Anxiety in the City
You’re sitting on the edge of your bed, elbows on your knees, hands clasped in the space between. Head bowed, like an athlete at rest. Earlier in the night, you’d had an attack. Now, hours later, you breathe. You tell yourself that this is a process. You’ve been here before.
Through an open window that overlooks Lombard Street, you’re listening to the sound of the city in the fog at night. It’s an orchestral sound, comprised of sub-parts. There’s the traffic, which arrives and fades in a spectrum of percussive intensities — Smart cars like waves at low tide, busses and motorcycles with more mechanical violence, like chainsaws ripping the night in two. From down on the sidewalk, there’s the high-pitched gargle of a meth addict screaming at himself. His voice sounds like a garbage disposal. Above this there’s the white noise of the wind. Every once in a while there are moments of music, and every half hour or so the ships’ foghorns moan with guttural lament. Notes of thick baritone that punctuate the night. Interruptions from God.
You’re listening to the sound of the city to distract yourself. To silence, or more aptly overpower, the volume of the thoughts reverberating inside your own skull. You’re thinking about earlier. You were in the bathroom at ______ in the Mission. It was around 1:00. You were standing at the sink, letting the water run over your hands, considering your reflection in a mirror muddied with filth. The bass in the music pulsed through the floor. A nauseous humidity weighed down the air. The grout lining the frame of the window on the wall looked wet. The soap dispenser was broken.
All night you’d been drinking whiskey gingers and coercing yourself into dancing and doing your best to make your friends laugh. Three or four drinks in, it’d been fun; it’d felt like you’d slipped inside a moment — found a way to forget about the constant momentum of time. But as you were readying yourself to go back out to the bar now, back out into that throbbing, amorphous thing of people sweating and breathing and lifted and drunk, you felt something like bile bubble up near the top of your stomach, a broken-bone cognizance of just how fast the world around you was spinning. Something like dread. You turned off the water, dried your hands on your jeans and, in one fluid motion, opened the door and cut through the thing of people and hopped in a cab and went home, at no point stopping to say goodbye to anyone.
In the two hours that have passed since, that curdled sense of dread has congealed into guilt. It isn’t a product of your having left the bar without saying bye, you know, but of the sincerity of the unhappiness you were feeling just before you left. The implications of that sincerity, of your desire to be alone. And the implications are many, and they’re generative: each spawns separate anxieties that are themselves their own things, their own planets, spinning around in a crowded solar system that orbits the nucleus of your brain. You’re 26 years old. You’re a bad friend. A bad brother. A bad son. You’re a fake, a fraud, a phony and an imposter, and sooner or later you will be found out, and everyone you’ve been lying to will see you for the nervous little weak thing you are.
And oh no, this isn’t the first time. You were prescribed Zoloft at 16. There must be something wrong with you. There must be something wrong with you that can account for your being incapable of enjoying this youth you’ve been blessed with, these legs that walk and these arms that work and these friends who laugh and this brain that can talk and learn and fall in love. You left the bar because you wanted to be alone. Because you don’t appreciate and don’t belong in this city.
And oh no, this isn’t the first time. How often do you ignore text messages on Thursday and Friday nights? Maybe things would be different if you were alone. Unencumbered by love or friendship, exonerated of expectations, you wouldn’t have to worry about anything except yourself. And you wouldn’t have to feel bad about wanting to be alone or about the implications of wanting that — because you would be alone. Like a bird, free to pursue the limitlessness of your whims.
And oh no, this isn’t the first —
You tell yourself to stop. You lift your head up. Another breath. This is a process. This is familiar. You close, then reopen, your eyes. The city is smothered in fog. You sit up. Inside its square frame, your bedroom window is a TV screen silenced by bad reception; its ethereal light basks your bedroom in metallic gloom.
There are things you know about yourself that you forget about in the midst of these anxiety attacks. You force yourself to think back to a time when you remembered those things — when they were so obvious that they were all you could think about. You cycle through the usual memories, the typical anecdotes — summer afternoons on a baseball diamond, winter nights in the desert in college, walking through the French Quarter with Alex — but what you land on is a memory of the weekend before, when you and Alex ran from your apartment on the corner of Lombard and Van Ness to the top of the Lyon Street steps. You force yourself to think about the melodious way the gears of your body churned, synchronized and smooth. The unstoppable strength of the tendons flexing and stretching in your legs, of the lungs pumping in your chest. Hands on your head, breathing hard, standing at what seemed like eye level with the top of the Golden Gate, you hadn’t felt like a bird so much as a German Shepherd, lean and powerful and in the prime of your life.
It was so obvious in that moment that you force yourself to remember. You are 26 years old. You’re a living, breathing, sweating, running, powerful component of this city. There are many things about you that work quite well. It was a moment of appreciation and awareness that’d felt like an instance of timelessness — a different way of forgetting about the momentum of time, spinning. A feeling of infinity. A feeling you’d forgotten exists in the bathroom at _______.
But this happens from time to time — your forgetting, you know. And when it does, you need to force yourself to remember: This is a process. You’ve been here before.
You take another breath. Open your eyes. The voice that had sounded like a broken garbage disposal has drifted away, a tendril of thought forgotten. In its place is the oscillating wail of far-off sirens, the sharp, knuckled barking of dogs, and more moments of music. The sounds lend a constancy to the darkness, a substance to the night, an electric hum.
You turn and look to Alex asleep in the bed behind you. You kiss her forehead. You text your friends saying that you’re sorry for leaving, and you ask if anyone might want to go for a run in the morning — and, if not, if they might want to go to the park to play Settlers of Catan.
Then you lie down. You close your eyes, trying to think of nothing at all. Soon, sleep. Maybe. This is a process. You’ve been here before.
