I stop at a red light and call my mom. I talk to her about a fight I just had with my daughter’s father. The world spins upwards and sideways and I’m gripping the steering wheel, pressing the brake harder. My view inverts. All the while I’m talking, and I am scared. I am confused. My back sticks to the black leather seat in my car. Sweat drips down my lower back. I pull into a parking lot next to scorched grass soccer fields. Two men load a truck with yard debris. Branches hang from the pickup cab. Exposed, like me. I am parked crooked and askew.
I’ve put everything on hold for the last eight months. I’ve been falling—falling with my eyes closed, ignoring the change, ignoring what’s happening to me, to the life I thought I was making, to the life I thought I was living. This is the crisis, and it isn’t a cherry red Porsche or a much younger partner or any of those things. My crisis hides behind my smile, so fake when others ask me how I’m doing. I am going through the motions. I am pretending to be okay.
***
I talk in my sleep. The way the streetlights illuminate the doors of my closet triggers my brain, somehow. I used to have night terrors—running and screaming and neighbors calling the police. Waking up in my college dorm hallway with people hovering over me. That one dream where I had to escape and take an elevator to the highest floor, but the only button was down. I lived on the top floor, but my sleeping mind didn’t understand.
***
I’m lost in the clouds. Spiraling down, and I don’t know how to level myself. What’s the purpose of life? How did I get here? My mind spins. It feels like waiting for a red light to turn, and then suddenly the red light turning green is the most important moment today, or else I’ll fall sitting in place. Yes. This is the sensation. I’m hurtling to the earth from 30,000 feet in the air, the clouds obstructing my view, a sinking sensation in my stomach down to my groin. To the rest of the world, I am a woman talking to her mother in her car, waiting for the light to change.
***
A thought, while on toilet. I’ve resisted writing because it means I must slow down. Linger in my pain. Face myself. Admit what’s lost. It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to face this pain. To fail. To wallow. To find the other side.
***
Yesterday I quit Starbucks. I was telling my partner about it at a brewery. I cross my legs and sip a beer, Neon Sunshine. I tell him why. It’s because for years, especially when I was a new mom, alone, my university friends having abandoned me, I’d drive to Starbucks and whoever was working there, regardless of turnover, would learn my name, know my order, and ask how I was doing. They are trained to do this, I know. But more days than not, it was the only time anyone asked. After my job ended, and I lost all connection to the university and the identity I’d forged for sixteen years, I’d go to Starbucks. This was the moment I accepted my own loneliness.
Is this what a breakdown looks like?
***
I’m standing in Sprouts, the organic, overpriced grocery store chain for towns that are too small for a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, but it’s better than nothing, right? My eight-year-old daughter runs ahead of me, searching for coconut milk–infused gluten free ice cream sandwiches. She holds a container of raspberries. I tell her to look for the good ones—the raspberries that are plump and ripe and have no white specs of decay. I’m wearing a summer version of my pandemic attire from two years ago: black biking shorts with pockets for my phone so I can listen to my podcasts about con women in California while walking in heat that makes me want to pass out. My T-shirt, also part of my standard errand-running attire, a black and white Woody Guthrie shirt, fitted and aggressive with its “this machine kills fascists” slogan emblazoned like a Hell’s Angel bike gang tattoo. Birkenstocks on my feet. A mother Gaia cap that’s supposed to be white but has makeup stains and sweat stains along the brim.
In the corner of my vision, I see a man walking toward me. He is slim and is wearing gym shorts, the shiny kind, and has a thick mustache.
“Excuse me, ma’am, is this a Roma tomato? My girlfriend sent me to get this, and I don’t know what a Roma tomato is. I am 24 years old…”
I give a brief yet passionate lecture on the nuances of tomatoes.
“These are vine ripened and will work just as well,” I say.
My daughter stands in the aisle, bewildered, and is anxious to get out of the store so she can have a dairy free ice cream sandwich.
I keep thinking about this kid and his Roma tomato, and how useful I felt after the last eight months of not feeling useful at all.
***
I’m writing at a nondescript cafe at Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma City. By “nondescript,” I mean a beige table, tan chairs, scenic pictures on the walls, a waterfall cascading, a magenta flower, a garden filled with hydrangeas and sawgrass and a stone wall. Soft yellow walls, a few shades lighter than a ripe banana, green accents on the entryways. The kind of green we all know from hospitals—snap pea green. My fingers cramp. I bought an overpriced coffee at the hospital cafe, Catherine’s Corner, and a Larabar. Peanut butter and chocolate chip. It’s vegan, but I asked for heavy cream in my coffee. Go figure.
***
Tonight, I veer my car down the narrow road outside the studio I rent. This place, idyllic with its manicured hedges and crepe myrtles and ponds with a white heron, so graceful. I share it with other artists next to a historic 1920s mansion. An oil man’s place. I press the accelerator. Taking sharp turns. Veering close to the pond but turning before my car strikes the water. I clutch the steering wheel. I keep driving forward.
Everything is crashing and it isn’t crashing. A suspended descent.
I make a choice.
I control the fall.