​     And, no stopping it now, here came the panic attack. No way out. She had no one left to call. She hated anti-anxiety pills​​, she hated the sleepy and slightly out-of-touch sensations they gave her, so she never allowed a doctor to proscribe her any, but now she kind of regretted that decision. Her strongest concern for herself at the moment was how her panic attack would effect the other people who were now sitting at the bus stop. Would they call an aid car when she started crying and trembling so much that she wouldn't be able to talk? No way of knowing. She'd just have to ride with the incident on this one, and if she wound up in some sort of emergency room somewhere... 

​     So, for several minutes, she just kind of fell apart. 

​     Tears flooded down her cheeks. She quivered like she was having a fit of some kind. which indeed she was. Sobs became loud, wailing coughs. The other people stayed away from her as much as possible. They knew Kathy was acting irrationally. They just didn't know how irrational she was, how crazy she was, and, really, they didn't want to know. All they wanted, really, was to get to where they needed to go on the bus. And, of course, the bus was late. It was supposed to be at that stop at quarter after, but then came twenty after, twenty-five after. The bus must've gotten caught in traffic somewhere. It happened all the time. The busses rarely kept to the schedules anymore. Katy continued to sob. She kept trying to get it to end, but she couldn't. She felt so alone. That was at the root of everything. She felt so damned lonely. She honestly felt that, if she died, no one would really care. No one would mourn her loss. She didn't matter. That's what made her cry so hard. She'd longed all her life to excel at something, to make her mark in some manner, that's what studying so hard in high school was all about, that's what college had been about, and now, here she was, nearly thirty and deep in debt with a "boyfriend" who was a joke and utterly friendless besides that and without any family members who gave a fiddler's fart about her, and she really was thirty pounds overweight, and she really, really was never going to amount to anything, and really, really no one was ever going to honestly and completely love her, and...and...what in the hell was it all about, anyway? This whole life business, this whole business of struggling through despair and hard, soul-sucking work five days a week, what did it all mean? What was it all supposed to accomplish, exactly? And so she sobbed. She sobbed until there were no sobs left in her, until she felt as empty as the empty sky, and then after that...after all that...she felt exhausted. She'd run completely out of energy. If the bus had come right then, she didn't feel confident enough in whatever energy was left in her to step up and get on it. What she really wanted to do? She wanted to go to sleep. Yes, as crazy as that sounded to herself even as she thought it, she wanted to, right at that moment, close her eyes and drift away into...into... 

CONTINUE