some say it's like a gnawing in the pit of your stomach. it's a slow sinking feeling-- you know it's there, but you can't really describe it. you feel the words hanging off your tongue, clinging for life as if they'd disappear if they were to leave the safe abode of your mouth. the feeling that runs deep and endlessly inside yourself that you know this is beyond anything you imagined it to be.

or it can be like a billion butterflies in your stomach, so many butterflies that you wonder how they don't fly up to your throat and out of your mouth so everyone can see, or how they don't simply choke you because you're trying so damn hard to breathe. sometimes they crash into each other and cause you distress and other times they make you feel high. But you always feel it... those wings beating at a rate faster than you can comprehend. all the fluttering.

then there's the comparison of it to a fire; a quick, dangerous, fleeting brush fire that rushes through and burns out unless it catches if its lucky, or the slow, all-consuming, living fire that sits and broods. it breathes and burns white instead of red; it's passionate, yet patient; quiet, but long lasting.

it's either good or bad, never really in between. it's the feeling that lingers before you fall asleep... the peaceful knowledge that when you wake up, there's someone glad you're awake and there. your presence is longed for, missed, and welcomed into the arms of the world that waits. or it's that worried, frayed and exhausted surrender when you know it's over and gone but you just want to hold on for one more day, thinking maybe it'll be like yesterday or the year before.

but it's definitely a feeling-- whether it's mistaken or compared to something else, it still causes a chemical firing in the brain that finds its source far from anything a doctor or shrink can explain away. 

its something that comes from our souls and reminds us that we're very much so alive