however, as though I was not the only one who could hear them now.

‘It’s good that you came,’ my doctor said, with a kind, unwavering smile and a box of tissues that hadn’t left my sight since I had sat down. I took another, the material softer against my oversensitive fingertips than the cheap ones I kept in my bedside table, as I begged for the screaming to stop, prescribe me something before I might give in and do it myself. Fear, fear, fear, beating its frantic drums. The doctor smiled on, sympathetic, knowing things I knew better and things I did not know at all. I could hear it even through all the noise that came from inside of me. ‘I’m glad that you came.’

Through the tears and the fog that they left on my glasses, I could hardly see anymore, certainly could not make out my reflection in the mirror opposite me, but I knew the red would stay there under my collarbone for long after I had left the practice. My hands were too busy picking at the tissue to keep scratching now, marveling at the effortlessness with which it came apart, more like the gentle cotton stuffing of my old teddy bear than the paper that cuts my fingers as I write frantic words, one less capable of expressing my meaning than the last. Suddenly, I couldn’t bear to imagine how my deep red would stain the perfect white of the tissue.

When I looked up at the doctor once more, I knew that I would not be leaving with the type of prescription I had come in hoping for. No easy fixes, no shiny new gate safely installed for a controlled release of pressure. I also knew, though, that there may not be a map that would find the exit for all that wants out of me, and that there may not be any exits at all, but that it was good that I had come, nonetheless. Somehow, I would have to figure out how to teach them to live there in me, trusting that there was no need to run, and now that I was here, at least someone knew where I was in case I got lost.

‘We’ll figure it all out. You’ll see.’

-Jacqueline Koshorst

Jacqueline Koshorst is a graduate student of English and American Studies at the University of Kassel. A lover of fiction and non-fiction, poetry, drama, and prose, especially resonating with words written or spoken by female and queer voices, her free time as well as her studies centre primarily around literature. She lives with her cat and too many books in a quaint village in central Germany, where she occasionally strays toward other forms of art when the words start swimming before her embarrassingly myopic eyes.