The hot feeling of embarrassment, like tea dripped onto tights, spreading across skin. The creeping, rolling, burning shame of it, the memories of childhood wetness seeping into our clothes. A flush that starts in your chest and slips up higher, tightening towards your throat, spilling out crimson across your cheeks. It’s too hot, nowhere to hide.

Or is it that cold lodestone dropped straight down your spine, bouncing down to your feet and landing square in your stomach. That sloshing wave of cold nausea, a coiled weight in the pit of your gut. It’s terror brewed on dark nights when blankets block out the world and yet still those spindly fingers scrape against your mind, whispering what if, what if.

Maybe it’s the buzzing, jittering, off-kilter, off-beat whirring. The heat builds within you like a too hot train carriage, suffocating and filled with too many other breaths, other sweat, other tears. You feel the buzzing in your chest like a frantic bee and you feel yourself going up, up, up, detached from what’s happening as the anxiety bolts through you, flooding every nerve and pore, clinging on with grim determination.

Could it be the honey-like embrace of happiness, that warm syrupy emotion that unfolds through all your limbs with languor. It’s nothing and everything, a delicious slowness of intoxicating, irresistible sweetness. Total comfort like a hot bath, enveloping that one moment, just for the briefest of pauses, with a warm, empty bliss.

Visceral feeling is chewy. You can taste it on your tongue and it gets caught between your teeth. You worry at it, trying to pick and pull it free, but it won’t let go, it demands to be felt, to hold on, to mark you with the essence of its humanness. It elicits that which is primal, raw, and honest, the purest reactions to ourselves, of ourselves.