anxiety

The gold paint was peeling. Badly. Coming loose from the runner-board along the wall in large chunks and sections. On first glance, even on second and third, the place looked so stunning, so eccentrically artistic – or was it artistically eccentric? – but then she saw the peeling paint, and now it was all she could see. Just like life, she thought. And she willed herself to look away. There was a car outside – just hovering there, not parking, but not not parking, pulled up in front of the building halfway in the marks and halfway still in the street, as if that would make a difference, as if pulling at least somewhat into the designated area made him less of an asshole to all the cars that had to drive around him. She stared at him a while; wondered what he was doing. He was just staring straight ahead, hovering, in that halfway place of non-committal passive aggression. Just like life. She looked away from him, too.

She’d been sitting there for an hour – it hadn’t seemed that long, because she’d brought the new book she’d purchased, the one she bought just because of the dedication (anyone that can write that beautiful of a dedication, she thought, is worth reading) and it hadn’t disappointed. She kept losing herself in syntax and rhythm and stories, but after a while that had begun to make her feel uncomfortable. In the way that all things made her feel uncomfortable, perhaps; or maybe in a very specific way, in the way that disconnecting while still connected felt out of place and uneasy. So she’d placed the bookmark inside and set it down. It was just her and her surroundings, then – also uncomfortable. Surroundings were problematic, for her; they were a constant deluge of stimuli. Once, years ago, she’d tried to explain to her then-partner what life was like for her. They’d been standing outside a movie theater in Berkeley. “Tell me what you are aware of, right now,” she’d said. And her partner had rattled off the basics – standing on a sidewalk, air smells like popcorn, there’s traffic going by. And she’d nodded. “Here is what I’m aware of,” she’d said. “There are three people standing ten feet behind you and one of the men is angry and the woman is nervous because he is angry; he keeps getting louder and she keeps backing away, and I can feel his anger and her anxiety. That car that went by almost hit the car in front of it and the screech of the tires was so high it was painful. There are horns blaring from probably three or four blocks away, and it’s making me jump in my skin. The traffic sounds you mentioned are as loud as wind and driving me crazy. There’s a bicyclist coming up behind me, I can hear the zip-whir of his wheels. The air smells like exhaust so heavily that I can barely smell the popcorn, and what I can smell, smells burnt. There’s a crowd of teenagers walking down the street and their voices are as loud as the traffic but their words are unintelligible so it all sounds like just one cloud of noise getting closer as another line of noise keeps driving by. And every sound and every feeling and every smell is like a laserbeam pointed directly into my eyes. And I can’t breathe.” Her partner had just stared at her. And for the thousandth time, she’d wished that she could just walk down a street, or sit in a restaurant, or drive through a city, and be like a normal person.

But then the pandemic had happened; and suddenly, it was a different world. Now stores only allowed a few people in at a time, and so they were quieter, less emotions to absorb and less clatter. Restaurants made you sit outside and spaced far apart, so she no longer had to endure the feeling of being trapped in a large coffin full of scraping forks and clattering dishes and loud voices, she could sit out in the air and the sounds carried away on it. The traffic was less. The streets were emptier. And the irony was, that she had begun to miss the way things used to be. Oh, a part of her was grateful – if that word could be used when referring to a global pandemic and its effects on everyday living, but she was; because now she could walk down a street, or sit outside a restaurant, or drive through the city, like a normal person. But…it all felt so lonely, now. It all felt so distant. She had been given the one thing she’d always wanted, and found it wasn’t quite as shiny as she’d imagined it to be. Just like life.

She fidgeted and picked up the book, again, but now reading it made her feel nervous – and that was in the way that all things made her feel nervous – so she put it back down, next to her on the padded bench seat by the window. The tall, beautiful stylist and her client – the only other client in the place – were talking, and she caught a few words here and there, wanted to hold out her hands and try to catch more but they were coming too fast and thrown from too great a distance, even in that small space, so she kept missing them as they whizzed past and landed somewhere to her right. And the ones she caught weren’t all that interesting, anyway, once she opened her hands and looked down at them. A basic collection of nouns and verbs in various tenses – past, future, past imperfect. She mused on that, a while – past imperfect; such an odd thing, such a strange term. Such a judgmental and condescending description of the simple combination of both past and present. She wondered if there was a tense that described the combination of past, present, and future, and if that would be called “constant imperfect”. Aren’t we all constantly imperfect, she thought. She looked back out the window to observe the hovering car, but the car was gone; and that made her sad. Because any connection, even through a window with a stranger in a car who wasn’t even aware of her existence, felt strangely important, now.

She thought about what her ex had said to her, as they were breaking up seven months ago: how difficult she made things, how challenging her “issues” were. At the time, she had felt terrible, so guilty, had been so apologetic, ready and willing to accept such hurled judgments. But seven months can change a lot of things. Now, it just made her angry. Fuck you, she thought, as she had thought a hundred times recently, fuck you – I’ve lived with myself for 42 years, and I’ve still managed to love me. You gave it a shot for six months. Coward. You weren’t even in it long enough to learn how I like my coffee. Yes, fuck you and all your emotional unavailability; you think I’m challenging because I feel too much, when you feel too little. You call my anxiety an “issue” that you find difficult to handle, but I’m the one who has to walk through life constantly terrified and still try to find a way to function, work, cook, grocery shop, pick up the dry cleaning, and engage in interpersonal communication with total strangers. And considering I’m not in a mental institution and have raised two children and earned two degrees, I think my “issues” aren’t all that impossible to handle. I never asked you to alter your ways or change your life for me, all I ever needed was a basic understanding and some human comfort on bad days. Fuck you for using me as an excuse, a shield to hide your own issues behind.

