Someone Else's Ocean

“That’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not.” He took a seat on one of the smaller boulders nearby. “But you did offer.”

“I did, didn’t I?” I stood silent for several moments. It

was hard to convey what happened to me, why I was there because it seemed so trivial to some. A few really bad days was the gist of it. A few really bad days was the sum of it. For a long time, so much of me believed my issues were trivial because I was told they were. I was told my attacks were just temporary setbacks. But they just kept coming. It had always seemed impossible to explain my circumstances to anyone other than my therapist. No one in my life, especially my mother, who heard about my condition gathered that my disorder wasn’t anything other than someone trying to seek attention. Even my ex-boyfriend, Trevor, had downplayed my attacks and told me I just needed to relax.

I hated that word. As if it could really be so easily executed by a person with generalized anxiety disorder on demand. As if it was that simplistic. Relax.

That word was a hundred percent of the reason why I left him holding the bag of our new relationship in New York. It took me a few months to start liking Trevor enough to commit to him and only minutes for me to decide that commitment was a mistake.

“Trevor, I need you.”

“Relax, Koti. Can this wait? I have a meeting in an hour and I need to concentrate. I’ll call you back.”

Everyone close to me in New York, even the best of my friends never could grasp the reality of the hell I went through just to be present for them. Ginger, my friend since grade school, had dismissed my anxiety the way my mother had. Anger surfaced every time I thought about the day I left New York and the last time I’d reached out to her. She’d answered the phone while entertaining a few of our mutual friends and before I could get a word out, I heard her excuse for taking my phone call. “It’s Koti, she’s having one of her episodes.” I hadn’t spoken to her since. And I probably never would again. So much of my life I’d left behind, the day I boarded that plane. Everything. I’d left everything. And though it had taken me some time to open up to Jasmine, I didn’t have to force the words out for Ian.

I’d watched him implode when he knew I was his audience. His breakdown, though not the same as mine, had been just as unavoidable. We were both matches on an island of fire and couldn’t be helped. For us, our ashes were all there was left to work with. But I wanted him to know there was something to be said for those ashes.

“My parents started me early. I went to the best schools, got the grades, had the friends, the life everybody wants. I really can’t complain. It all worked out the way it was supposed to, mostly, but when it didn’t that’s when the trouble started.”

Ian sat quietly perched on the rock and waited.

“I had my first panic attack when I was fourteen. I didn’t know what was happening. And it was for the dumbest reason.”

“Which was?”

“I couldn’t get a stain out of my skirt.”

Ian studied me briefly before his eyes drifted back to the sea. A spray of water pooled between us and covered our feet. I moved to stand in front of him. If he wanted to know my answers, I wanted his attention. He didn’t hesitate, his gaze landed squarely on mine. Even in the dimly starlit sky, I could see the storm in his eyes. If my story were only a mild distraction, I would give it to him. The odd part is that I wanted to tell him.

He spoke low erasing my doubts. “Tell me. I want to know.”

“The first time it happened, I blamed it on PMS, but they just kept coming. My mother was completely intolerant of my ‘weakness’. And I felt the expectation every day, her expectation. She set the bar so high, it began to choke me. It was both physical and mental, I just couldn’t get to her kind of normal. But, oh, how I faked it, or tried to. I held it inside even though every day I struggled. I’d watch my friends and their reactions to certain situations and I would do my best to imitate, and then I would find a bathroom or a place to hide and have my freak out. There was no end to it. I just worked through it, all day every day, but worked as in an act of labor, I exhausted myself. I passed out a lot. I hid a lot, I faked illness, so I could hide and it would buy me just a few blissful days alone and away from the world. When I missed so much school, to the point of my parents being summoned by the headmaster, my father suggested therapy. My mother grudgingly agreed after years of telling me it was all in my head.”

Soaked from my fall, I crossed my arms and gripped the tops of my shoulders as I shivered in the breeze, feeling heavy with my confession.

“My psychiatrist used to tell me to fold my fears into fourths. To mentally write down what I was afraid of and memorize and recognize it for what it was and then treat it like a piece of paper and fold it in half and then fourths and so on until it was so small I could put it in my pocket and forget about it.”

“Your pockets overflowed,” he said slowly as he picked up the hem of my skirt and rubbed it between his fingers.

I nodded. “I tried everything. I counted. I took the meds. I did the breathing exercises. All of it.”

“Nothing worked?”

“No, because despite my mother’s permission to let me get help, her expectations outweighed my progress. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t be the daughter she expected, and anxiety-ridden, so I scrambled, and I hid it the best I could. I pretended the medication helped, for her, for my father and eventually convinced myself that I was capable of handling it.”

I moved to sit next to him but he caged me between his legs. “Go on.”

“So… then…” Ian kept busy dusting the sand off the bottom of my dress. I felt the low burning fire stir up again with the accidental brush of his fingers along my thigh.

“So, I faked my way through high school and college, feigning progress up until the time I got my job.”

He dropped the dress and wiped the sand on his shorts. “What did you do?”

“Real estate. Biggest firm in New York. I was one of their best brokers.”

“That’s ludicrous. How did you manage that stress?”