

“There’s just so much going on,” I tell Gerald before sipping my mocktail. “Work is stressing me out. I promised three people I’d blurb their books by the end of this month, and I haven’t even started reading. I have two big grad school assignments due by the end of next month. Managing my social media accounts is a nightmare.” I take another sip. “Not to mention the surgery.”

I rarely mentioned the upcoming surgery. The more I talk about something, the more it grows violently, malignantly, before me. As a teenager, I talked about my first love so much that he manifested into a cinder block-sized emptiness in my stomach that pitted me well into young adulthood. As a young adult, I mentioned my depression so often that, in the mirror, the shape of my outline became obscured by the largeness of my sadness.

“You’re going through a lot,” Gerald validates, stirring his drink. “Plus, the surgery is a big deal.”

He was right, of course. The surgery — a hysterectomy plus the removal of fast-growing fibroids and endometriosis — was a big deal. My body had heavy, thorned chains around me. I’d been in physical pain so long that, at this point, it felt like I welcomed (and was strangely comforted by) psychological pain. Stress is easier to endure than an aching belly. It gave my brain the illusion of control. 

As we return to the car from our Happy Hour Vent Session, my left arm tingles viciously, like TV static gone rogue.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if I was having a heart attack?” I joke to Gerald, shaking my arm as if snapping a wet towel. 

I start the engine and find directions to our dinner spot. Five Guys, again. I don’t want a burger, but Gerald does, and I love him. I reverse the car as Gerald DJs. I think about our happy hour conversation.

My arm continues to tingle. God, I have so much to do. Things will be fine, I think. I don’t want to do anything. I’m scared about surgery. God, my arm won’t stop tingling. I’m okay. I look at Gerald. He smiles. He is the love of my life. I have a lot going on. I have a lot going for me. My hands begin to tingle, too. I mean, I think I have a lot going for me. There is a lot going on. What the fuck. I’m not sure what’s going on. I am loved. I think. What am I doing? After the surgery, I won’t be able to have kids. I have 139 unread emails. Things are okay. I don’t. Where am.

The light switch in my brain flips on sideways. I grip the wheel so tight I forget it is possible to let go.

“Something is wrong,” I say to Gerald. I don’t allow him to respond before I repeat: “Baby, something is wrong.”

I can’t see. Where are my legs. My breath is. I can’t. I stop the car. Gerald asks if we need to go to the hospital. I open the driver’s side door in the middle of Manning Street. 

“Something is wrong,” I say again, louder. I am standing in the street. I want to run. Where do I. Oh my god. Gerald ushers me into the passenger seat and takes the wheel, waving the traffic around us. Again, with his whole belly, he says: “Do we need to go to the hospital?”

I put two fingers on my neck to feel my pulse. Oh my god. My heart is bursting. There is a woodpecker in my artery. I am dying. Oh my god. I am. I am dying. 

The cliché says you will see your life flash before your eyes when the time comes. I can only see Gerald, looking at me. So, the cliché must be right. If I am dying — oh my god, I’m dying — at least I am dying seen, I am dying loved. I rapidly plan my funeral as Gerald makes the final decision to call the paramedics. He speeds through our neighborhood. The firefighters meet us in the lobby of our building. 

“She’s on a few medications,” Gerald tells the suited men. “Yes, a few medical issues. She has a big surgery coming up. Yes, a history of anxiety and depression.”

Another firefighter takes my blood pressure. “Could you be having a panic attack?”

I have tried to end my life three times — I know what it feels like to almost die. I swear, I am almost dying. The paramedics say my vitals are fine. My heart rate is sky-high, but the propranolol I don’t remember taking is starting to work.

It feels like I have been unplugged. My body continues to shake. I take a deep breath. Yes. Yes. Of fucking course it’s a panic attack. Why would I be dying? Only life has happened.

My body, revenge-hungry for the terrible everything I forced it to endure, willed me to listen in the only way it knew how. 

In the loudness, in the beating chest of the goings-on, in the so much to do — the body remembers each knuckle crack, each angry, salty tear, each time it has been ignored in the name of survival. I have never felt so scared of my body and what it could do. I wonder if it has always been this scared of me.

I make a mental note to apologize to my body when it helps me find the words. The paramedics pack their equipment, and Gerald kisses the crown of my head.

My body’s tenderness is the only wound I have survived, that I will always have to survive. More bloodthirst occurs within my chest than could ever drip from my palms.

I must survive all of the worst my body has endured. I am my body’s only spokesperson. It will make itself heard even if it must take my breath. Even if it must hold my heart hostage, a ticking bomb strapped to my aorta. 

I hear my neighbor get off the elevator. She walks into the lobby to see Gerald, the paramedics, and me. She questions the room. “Has anyone seen my DoorDash order?”

I remember I can laugh. My body lets me. Electricity bullies through my blood cells until it escapes through my open mouth.


Only Life Has Happened


“Are you even listening to me right now?”

Sam picked absently at a chip in the Formica table and gazed out the window behind Meredith. The vinyl booth was sticky against her legs. Everything in that diner had the same feel — damp, grubby, overly bright — but they always went back because Meredith liked the French fries.

