honeydunce

I was getting laughed at the other day, while talking about my childhood panic attacks.  Others found the oddity of triggers to be amusing, I guess.  I had one during the summer between third and fourth grade, while staring at the ceiling fan.  The fan was on a lackadaisical speed–not too fast, not too slow, just making the rounds so to speak.  I started focusing my eyes on one single blade, following it in circle after circle without moving my head.  It provided a pace, and behind my eyes the brain started matching it, and the heart held onto the bumper like a champ–it all came crashing in.  For some reason I was convinced that there was homework–homework due any minute that I hadn’t completed–even though it was mid-July and I had nothing to do but be a kid and enjoy it.  I ran all around the house, looking for someone to convince me that things were okay.  I was alone.  The only way to get calm was to get the hell away from that fan. 

 I still find that stunt from time to time, my eyes tracking up to a spin on the ceiling, and I have to resist singling out a blade to follow.  It’s just going to make me nervous.

My other early panic attack came from Roy Orbison.  My second step-father was a big fan.  One summer we spent almost a month on a house boat in Dale Hollow, and my step-father had the live video of an Orbison performance.  It’s the one with Springsteen on guitar. Anyway, he put it on the tiny television one afternoon, while my mother napped.  Something about “Only the Lonely” and my mother being unattainable in her REM state drove me crazy.  I had to walk down the dock, away from the scene–I had three stepbrothers at the time and I didn’t feel they had the right to see me cry.  How would I explain such a thing.  As I’m typing this, I just remembered another little panic instance–unrelated to Roy, but related to my mother’s slumber.  Perhaps something about her naps disturbing.  What’s so strange about sleep?  I’m not sure but I can remember feeling as if she was pulling away from me.  The year before Orbison, she was napping at our condo and “More Than Words” came on the radio.  Of all songs, right? 

All my moments of sheer terror were rooted in potential abandonment.  As if I knew one day my mother would leave me.  As if I knew my mother would always be leaving me and that one day she would become a stranger.  Can little kids know that stuff?  Do all children get nabbed by a fear they can’t quite express, aside from emotional response? Where does that fear come from?  

 Well a few people laughed when I told them about these instances of freak out from the past.  They laughed.  I don’t care if they laughed really, I care more about the fact that no one shared anything in return, not a shred.  A bit of me hung out there in the air and rolled around the floor between all of us and so I had to do the polite apologetic stoop n swoop to clear away any remnants of spilling my heart out. Again. Always again.  But that’s how I go.