It took a few minutes for the feeling to go away.
My chest was tight. My breathing was irregular and quick and shallow. The song playing in my head was Milky Chance’s version of Tainted Love. She had casually mentioned that another guy had gone down on her this past summer. They were just foolin’ around, it didn’t mean anything. She thought that maybe since we weren’t together it mattered less. Except we were together, just not physically in the same town. I was away, or maybe she was away. We were doing the long-distance thing for a few months. It was still cheating. How could she not see that? I recoiled when she told me. My eyes flashed and I waved her off. I needed to sit down. I don’t remember if we were inside near a sofa or outside near a park bench. The backdrop was nondescript. She tried to move in closer, to sit next to me, to make it all ok, to talk softly and say she was sorry. I kept moving away from her, breaking free of her attempt at an embrace. We had somehow gotten on the subject of contraceptives and she was running down the list of her girlfriends who had stopped using them and when she mentioned this guy in her list I questioned how or why she knew he wasn’t using any. That’s when she told me. It wasn’t a Ross and Rachel “we were on a break” admission. We weren’t on a break, we just hadn’t gotten the chance to see each other for a few months.
That was how I woke up: short of breath with a constricting feeling in my chest. It physically hurt and I felt queasy. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t real. I felt like I might never trust again. I felt heavy with loss. I stayed like that for a while, lying in the dark, running the fingers of my mind over the details of our conversation, the feeling of betrayal, the panic, the anger, the hurt. She didn’t have a face or a name. He might have been Brad or something equally punchable. He was a mutual friend and might have looked like Hyde from That 70s Show. None of this was real, but I was still paralyzed. I still wanted to run away, to hide, to breath normal again. I couldn’t move.
It’s funny how the mind works. I’ve spent the last few days cleaning some things out – mostly old text messages and photos from my phone. Yesterday, I went downstairs, opened some boxes, but purged very little. I got rid of the plush, embroidered Christmas stockings that I bought for and ex and her dog, a Whole Foods bag that was hers, the service paperwork for the old car, and a stack of condoms from back when I was dating. Only the stockings had any sentimental value, but apparently it was the condoms that triggered the dream and reminded me of the emotional risks we take with people we think we know. The potential price of getting close.
The adrenaline crash still lingers as I write this. It’s anxiety in reverse, a heavy beast slinking back from the shoreline into the sea. I feel slow as though movement might be difficult and there’s nowhere to go. I know I’ve felt this before… just before and after every big decision in which maybe I had to stand up for myself or take some sort of punishment. It seems to accompany failure or guilt or the stripping down to some raw form of truth. Telling my dad I got bad grades. Telling my boss I’m taking another job. I felt it in the kitchen of my college apartment when I found out I was being cheated on. I felt it the day my fiancée left – in those silent hours after her therapy appointment when she didn’t call or text to say everything was ok. I felt it in the moments before I climbed into the moving van and left for Memphis – not sure how to manage the move, the overnight stay in Kentucky, the cat, parking at the new apartment on a downtown street I had never seen. Maybe that was some of the trigger too. In cleaning out the photos from my phone, I had a lot of pictures from Memphis – a city I still feel strangely tied to, an ending that felt premature.
The sky is turning pink with dawn. It looks warmer than it is, though the clouds look thin and frozen. The day will brighten up and the morning panic will soon recede under the call of birds and a second cup of coffee.