“You were saying we never spend enough time talking about our feelings,” Sam said.      

Meredith raised an eyebrow. “Well yeah, you can be so closed off, and sometimes I feel like you’re not even in the room with me …”

Sam’s attention wandered back to the window. She watched as, on the other side of the street, a man retrieved a hammer from beneath his jacket and swung it against the front door of a jewelry store, batting aside a “closed” sign. The glass cracked with the first swing and shattered with the second.      

“Meredith,” Sam started. 

“Sam, please, I’m speaking. See, this is exactly what I was talking about …”

“But –”

The man ducked through the gap in the glass and took his hammer to the nearest display case.

“No, Sam, for once I need you to just pay attention. Otherwise, we’re going to keep going around in circles, and I’m trying to tell you …” 

Alarm bells blared in Sam’s head, not just because of Meredith. Over the murmuring din of the diner, she could just barely make out the sirens of the jewelry store’s security system. The man started taking fistfuls of rings, bracelets, and diamond-studded necklaces, stuffing them into his pockets.

No one stopped him.

Sam’s eyes flitted back to Meredith’s for help, but all she found was accusation. She motioned toward the window. “Can you just –”           
                    
“Fine, I’ll get to the point,” Meredith snapped.

Across the street the man busted open the cash register and pocketed the meager assortment of bills he found there. 

“I’ve thought long and hard about this …”

Sam dragged her gaze back to Meredith even as she heard the peal of approaching sirens. The sound grew loud enough to interrupt Meredith for a moment, but then began to fade quickly.      

“I’ve had several conversations with my therapist, and we both agree that this relationship has gotten really unhealthy lately.”

A suffocating tightness started wrapping its tendrils around Sam’s chest.

It hadn’t always been this way. This diner used to be one of the only places they could afford to eat at regularly, back when they were a couple of broke college students. Sam remembered sitting in that same booth and leaning across the table to kiss Meredith, licking the salt off her lips.

Sam opened her mouth to speak; the words didn’t come. Instead, she glanced back outside to see a retreating police car and an empty jewelry store. Heart pounding, Sam craned her neck until she spotted the man, still on the street.

He jogged a few steps down the sidewalk before stopping abruptly beside a dinged and dented silver sedan.     

The man raised his hammer. Sam rose from her seat.

“Sam!” Meredith exclaimed, “Are you seriously ignoring me right now?” 

The hammer came down, destroying the driver’s side window. This time there was no alarm.

“Meredith.”

“I can’t believe you. If you can’t even pay attention right now, I think we need to be adults about this and admit that it might finally be time to …”

Sam held Meredith’s gaze as outside the engine roared to life. A squeal of rubber was followed by a deafening silence. 

“Break up,” Sam finished for her. She gave a sad smile, then looked past Meredith to the empty spot on the street where the sedan used to be. “Maybe you’re right. It’s amazing what you miss when you’re not paying attention.” She scooped her keys from the table. “But you should at least let me give you a ride home. I think someone just stole your car.”


In One Ear


While everyone was riding the waves of different Covid-19 variants over the past few years, I found myself pulled into my own personal swell: A resurgence of my anxiety disorders.

Anxiety, like water, is easy to drown in. I bought my first car and spent months imagining crashes in horrific detail. Then my anxiety surged like a sneaker wave, swelling from one specific fear to every fear, everything. I was starting grad school soon, something I’d wanted for years, and all I felt was dread that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I’ve been told you should never turn your back on the ocean when it’s at its wildest; life itself became anxiety. I fixated on my health, convinced something was wrong with my stomach, my heart, the way I breathed. I didn’t sleep for nights in a row. Floating through those days, my connection to reality faded in and out. I’ve never felt more like a ghost.

I could write about therapy sessions I attended, journal entries I wrote, medications I took, meditation retreats I went on, all the practical techniques I used to try to help myself feel more like myself. Those have their uses. But this kind of anxiety, the kind you’re swept up in, requires something more. It forced me to shift my perspective. 

I started this past new year in Seaside, Oregon. One night, snow drifted down, blanketing the beach, adorning each individual blade of seagrass. I ran outside to witness my first oceanside snowfall, and there it was, shy moonlight making the snow glow and the waves sparkle, the bite in the air clouding my breath. This place of breeze and sea spray and undulation suddenly rendered still. 

Standing in front of the dark waves that night, watching soft flakes drift down, I was reminded that nothing lasts as long as we think it will. Snow melts. Storms die. Even in the cold, standing there felt the same as it always does when I stand in front of the sea, placing myself before a force so powerful, everything worrying me seems utterly insignificant. 

The power of my anxiety never awes me like the ocean does. The long days and nights working to mend my overreacting nervous system can’t be romanticized. They’re a blur of survival, of doing the bare minimum. They’re an endless string of reminders: This won’t last forever. You always get through this. Life will be better soon. 

