The Weight With No Name

There is something sitting on your chest. Not a feeling — or not only a feeling. Something with mass. You have checked. You have pressed your hand there. Nothing. And yet. The ribs are heavy. The throat is thick with something that will not come up and will not go down. You are standing in a supermarket, or in a meeting, or in the shower, and it arrives without warning and you cannot explain it to anyone because you do not have the word for it, and without the word, the people around you cannot see it, and because they cannot see it, you begin to wonder if it is real. It is real. Your nervous system is running a distress protocol it learned a hundred thousand years ago, designed for a wound you can point to. But this wound has no location. The pain fires anyway. The chest tightens. The jaw sets. The stomach drops. Your body is doing exactly what a body is supposed to do — it is trying to survive something — but the thing it is surviving cannot be x-rayed or stitched. Some languages have a word for this. English largely does not. The absence of the word does not mean the absence of the thing. It means the thing has nowhere to live except inside you, pressing, on some ordinary Tuesday, with no warning at all.