Tingling

Years ago, when I was going through my separation from my first husband, and working at my first career-oriented job where my supervisor was a big dick, but I depended on keeping that job in order to feed my kids, I used to get this feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It was that feeling like butterflies, tingling in my stomach so intense that it resonated through my chest and up to my teeth. A lot of people would call it anxiety, or nerves. But I didn’t.

Sometimes, at lunch, I would leave my office and walk to the cafeteria to buy something to eat. And I would feel this tingling in my stomach, rising up through my chest. And it felt, almost, like I was breathing out something tangible and even magical. I had this image in my head of my breath pushing out ahead of me in a cloud of golden light, and me walking through it, light clinging to me like mist.

One day, my coworker turned to me and said, “Megan, do you ever get a feeling… like, in your stomach?”

I said, “Like butterflies? but tingling?”

“Yes.”

“I have it right now.”

She said, “what does it mean?”

And I knew it sounded stupid and fanciful, but I paused a long time, and then I finally said, “I think it means something good is coming.”

“Me too,” she said.

Logically, in retrospect, it was probably just anxiety. It was probably just anxiety, from being in a terrible space, where consequences seemed dire and making it through wasn’t a given.

But also, in retrospect. There were good things coming. So many good things.

It’s been ten years since then, and this week, that feeling is back. And I don’t know what I think of it.

It’s probably just anxiety. Seriously, I can barely breathe.

But I’d rather it was magic.