“Relax, Koti. Can this wait? I have a meeting in an hour and I need to concentrate. I’ll call you back.”
Everyone close to me in New York, even the best of my friends never could grasp the reality of the hell I went through just to be present for them. Ginger, my friend since grade school, had dismissed my anxiety the way my mother had. Anger surfaced every time I thought about the day I left New York and the last time I’d reached out to her. She’d answered the phone while entertaining a few of our mutual friends and before I could get a word out, I heard her excuse for taking my phone call. “It’s Koti, she’s having one of her episodes.” I hadn’t spoken to her since. And I probably never would again. So much of my life I’d left behind, the day I boarded that plane. Everything. I’d left everything. And though it had taken me some time to open up to Jasmine, I didn’t have to force the words out for Ian.
I’d watched him implode when he knew I was his audience. His breakdown, though not the same as mine, had been just as unavoidable. We were both matches on an island of fire and couldn’t be helped. For us, our ashes were all there was left to work with. But I wanted him to know there was something to be said for those ashes.
“My parents started me early. I went to the best schools, got the grades, had the friends, the life everybody wants. I really can’t complain. It all worked out the way it was supposed to, mostly, but when it didn’t that’s when the trouble started.”
Ian sat quietly perched on the rock and waited.
“I had my first panic attack when I was fourteen. I didn’t know what was happening. And it was for the dumbest reason.”
“Which was?”
“I couldn’t get a stain out of my skirt.”
Ian studied me briefly before his eyes drifted back to the sea. A spray of water pooled between us and covered our feet. I moved to stand in front of him. If he wanted to know my answers, I wanted his attention. He didn’t hesitate, his gaze landed squarely on mine. Even in the dimly starlit sky, I could see the storm in his eyes. If my story were only a mild distraction, I would give it to him. The odd part is that I wanted to tell him.
He spoke low erasing my doubts. “Tell me. I want to know.”
“The first time it happened, I blamed it on PMS, but they just kept coming. My mother was completely intolerant of my ‘weakness’. And I felt the expectation every day, her expectation. She set the bar so high, it began to choke me. It was both physical and mental, I just couldn’t get to her kind of normal. But, oh, how I faked it, or tried to. I held it inside even though every day I struggled. I’d watch my friends and their reactions to certain situations and I would do my best to imitate, and then I would find a bathroom or a place to hide and have my freak out. There was no end to it. I just worked through it, all day every day, but worked as in an act of labor, I exhausted myself. I passed out a lot. I hid a lot, I faked illness, so I could hide and it would buy me just a few blissful days alone and away from the world. When I missed so much school, to the point of my parents being summoned by the headmaster, my father suggested therapy. My mother grudgingly agreed after years of telling me it was all in my head.”
Soaked from my fall, I crossed my arms and gripped the tops of my shoulders as I shivered in the breeze, feeling heavy with my confession.
“My psychiatrist used to tell me to fold my fears into fourths. To mentally write down what I was afraid of and memorize and recognize it for what it was and then treat it like a piece of paper and fold it in half and then fourths and so on until it was so small I could put it in my pocket and forget about it.”
“Your pockets overflowed,” he said slowly as he picked up the hem of my skirt and rubbed it between his fingers.
I nodded. “I tried everything. I counted. I took the meds. I did the breathing exercises. All of it.”
“Nothing worked?”
“No, because despite my mother’s permission to let me get help, her expectations outweighed my progress. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t be the daughter she expected, and anxiety-ridden, so I scrambled, and I hid it the best I could. I pretended the medication helped, for her, for my father and eventually convinced myself that I was capable of handling it.”
I moved to sit next to him but he caged me between his legs. “Go on.”
“So… then…” Ian kept busy dusting the sand off the bottom of my dress. I felt the low burning fire stir up again with the accidental brush of his fingers along my thigh.
“So, I faked my way through high school and college, feigning progress up until the time I got my job.”
He dropped the dress and wiped the sand on his shorts. “What did you do?”
“Real estate. Biggest firm in New York. I was one of their best brokers.”
“That’s ludicrous. How did you manage that stress?”
“Sometimes I think I purposefully put myself into that mess to self-destruct.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know. Probably. I was working so hard and to my own detriment, I didn’t stop for anything. My parents were so proud while inside I was screaming. My health got so bad. It was all. So. Bad. I started drinking heavily and went from having an attack every few weeks to daily. I spent years conditioning myself to stop listening to my body, and in a matter of days all my fears came to light and I mean all of them. Everything was gone, every single damn thing I’d worked for since I was in grade-school up to that point vanished.”
“What happened?”
“I was in the midst of setting up one of the biggest real estate deals in New York. I was showing a property to a slew of investors. It was a billion-dollar deal. My job was to sell a set of high-rise buildings that were going to be turned into high-value condos, posh, exclusive, that sort of thing. I worked on it for a year. The day before I was set to pitch I was doing a walk-through of one of the buildings and I got attacked by a squatter.” I shivered at the thought of that day. “He pulled a knife on me.”
“Jesus.”
“I barely made it out of there with my life and that’s no exaggeration. One of my associates walked in and that’s what saved me. But that incident opened up a whole different can of worms.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say, I’ve done more research on the hereafter than most theologists.”
“Fear of death?”
“Yes.”
Ian grabbed my hand and I let him hold it between his.
“A majority of my anxiety comes from lack of control. I have to have things a certain way, not so much OCD but to the point where I know what will happen in my every day. I’m not a fan of surprises. Routine is crucial to me, I’d never experienced anything like I did that day. And as you can imagine the realization about death, well let’s save that conversation for a rainy day or never.”
I was shaking as I remembered the man on the beach chair that morning. Ian read my thoughts.
“Today, you had a horrible attack.” It was a statement. “And you joked about it. That’s what you do with everyone else?”
Tears sprang to my eyes. “Yes.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“You couldn’t have. It’s not your place.”
“My job as much as it is yours, right?”
He turned my palm up and slowly brought it to his lips, kissing it softly. A small moan escaped me, and I wasn’t sure if he heard it.
“What happened? With the deal?” He rested my hand on his shoulder as if it was the most natural thing. I was itching to run my fingers through his hair. My breaths came out faster, his subtle seduction was wrecking my train of thought.