A SIMPLE SOLUTION 2021

something I wrote during Covid

Photo by Dawn Casey on Unsplash

There’s a first-class stamp affixed to the floor of my porch. It wasn’t there before. The first thought in my untethered mind is that if my house is trying to mail itself somewhere, it isn’t going to get very far. Where was it planning to go? The beach? Then, my mood being what it is these days, my mind goes straight to hurricanes, and global warming, all manner of devastation. I haven’t left this house for nine weeks because of the coronavirus and I’m probably more than a little nuts. I leave the stamp where it is, a perfect example of insufficient postage and ridiculous hope. It’s only a stamp, but it makes me smile, and these days, I take what I can get.

I’m thinking about the beach. My grandmother lived on a road in Amagansett that stopped at the Atlantic Ocean. Growing up, we were there every summer, and in good weather, we spent most of our time in the water. On hurricane days, when everyone else had gone back to the city, my family drove to the beach, sat in the car rocked by wind and watched the ocean tear itself apart. That’s when I first felt the kind of awe that makes you tremble.

I want to write about fear, the kind that has no face, no edges, no logic. Free-floating fear has plagued me for months. It began in late February when I woke out of a sound sleep gasping for breath. Three huge gasps out of nowhere that woke and terrified me and I spent the rest of the night in the living room sitting by the radio in order to hear human voices. I’d lost all sense of myself as any particular kind of being. I might as well have been a lizard in a nightgown, hunched over in my chair. That was the beginning of a panic that has kept me company for a couple of months. I’m afraid of the rooms in my house, afraid of the fading sun, afraid of my bed. I’ve tried meditation and guided meditation and gratitude and music and finding my happy place but nothing has worked.

Flattened by panic one night I had an inspiration. What if I make up a story that would justify this kind of fear? For me it always comes back to the ocean. So there I am, lying in the fetal position on the sofa, my dog Sadie with her head on my ankles, and I start to imagine myself on the beach after a hurricane, and something ragged is chasing me, and the sand is too soft to run fast and it is getting dark, and the whatever it is gaining on me so the only safe place to run now is right into the ocean, the dark wild ocean,

I thrash through the broken surf so I can dive the first huge olive green wave before it breaks on top of me, then there’s another to dive, and another, the breakers stretch to the horizon and I am gasping again because the undertow is pulling me down and I’m going to drown until some crazy riptide drags me further out to sea, turns sideways toward Montauk but taking me further and further from shore and my panic is turning into the psychic equivalent of a soundtrack, matching the story I am telling myself—and the next thing I know it is daylight and I am waking up on the sofa, home and dry.

I offer this simple solution to anyone suffering from nameless fear: write yourself into a story where you stand half a chance of surviving, and do, at least until morning.

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