She had a history of this; of picking people like her ex. People who wouldn’t know their own feelings if those feelings walked up and bit them in the ass. People who disassociated, shut down, disappeared. For a long time she’d thought she picked lovers like that because she didn’t feel she was worthy of more; but lately she’d realized, it was because she looked for exactly what they gave. She was constantly on, so she looked for someone who wasn’t. She couldn’t shut out the world, so she looked for someone that could turn off like a light switch and thus provide a bit of silence and peace. She felt everything, so she desperately wanted to learn how to stop doing that – and who better to learn from, her subconscious had evidently decided at some point years ago, than a lover with all the emotional capability of a grasshopper? But it wasn’t healthy. Of course it wasn’t. It was just one imbalanced human picking the opposite imbalanced human and hoping it will lead to equilibrium. It never does, of course. It just creates a seesaw of frustration. Such is life.

The tall, beautiful stylist was blow-drying the bits of hair off the black cape fastened around the client’s body, off the back of the client’s neck. Such a strange thing, all that discarded hair, she thought; how it serves such a purpose while still attached to us and yet we tire of it and let someone shear it off our scalps and let it fall to the ground without a thought, let it get swept up and combined with all the other sheared and discarded hair from all the other humans who have made the same judgment and decision, that day. This thing, this organic material that keeps us warm and protects us, thrown down and thrown away like confetti bits after a birthday party, all because we want something new or feel we don’t look beautiful enough. She reached up and ran her fingers through her own hair, feeling its weight and texture. She touched the places where the gray was showing through, not seeing them now but knowing exactly where they were, and she wondered why she covered them up, dyed them, hid them. Why? She’d earned them, by God; she’d earned every last one. Why do people try so hard to make themselves anything more or less than they are? Why is it so hard to just be? Why did she waste money and time to paint herself a different color and pretend the gray was still a chocolate brown, and the years hadn’t arrived for her the way they did for everyone? Why did she constantly look at her pooching stomach or ever-thickening thighs with such disdain, searching for clothes that would hide them away or distort their reality? Why was she constantly dieting when she loved food, constantly running when her knees couldn’t take it, constantly striving for a body or style or form that would make her feel like someone else entirely?

Why hadn’t she just said to her ex, on that cold day sitting in the car in front of the grocery store, This is who I am and damn you if you can’t see the beauty in me. I have felt agonies and I have survived. I have fought battles and waged wars. I have shed my own blood and I have cried more tears than you will ever produce in your lifetime. I have laughed so hard I’ve cried even more. I am alive. I am full. I am not a halfling wandering with glazed eyes through aisles in stores only vaguely aware of my grocery list. Everything I do, every second I breathe, every moment of every hour of every day, I am Aware. I am Emotion and Thought and Fear and Courage. I am broken, and all my broken pieces have made me whole. Yes, I cry at commercials – because I feel, damn you. Yes, I am overwhelmed in crowds – because crowds are overwhelming. Yes, I sometimes need to be held very tight and very close and spoken to in very soothing, quiet, gentle tones. Because I am fully human; I am not half-dead. And if you could take my central nervous system and put it in place of your own, you wouldn’t last one day, while I’ve lasted for 15,396 of them and still have more to go. This is me. And I am a fucking goddess. Gray hair, thick thighs, and all.

The tall, beautiful stylist looked over at her, her eyes crinkling above her mask to show that she was smiling. “Ready?”

She nodded, standing up and leaving her coat and book where they were resting, and walked over to sit in the chair. With a flourish, the stylist wrapped the black cape over her and snapped it at the nape of her neck. “Same as always?” Their eyes met in the mirror, and she sat there, considering the question and trying not to feel self-conscious with how long her response was taking. But the tall, beautiful stylist just waited patiently, without so much as a furrowed brow or tilted head, just those crinkling, smiling eyes.

“No,” she finally said, unsure if she meant it but hating the idea of giving any other answer. “No, this time – this time, just the cut, yes?”

The eyes crinkled even more. “Letting the gray come in?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I love that.” Such a simple reply, but it said so much. Or maybe it was the tone that said it. Or maybe it was the validation it provided, and not the words and tone at all.

“I mean, after all, I earned that gray.”

“Damn right, sweetheart. We all have. And anyway, I happen to think that the more of you that’s shown, the more beautiful you look.” The stylist reached for the clippers and gave her a wink in the mirror, and she felt…good. She felt good, for the first time in ages, for the first time in she didn’t know how long. She felt seen and heard and normal and good.

And then she noticed that the tall, beautiful stylist had a bit of gray of her own, just at the sides, just the beginnings of what would one day be a head of silver beauty. She had never seen that, before. She wondered if the stylist had recently come to the same conclusion she had – or if, which was more likely, she had just never noticed because she was too busy noticing everything else around her; so absorbed in the chaos that she missed the simple. Just like life.