By Jordan Heide
Recall a time when you encountered your greatest fear. Now imagine reliving that experience daily, hourly, terror pulsating through your veins, dread throttling your heart, despair materializing in tremors and trickles of glacial sweat. Oxygen escapes from your body in frantic dash, the shock of which antagonizes the belligerent thumping of your heart. Myopia freezes your functionality, paralyzing your psyche with suspicions of gruesome nightmares materializing into horrific actualities. Frightened and exasperated, you flock to comfort, to safety, to familiarity. However, your fear is not so forgiving; it confronts you suddenly, uninhibitedly, and panoramically seizes your agency. Immobilized in a blazing inferno, the unrelenting grasp of horror consumes every laborious breath, propelling you into a delusory realm of persistent cataclysm. Terror menacingly unravels rationality, suspending existence under the immensity of paranoia; each successive moment contracts a greater degree of uncertainty, such that you nearly cease to exist amongst the soothing tranquility of realism.