Panic 2015

The day after it tried to kill me, the doctor says “your heart sounds fine.” Apparently this has only been a test of my emergency broadcast system. In the event of an actual emergency my heart will let me know in a more dramatic fashion. My heart isn't shy; it doesn't just murmur like other hearts, instead it shouts from my own throat just to make itself heard. I should be used to hearing my heart speak, in high school the nurse said I need reinforce the bars in my chest with iron supplements because anything that sounded that wild should not be let out. In the corners of my notebooks I doodled hearts like mine clenched by thorns and spouting flames: sacred hearts. The divine mystery of the sacred heart always held for me a fearful plausibility. I understood the feeling of a heart so full of love and sorrow that it could no longer be contained that it must be allowed to combust in a brilliant display of color before it could be placed safely back. They say the meek have more panic attacks because passivity in life may lead to the sudden combustion of feeling.

Once in a box of baby things, the relics of our past, my brother and I found a shiny red plastic heart with a switch on it. When we turned it on it beat like a metronome. It was thought, my mother explained, to prevent SIDS by reminding a baby’s heart to keep rhythm; a night time conductor for the newborn percussionist. My heart remains tone-deaf.

My loss of rhythm is often the first sign of an impending assault from panic. I know what it feels like to be in the ER in Cedar Rapids attached to wires, not having a heart attack. No one is sure what causes panic attacks but only a little over 2% of the population suffers them. We may be mis-wired, our bodies triggering the alarm bells for a personal apocalypse prematurely. Chest pain, palpitations, tingling, depersonalization, headache and trouble breathing are written in the body’s book of revelations, they are almost always signs of the end times in the rest of the population. For me it means about twenty minutes of terror in which my body acts as if it is in mortal peril. My rational brain knows I am fine but when has the rational brain ever won an argument against the body?

I know fear is a spark. Fear will cause my sacred heart to burst again. And Christ, am I fearful about leaving everything I know to start over in Iowa. Kalamazoo’s late summer evenings felt like home; fireflies igniting in impassioned bursts along the bike trail lighting my way home, sitting on my balcony in a secondhand plastic outdoor chair ponderously sipping cheap wine; and spending time with my working class room mates, my family of choice.

Now, after four years I am gripping tight with both hands and yanking out all of my roots. It is not that I’m impulsive. I would love to put down roots as deep as the trees in old neighborhoods, ones that grow gnarled and tangled up in everything they touch and are so strong they rip up the concrete on the encroaching sidewalks. But trees and people don’t pick where they grow.

I've stopped thinking of home as a place or even a state of being. In its new incarnation home is a person. Home is the person whose eyes I will look at and say “It’s a good offer but we have to move.” She'll say “We should take it.” Home is the firmness behind ‘we’. Home isn't waking up to the same bedroom year after year but waking up on the same side of the bed; that little amount of space that does not need to be renegotiated. Home doesn't need to know where the grocery store is but it gets lost together and laughs as they pass the same gas station the third time. Love fills the empty chamber but does not ignite.