I use the word as a catchall, a broad arm-sweep of the aggregate on the counter, clogging my brains. It’s a massive static wall of relentless noise: sometimes it’s a benign sound, a pulsing energy that amplifies the light around it. Alternately, and most often when being referred to as “agony,” it is a towering shriek broken into hundreds of thousands of shards careening wildly through my mind, my blood, my bones. My whole existence will vibrate with this rising pressure that my body can barely contain, that my body feels like it will shatter trying to contain. It climbs up through me from some bottomless chasm I keep inside and it swallows me. It fills my skull and I can feel it happening, this swelling- a horrible, slowly rising crescendo that will inevitably eat my reasoning, my clear eyes, my honest tongue, and I will move and see and speak from the sound of this perspective.

There is so much anger in this noise. I clench my jaw to keep it trapped behind my teeth and they have suffered terribly from the strain. I have done more damage as a result of this overflow than I can stomach to acknowledge, that I am a part-time monster-in-hiding, but there’s never been anything to gain from flinching. The agony is a hundred things inside me and they all wear my face. When you live in the cycle, cyclone, you get used to these things. You become inured to the highs and lows, ride them out as they come and go. Things only ever get complicated when you let people in past the front porch. You bring them in and they start to see how you’re a burned out church, an angry volcano god, a pillar of effervescent light, an altar to sweat. How there are innumerable calculations tabulated at an astonishing rate flying through the open air sanctuary inside your skull. I mean, if they can see it. Most of the time they walk in and you just look like an infinite hallway of locked doors, inexplicable sounds and phantoms and there’s probably lava somewhere (do you smell something burning?). There’s always something burning. Agony is when you’re in love with the emotionally illiterate, the metaphysically challenged. Because there’s no way to be seen, and only the expectations of what you seem to be.

This is a huge word, it’s got a dozen tongues in each of its forty heads and we’re still discovering what any of that even means, so when I say “agony” I mean “everything.”