Quarantine Anxiety

I’m twenty-one and I’m walking on a cobble stone path while someone is smoking nearby. Or they had just been smoking then stamped out their cigarette and walked elsewhere. Whatever the case, the smoke was lingering in the air and I walked right through it, burning my nostrils and scratching at my throat. The smoke caught me in a space between two buildings, not quite close enough for an alleyway but not far enough apart to be considered a street and for a moment, I wasn’t where I thought I was. I was transported back to a place I can only visit in my memories, memories I sometimes worry are merely dreams that I fabricated in the dark hours of deep sleep. The smoke, the cobblestones, the wet air from a recent rain. I was back in Florence, walking past the Duomo and wishing my mother had come with—she would have reminded my forgetful mind to grab the umbrella. My mother does not travel by plane, though. The possibility of failure of the technology used to manifest flight consumes her and I am inclined to acknowledge her constant worry is a learned behavior I have found in myself. Not there, though, on the cobblestone sidewalks. Not as I made my way past the hostesses standing outside under restaurant awnings, calling out lunch specials while men in forest green jumpsuits dismantled Christmas trees leftover from the holiday. I never thought I would miss the smell of cigarette stained air, but I do.

What I mean is I miss the version of myself who could walk through smoke stained air, on cobblestone paths, past the Duomo in Florence without her chest tightening, her thoughts racing, without panic overtaking every centimeter of her skin. She ventured to faraway places without reservation, walked through the streets of Paris in welcomed solitude, did not fear the uncertainty of the unknown. In that self, the younger me, the insidious neurosis deemed anxiety lay dormant, only occasionally rearing its malevolent tongue— waking me in the middle of the night with fear for my mother’s wellbeing, clenching the chambers of my heart muscle as I walked into a public space, turning the color of my face and cheeks to a morbid red if someone I did not know asked to borrow my pen. Silently, the panic was built up with the passage of time until I became plagued by the tumultuous train of thought, the one which forced me to question, doubt and mistrust every aspect of my being. This seemingly foreign entity, one I believed separate from my own but was somehow emanating from within me, had taken hold of my mind. It convinced me I was incapable of anything— not even the simple luxury of going to the grocery store alone. There was once a time when I grew restless from being home too much. Now, I can barely stand to leave.

***

I sit on the couch in my therapist’s office that sags so much, I worry if I’ll be able to stand back up or if I’m going to get stuck and need to be hoisted out by a crane. I sit in the middle but then wonder if most of the other patients sit closer to one side or the other. Does my choice of seat indicate how I perceive myself— stuck in an in between? My therapist asks me to describe what I meant when I said I saw myself as two different people and I say I didn’t mean two people so much as two versions; who I remember being and who my anxiety makes me believe I am.

“When was the last time you remember not feeling anxious?” She asks me.

My mind is blank. I couldn't remember.

Or maybe I didn’t want to— I had been entangled in this head space of turbulence for so many years, I failed to see those versions I imagined had overlapped and weren’t actually different at all but rather a reframing of how my process of thought operated. I wanted so badly to be able to pinpoint where it all started, to look back through my history and determine the exact moment I turned into the decrepit, anxious mess but I could not identify one. Slowly, over the course of many moments, my mind turned against itself and instead of being able to tune out the noise, it took everything in me to hear something, anything else.

“What do you think it means when I’m trying to fall asleep at night and my mind wanders to the topic of death, of nonexistence? I try to settle my thoughts but then I remember my mom is turning sixty-two this year and although she doesn’t seem sixty-two to me, she’s going to be seventy in eight years? And in eight years, I’m going to be thirty something— but I feel so young and she’s becoming so old? So what do you think? When I try to fall asleep but then can’t because I start doing all of this math to determine how old we will be in ‘x’ amount of years and creating timelines to coincide with our ages and then I start to cry because I realize no matter the math, we’re both going to continue to grow older and I will never catch up to her and I wish my mom had had me when she was younger so that maybe then I could have just a little more time with her? What do you think it means?” I ask my therapist, struggling to breathe.

“What do you think it means?” she responds.

“I don’t know what it means but I know that I am afraid of a world without her in it and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to exist.”