The first time I had the kind of anxiety attack that makes you feel like you’re going to die, I was standing next to a friend’s car in the parking lot of a combination gas station and Subway. I tossed my sandwich onto the passenger seat and pawed at my chest while trying to catch my breath. What a fucking terrible place to die, I thought, surrounded by cabdrivers shouting unintelligibly into Bluetooth headsets and people in wheelchairs from the nursing home down the street rolling up to buy candy bars and beer.
I assumed I was having a heart attack because I had been in line at Subway behind three of my people, each of whom had a long list of complicated instructions for the sandwich artist tasked with preparing his evening meal. Since we can’t get reparations, we will make it up in toppings. “I want provolone cheese and cucumbers and spinach and lettuce and red onions and tomatoes, olives and banana peppers and giardiniera. I need the chipotle southwest sauce and the ranch, and extra meat, but I don’t want you to charge me for it. Also, let me get the green bell peppers and the herbs and spices, oil and vinegar, too, on the Italian herbs and cheese bread, then I want you to toast that shit but don’t, like, toast it toast it.” It’s nerve-racking—please just let me get my plain scoops of tuna on wheat bread before I sweat through my clothes with anxiety over this transaction not turning out the way you intended because most of those things don’t even go with meatballs but what the fuck do I know God just let me leave.
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It took less than two minutes to get to my place and I spent the entire car ride wondering whether my outfit looked good enough for my ghost to float around in for an eternity. I got off the elevator in my building and stood in place, gasping like I’d just run a marathon, and I felt this weird pain radiating from my left shoulder down my arm and into my hand and the crushing realization that now I was going to die in a hallway that doesn’t get vacuumed often enough before the next Game of Thrones book comes out made me dizzy with rage. After struggling to get the key into the lock, I finally stumbled into my apartment and collapsed on the bed, gulping air and wondering if the paramedics would keep my dying with a footlong tuna sub crammed into my mouth a secret. Seriously, I for real thought I was having a motherfucking heart attack, and while balanced precariously on the precipice of death, my biggest concern wasn’t life insurance or whether my toilet had been bleached or if I had time to write a list of who would get my worthless belongings, it was SHOULD I TAKE A BITE OF THESE TUNA FISHES BEFORE THEY GET SLIMY OR NAH?
I spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about death. Not normal shit, like wondering if heaven is real (no) and if my parents have reunited there to continue that one argument from 1983 over the light bill (probably), but about how and when and what I’m going to be wearing when it finally comes for me. You would think that someone this preoccupied with dying would take better care of her plants and apartment, but nope. I prefer instead to lie awake, petrified that I’m not going to wake up and that whoever finds the stinking meatsuit rotting away in my two-week-old sheets is going to know I was too lazy to wash off my mascara before I went to sleep. Sometimes I feel ready to die. Like when I have to sit through the painful drunken rambling toasts at a wedding, or when a stranger accidentally grazes my skin with his visibly dirty, overgrown fingernails. But other times I think I need to stick around longer, because I haven’t gotten to see Ben Affleck as Batman yet or had a really good pineapple upside-down cake since the ones my mom used to make.
I really do think about dying every day, though. Sometimes I think about what would happen if the electricity in my brain just suddenly shut off, like a light switch. Like what if I was just sitting there watching that same Mike Epps comedy special I always watch (does Netflix track that? Is someone in a windowless Silicon Valley office counting that I have watched Mike Epps: Under Rated & Never Faded 237 real times?!) while unbeknownst to me a giant clot was creeping its way from behind my knee up to my lungs? Somebody from work, pissed off that I’ve missed so many shifts, is gonna find my dead body next to a pile of dried-up baked beans I had been eating in the dark out of the can. In a robe I didn’t even bother to cinch shut because who the fuck is even here. I would be dead in my fancy black robe, tits splayed, tomato sauce congealed in the corners of my mouth as Netflix asks judgmentally, “Are you still watching this?” If you are the person who happens to find me, please at least switch the television to something educational before you call the police.
I turned on Family Feud (if I gotta die I want to be watching something wholesome in case I’m wrong about the heaven thing) and called my number one call-in-an-emergency-especially-if-I-think-I’m-dying friend, Carl, who is a total idiot in most instances, but dude has been a paramedic supervisor for ten-plus years, so I figured I could defer to his judgment. He’d talked me through a couple of bug bites and mysterious rashes previously with mostly satisfactory results. Before I even finished describing my symptoms, he was like, “Call an ambulance.” Slow down, homie. Having an ambulance come to rescue me from the warm embrace of death is my biggest fear other than whether the people who deliver my takeout are secretly judging how many quarts of soup I order every week. I assume that everyone is as simple as I am, and if I were an EMT, while my main objective would be to save a dying person’s life, I would definitely notice the overflowing cat box in the corner of your bathroom as you writhed on the carpet clutching at your throat while trying not to die. Sure, I’d put out the grease fire threatening to engulf your whole kitchen, but only after Firefighter Sam paused for a second to check out the spines on those haphazardly arranged books on your shelf. I might need a suggestion for book club.
I glanced at the pile of Lands’ End catalogs I’d tossed into the laundry basket full of balled-up socks and possibly an empty McDonald’s bag. “Not doing that,” I gasped into the phone, feeling the cold grip of death wrapped around my lungs grow tighter. I texted my sister Carmen, and after she picked me up, I instructed her to please drive me to the good emergency room. I’m not kidding. If I gotta die, that’s fine—it just has to be at a hospital with individual rooms and satellite television. So we left the car with the valet (I told you guys this place was dope) and checked in at the desk, where they pulled my chart up instantly. “It’s not my intestines this time, I am definitely dying,” I wheezed at the receptionist. “Do you still have United HealthCare?” she asked drily, never once glancing away from the computer screen, and I tried to explain with my eyes that I, too, know the agony of manning a desk where I am expected to facilitate care for inconsiderate jerks. I nodded and slid the flimsy plastic card across to her with the hand that wasn’t clutching the invisible knife wounds in my chest. She pointed to a chair in the waiting room and told me to wait for triage.