To Worry

Why are you a verb?

When I worry, I am the very opposite of any kind of doing or being or becoming or acting.

Worry (Noun): a state of mind one enters into, mostly involuntarily, but regardless of intention, one’s mind is now nothing but worry.

By Leena (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I try distraction--school work, walking the dogs, even this letter--but my mind is worried; it IS worry, I am worry. I don’t think about being worried or even about which I am worried.

I just think worry.

My mind is an ocean of worry and all my thoughts sail it.

Maybe the French, because they are good like this, say, “I have worry” the way they say “I have hunger.” But maybe, even better, they say, “Worry has me.”

Worry has me at retirement, at my health, at the health of all the people I love. Worry has me that my son will never grow up and worry has me that he will. Worry has me that the dogs might escape out the back fence and I check the gate again and again. Again.

Worry does not have me that I will be alone.

But worry does have me that everything, all of this, is not enough.

No, you are not a verb. You are a noun, solid and unmoving, whole.