The snowstorm brought me wholly into that fight. I ended up trapped on the coast a few days longer than anticipated. One day, I was even trapped in my sixth-floor hotel room, the elevators down after a power outage and the only set of stairs, exposed to the elements, coated thickly in ice. I could watch the ocean from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the room, could see what I couldn’t reach. I was anxious, but I never had a panic attack, never even came close. Instead, a dull acceptance tinged with dread settled into my body. If experiencing so much anxiety in the past few years — indeed, feeling possessed by it, feeling like the embodiment of anxiety itself — had taught me anything, it’s that I could live through it. So that’s what I did. I waited, a little uneasy but continuing on, and the storm passed. 

I don’t believe that anything happens for a reason. But why suffer without learning from it, allowing it to change you in some way for the better? Not all types of suffering lend themselves to this approach; sometimes pain is just pain. But I do know what I’ve learned from anxiety: How to be kinder to and not judge others, because you never know what someone is fighting internally; how to appreciate feeling deeply, even when it hurts; how to savor the calm moments and experience gratitude so deep it’s in my bones.

Anxiety is a necessary evolution, a way to keep ourselves safe; it has helped keep me alive and, in the next breath, made me feel like I’m dying. It’s ultimately a story my brain tells itself, and while I can’t always control the narrative, I can control the way I tell it. Anxiety can be an ocean if I want it to. Or the ocean can be a place of healing from anxiety.

Or both.


Listening to the Ocean


I lie sandwiched between my young children, attempting to sleep, yet waiting.

The other day, my counselor spoke to me about the importance of being a soft place for my husband to land. “You are both suffering,” she reminded me. Soon, he’ll come through the front door, and I’ll do my best to be soft. 

I toss and turn, each way getting a glimpse of my sleeping babies, who both wanted their fair share of momma snuggles tonight. We often sleep like this when my husband is on a work trip. All three of us feel more at ease knowing the others are close.

The sound of the door slipping open tightens my stomach and closes my heart. I breathe. Soft, I remind myself. I had texted my husband that I’d be asleep when he gets home, but since I’m awake now, and have vowed to set aside pride and to try with every fiber of my being, I get up and go to greet him.

“Welcome back,” I say, when I come into his view. He is sitting at his computer already. More work. He just got home and is already turning his attention to work. I try to put that judgment out of my mind. Soft. “Is there anything I can get you?”

He keeps his eyes on his computer screen.

Just an hour ago, he was in the clouds, leaving the fall colors of Kotzebue behind him. Kotzebue, Alaska: my place of birth. It was his first time visiting the village. The last time I’d been there, I was four. I often find myself wishing to return and connect with the beginnings of my life. A yearning to better understand myself and where I come from. 

Kotzebue is in the rural reaches of Alaska, located above the Arctic Circle. Like most of the state, it’s only accessible by airplane. Visiting takes planning and resources. Intentionality. Care. Which is why when my husband called a couple days ago — his feet standing on the land that held my first breath — to confess he’d been on a date with an old friend, it felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. My head spun. Time became disorienting. 

Tonight, with his brusque answer of “No thanks, I’m good,” I float and fumble back to our bed, letting gravity tend to my need for connection. I focus my yearning on the white noise machines of constant relaxed breaths on either side of me, and pray that my 11-year marriage isn’t ending. How could it be? That’s not how our story was supposed to go. 

An unsettling noise arises from outside. A scratch in the record of the lullaby that is my daughters’ breathing. Maybe it was just a whistle of air through my youngest’s nose? Because I don’t hear it anymore. My oldest purrs exhalations at me.

But there it is again.

We live in a duplex that backs up to a row of houses, with a busy street just beyond them. Sometimes we can get traffic sounds or voices from other windows. Usually, though, with the way the hill sits, it’s pretty quiet. I listen more intently.

“HELP!”

My reflexes lurch me into a seated position, and I toss the blankets off, jump to my feet and stalk toward the sliding glass door that leads to the balcony. The sound was clear that time. Where is it coming from? I quiet my racing and broken heart as it limps along, and I concentrate.

“HELP!”

Turning away from the plea, I run to the living room to get my husband. In a panic, I beg him to come and see if he can figure out who is crying for help. We hurry back to the bedroom and lift the blinds, exposing our tenderness to the outside world but not each other. I slide the glass door open and listen again. He’ll be able to help, I tell myself. We are both listening and trying. 

When the sound happens again, it’s the same voice, but more obviously, now, the yowl of a feral cat. I sigh relief and embarrassment, and melt toward my husband. “I thought someone was calling for help,” I say, “I was really concerned.” He holds me for the first time in probably a month. Even more startlingly, I let him. “I thought … help. I. There was someone, I thought. They needed help … I figured you could help.”

Before he had departed for Kotzebue, he had blindsided me with the idea of divorce. I knew, then, that we’d have to put forth significant effort to heal whatever was happening between us, but I still had naïve hopes. I didn’t yet know all the details that I would later come to discover. I wasn’t yet finding my body physically sick in response to messages I found on his phone. He hadn’t yet called from my birthplace to speed our relationship toward its death. 

We stand with each other in the dark now. He says goodnight. I catch my breath. He lets go.


March 2024

Only Life Has Happened

In One Ear

Listening to the Ocean

Where We Land