Tonight's Poet Corner: Abrupt Onset

Abrupt Onset
by Belinda Roddie

The first time I had a panic attack,
I was not in a public space. I was not
surrounded by shadows in suits or skirts,
their mouths flapping and gumless as
the screens of their phones lit up their lips.
I was not provoked by a crowd or mob, nor
emotionally riveted by a trauma in a scene
from a movie. No trigger or content warning,
this time, could protect me from the quivering
of the volatile telephone wires hooked
into my shivering brain. The first time I had

a panic attack, it was three o'clock in the
morning, and I had just gotten up to take a piss.
I didn't care if I disturbed my girlfriend
during her deep sleep; I stumbled to that
welcoming white basin, and the bathroom lights
washed my body in a cleansing glow. Sterilized, I let
the cold porcelain hold me up as if I had already
nearly achieved rigor mortis. I was still halfway
between the lands of the living and the dead.
I did my business, wiped, as you should always
do, tried to stand up - and then everything
got fuzzy. It was as if

someone had plugged my skull into
a wood-paneled television set and filled
my head with static. When I stared ahead
of me, I saw two shower curtains instead of
one. I began to wonder if I was about to faint,
but as soon as that thought process started, an
invisible stone ossified in my stomach. All my
guts felt like they were being pulled out like
someone was trying to knot a rope. I started
debating whether or not it was the flu, or
a fever, but when I took my temperature, the

thermometer dangled loosely from my mouth
like a broken tooth. The black numbers were
laid out to me in jagged lines, and yet I was
not appeased. My whole body then locked up
like I was a computer caught with its eyes
on a blue screen. I thought panic attacks felt
different than this: That my heartbeat would
form its own track list with its rhythm, that my
lungs would tighten like balloons bursting
for breath. Those symptoms came later, but

for now, I was greeted with my intestines
twisting into a corrupted butterfly. An imaginary
aggressor had taken a sledgehammer to my
spine. I was paralyzed, yet the vertigo made me
feel like I was always moving. Somehow, I smelled
salt - but I also smelled cleaning solution, pungent,
like someone had punched me in the nose with
an open Febreze bottle, and I couldn't get the citrus out
of either of my flaring nostrils. I was growing
orchards in my sinuses. The roots dug deep.
They wouldn't break free. The first time I had
a panic attack, I thought I was going to die,
and yet the only danger was slamming my
cranium into the bathtub in front of me. I've always

dealt with anxiety, but the fact that it could totally
compromise the body - systems overheating,
programs shutting down like my hard drive
couldn't handle the speed of my blood flow -
that was too much to bear. And of course,
thinking about it made it worse, until I was
floating in a vacuum of my own neuroses,
all the synapses misfiring, my own natural
electroshock therapy, only it wasn't curing me;
it was just making everything smell like smoke.
The first time I had a panic attack, I didn't want
my girlfriend to find out. When I first met her,

I wore a long black coat like a suit of armor.
I told her that she didn't need to look for a dashing
knight anymore; I was brave enough, strong enough
to scale any tower, slaughter any dragon. What
I didn't take into account was the beast burrowing
into my own belly, screeching at me, threatening to
set my insides on fire. I knew I was safe, but I
didn't want to look weak. It's amazing how much we
base strength on outside confidence rather than
inner endurance. That a smile of pride is worth

more gold than the actual marathon. The laps
I tried to swim just made me drown more, and
still I resurfaced, and the air tasted so good when
it wasn't filled with ash. When the episode didn't stop,
I staggered back to my room like I was drunk. The
buzz I had wasn't a high; it pinned my arms to my
sides like it was afraid I'd hit something, or someone.
I slipped back into bed, but the sheets were too heavy;
they felt like the tide pulling me into choking sands.
I couldn't go back to sleep, because I had no concept
of day and night anymore, of light and dark, of

dreams and reality. The first time I had a panic
attack, I felt so alone, even when my girlfriend
had her arms around me. Even when the warmth
of her skin fought hard against the ice in my veins.
Why was I so cold, and why was I so frail? She
may as well have been cradling a glass doll
against her chest. She reminded me that she was
there, she was with me, but that didn't matter; I
had forgotten who I was. I had forgotten the stories
I always told to people. I had forgotten the books
that I had spent time shelving the day before, their

paper faces sneering at me. I had forgotten that I was
just accepted back to university for a credential
that would shape my future, that would stick me back
in a classroom only to have me run the show. The lines
I had learned flew off the script, but there was no
one who knew the text well enough to give me cues.
When I finally started crying, that was when
the world returned to my bedroom. That was when
I remembered my alarm clock, and that my sister
had an old friend over, sleeping on the couch
in front of the TV. And that I was going to San
Francisco in just seven hours, if only to see the fog

roll in before the sun burned it away. And when
I finally fell back to sleep, I didn't dream; my
shoulders shrugged off the temporary burden
of dread, only to lift it back up the next day.
Who would have thought that a moment of
hysteria could strip you of your name, could
free you of all your responsibilities if only for
a handful of minutes in the middle of the night?
I was erased and then rebooted; the undo key had
never felt more appropriate. My canvas was bare.
The first time I had a panic attack, I never felt
more alive. I also hated every fucking minute of it.