The Chest-butterflies Never Leave Me

A poetic narrative of my embodied experience with C-PTSD

Photo by Benjamin DeYoung on Unsplash

The chest butterflies never leave me. They stay — each day, in metamorphosis — but, oh, they stay. First, they’re cockroaches. Next, they’re bees. Then, flies. Piranhas. Electric eels. It’s a buzzing, biting, stinging vibration some doctor would call the physiological component of anxiety. But the…