You get up every day, cram into your shoes and remember to put one foot in front of the other. You will repeat these steps over and over again until the day you die.

No one will call you a hero for breathing in and out, for digesting your food, for putting one foot in front of the other. You will eat, brush your teeth, fight, make love, die, and the world will continue to turn without your willing it.

You will look into your husband’s eyes today and feel afraid.

You are scared because if you could have anything, anything at all, you can think of nothing you want more than to never, ever, put one foot in front of the other again.

Even now, as you rise above yourself on this Sunday morning, when the earth lies lush and green from last night’s storm, you sense “the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe” as you grasp that like any insurance salesman you have to pay your dues before you can be a poet.

And because you believe your life is a story, you have sixteen fucking hours to move the narrative forward, to write the small, pedestrian triumphs of a full day before you turn out the lights. Another sixteen fucking hours of putting one fucking foot in front of the fucking other. You will do this, but you will feel deceitful because you’d rather die.

In the quiet of this morning, before you slip on a pair of jeans, before you drink your first cup of coffee, before your husband asks if there is any Swiss cheese left for his lunch, before your son spills his cup of orange juice on the sofa, before you take your daughter to the birthday party, you must accept that this, all of this, is all there is. Not an ancient sacrifice but a crucifixion just the same.

§§§

There it is—the veil just to the left of my field of vision. If I turn my head towards it, the image dissolves, but the lump in the pit of my stomach lingers.

“Dear God, what are you doing here?” I whisper to the shadows as I lapse into that twilight zone between fact and fiction.

OK. So this is not the first time the darkness descends on me, nor the second, nor the last, but the unveiling of the Beast in its full glory always takes my breath away.

There have been many disconnected moments, when without warning (it can be a crooked lampshade, a mussed curtain, or an uneven patch of wall), the lighting dims, and the world grows dull, flat, and gray. Mostly these moments are fleeting. But there’s no denying the spans are getting longer, overlapping each other so that a whole day crumbles in quiet desperation.

And what set it off today?

I woke up with a sense of dread. It was a relentless struggle from there, and the feeling crested when I arrived a little early to pick up Nicole from the birthday party, just in time for the cake. When everyone started singing “Happy Birthday,” I watched an older gentleman, probably the party girl’s grandfather, bray enthusiastically off key, making everyone laugh. He wore a conical birthday hat with the elastic chin strap cutting into his jowls. His joyful, tuneless abandon exposed my own raw sense of loss which subsides but never diminishes. My own father had a beautiful tenor and never sang off key, but then again, he never made it to his granddaughter’s birthday party either.

Nicole, bless her, has an uncanny understanding of my moods, and she didn’t fuss when I told her to say good-bye after the piñata. We drove home in silence, and she carefully selected piece after piece of candy from her party bag, knowing full well that I was too consumed by my own thoughts to interfere with her confectionary orgy.

When we got home, I told Felix I had a headache and crawled under the sheets with the blinds drawn.

This is how it starts.

Control. I am losing control, and imperfection is creeping in. And deeper, beneath the cracking veneer, is a layer of hysteria, bubbling up and threatening to seep out of the hairline fissures in my psyche. And beyond the hysteria, miles beneath the surface, at my core, nothing, just an emptiness that emanates out of me like a black hole.

Whoa. I’m getting way ahead of myself.

But it’s so tempting to let myself go. What would happen if I heeded the call of the sirens? If I let myself crash into the rocks and slip beneath the surface?

I close my eyes and conjure up the images from class the other day. Naked bodies writhing in flames that consume them from within; they hold their arms out to me, singing of eternity in one blasting voice like a trumpet breaking a seal with my name on it:

“Anna.” The images pulse beneath my eyelids. I feel a presence approaching, touching me.

“Anna, how long are you going to brush your teeth?”

My eyes open and focus on Felix’s reflection in the mirror. I put down my toothbrush; the bristles are stained with blood.

“Are you alright?” He hesitates behind me.

I rinse my mouth and the reddish water swirls down the drain.

“I’ll be right out.”

I can do this.

I look for the big picture in the mirror. It isn’t there. It isn’t between the sheets or the peanut butter and jelly. It isn’t on the grocery list or the evening news. It isn’t in the laundry basket or even in my dreams.

I know the Beast is tempting me like my father, making me choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. I choose to end this day in the oblivion of sleep.

I get in bed and place my pillow over my head.

This is how it begins, with the death of desire, and this is how it ends, with desire of death.