Another day and I am driving the long way home from a meeting. The road is twisting, winding up a mountain, still damp from the rain last night. I can feel myself slipping out of this world and into the other, the way I did in the meeting, watching an ant on the conference table and wishing I was anywhere else.
The conference room is hot. I am straddling a memory and the present moment, hands sweaty and mind faltering. I am remembering how it felt to be touched in a way that made me cringe, I am remembering blood dripping on the frozen porch, I am remembering my stomach dropping. My body is cold. My body is not really cold, the conference room is hot the way rooms get on the first warm day in winter. I am telling myself my body is not cold, it was cold that night but it is hot right now. I shiver involuntarily. The room quiets, looks at me.
The ant on the table has stopped running along the edge and stops in the middle near my notepad. I have not heard anything that’s been said. I clear my throat and ask for someone to repeat the question. My stomach is turning somersaults, my hands are shaking, and I answer. My voice catches, rough against my throat, like I have been made silent for a long time.
The woman from the memory is drilling me, asking question and question, and I am feeling small. My body is cold. There is blood on my foot. The woman calls, “Don’t make it weird” through the open door and I splinter. I look down. There is a second ant on the table now.
The second ant moves faster than the first toward my notepad. The woman from the memory is not understanding me. I am not understanding myself. Time is fluid. I am driving home, or I am on the porch, or I am at the conference room table. Time is fluid and I am a stone at the bottom, caught in the undertow. Time is fluid and I am an anchor, unmoving. The first ant has not moved in a long time.
I do not remember leaving or driving home or the long series of texts that made me cry. I do not remember how I ended up bleeding on the porch that night, or how it resolved, if it did. But now I am driving home, listening to the sound of the wind.
keep breathing 