Why does time sometimes get caught, between caves and coves, on a snag, as if forgotten of its forward purpose, trilling lengthily on the same note, letting select images imprint themselves on the back of our eyelids but not others, when those other images could be just as—if not more—consequential? Time is the worst sailor of all, freeze-framing the most trivial islands, vistas, experiences, and rushing through the rest. His wash of life-images, taken in their totality, is just as ridiculous as the fantasies we tell. Why must he catch gales in the presence of fun, skimming over our favorite contents? The most dreadful visuals, conversely, sail for miles; terrible sensations duplicate themselves over minutes, hours, squeeze themselves into the span of a second, and possess our attentions. How glib!
Lydia was panicked and felt like she was about to die.
Pain rippled through her flesh. Her heart, which she ordinarily heard humming against her breastbone, seemed to have disconnected from the rest of her body; unheard, unfelt, it went on beating, but irregularly, hinting at something—what, what?—terribly wrong. She grit her teeth and closed her eyes, stung by sweat, although she was cold. Terribly cold. The hair on her arms stood, ready, as if on guard. It felt like she was falling, and in a sense she was—falling forward. Only now did the train's speed appear to her as something to be feared; and she feared it, deeply, like she had been shot out of a gun. Time set up camp, lounging callously in the car (by her ear, whispering without noise): this was the moment he decided to possess. The train moved on, at one-hundred fifty miles per hour, but Lydia's watch had decided, "I like it here, now," its hands moving as if there was time to spare, and she felt like she was about to die, just like she had felt hundreds of times prior, last week with the headturn-contingent ghost, the week before with her mom's humdrum to-do list, and the week before for a reason random or totally un-random, but which she was not able to decide; and as she sat, frozen, at the precipice of perceived death, her panic belonged to the random classification of panic, if reasonable by amateur psychoanalysts the world over who would point to the very fact that she was boarded on a journey, an in-between, which most ordinary people fret over, much less poor Lydia, who in all her twenty-two years had not inoculated herself from life's rigid familiarities.
"Problems exist," her dad had said, "to be solved. Run, if you like; take shelter in the generosity of others. But don't think you can do that forever. I'll take culpability, here and there, for spoiling you. At twenty-two years I had a job—a good one—and didn't have parents to pay for college (at sixteen, honestly, I had a job). I can't say I don't feel bad. The lightest proddings send you into a panic. Lyd, look me in the eyes; look—I love you. We love you. And it's because we love you that it hurts to see you not even try, daily doing whatever you're doing, here in your room, holed up, hardly talking to us." She was curled up in bed, head between knees, teardrops silently streaming down her legs; they pooled into small puddles on the sheets, imperceptible to her dad, but mind-numbingly perceptible to her, who dared not speak, dared not reveal to her dad that she was crying. The next minute imploded—containing twenty tightly packed forevers—as her dad, his voice in a loud, pathetic register, asked if she understood; just a yes or no was all he needed; and he would not leave the room until he got acknowledgement that his daughter understood that being part of a family required conscious effort—meaning she had to try; she could not just exploit the fact that he was willing to pay for her school, living, and so on, and expect to provide nothing in return. But she said nothing. The door slammed shut and she trembled, thinking as she would a week later, on the train, that the world was ending; there was no hope for her.
Now she went through all the hollows of this memory, trying to find the key out of her new panic. It took three hours for the world to lighten its load on her, after the door-slam; checking her watch, which read 2:15, she could not bear to wait for Time to prop itself up at 5:15, in Pennsylvania, to ease the load of her panic. But there did not appear to be a choice: in the few hours of memory that spanned between panic and not-panic, she had remained with her head between her knees, curled up in bed; nor were there considerable alterations to her thinking. Simply, one minute, Aeolus changed currents, blew her thinking away—she became fine.
She had run the garbled gamut of therapists and psychiatrists; every night at 9 p.m. she took a pill that, meant to make her less anxious, supplied her generously with terrifying dreams. That is how she learned to fear sleep as she feared wakefulness. The imaginations of day were by no means less intimidating than those nauseating nightmares which tumbled and tripped over images of blood, death, sex—all in ridiculous configurations—leaving her flummoxed for all the following day. Her therapist was named Anna, although there are few needs in professional environments to invoke professionals' names. For that reason, it took a few seconds for it to even occur to her that her therapist had a name. To her, Anna was: "my therapist." The reciprocal was not true. Anna said "Lydia" at a rate of twenty times per hour-long session, as if to prove she knew her name: a mathematician who, after proving their hypothesis, chooses to linger in the glory of the proof, proving it time and time again, with no variation—or with some variation. Sometimes "Lydia" was pronounced softly, other times firmly; and sometimes it was truncated to "Lyd," like her parents' petnamed her. Her first dream in the aspirational sense was to be a mathematician. When she was nine she acquainted herself with game theory, Reinhard Selten, and John Nash (rather: his biographical furnishings), and developed prodigiously on this trajectory until she was thirteen, when she found the better fitting glove of writing, which to her necessitated the exclusion of math in her life. At that age math was to her the antithesis to writing; but as she cleaned her room that morning, looking through adolescent "manuscripts," she thought: maybe I should have taken a more mathematical—that is to say rigorous, structured, and true—approach to writing. Anna did not have much of an understanding of writing, biology, mathematics, or, to Lydia's uncharitable eye, much of anything, but they got along well.
Their last meeting was last week, six days ago, at about this time, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. The session opened with the basic trivialities. "So, how's the week been? Has anything changed?" Anna opened. Lydia, looking down, mumbled, "It's been fine. I've been taking walks outdoors. I'm going to New York next Monday." With characteristic formality, Anna jotted something down on a pad of paper Lydia wished more than anything to see. Then she dissected her speech, one sentence at a time: "Fine, okay. Last week you were 'okay.' Is 'fine' better than 'okay'?" I don't see any distinction between the two. I alternate between them at random when people ask me how I am. In any case. "Sure," Lydia replied. Anna smiled, then continued, "How are the walks? Do you think they're helping?" I think they're helping, but not much. Anthony told me I should run, not walk, but walking is all I have the vigor for. It's always embarrassing walking through my neighborhood, at twenty-two years old, through throngs of kids, seniors, wondering whether I should wave at them. Beatrice—well, the entire group—was surprised that I began taking walks, which filled me with some pride, even if their pretext of surprise was inherently "making fun." Yes, I suppose it's odd to imagine me outdoors, and I feel odd outdoors, encountering only people who I don't think could ever understand me. Lydia cleared her throat, evading eye contact, and said, "I think they're helping." Something else jotted down, "New York is big. My grandmother lives there and my husband used to work in NYC. What're you going to do while you're there?" I'm going to see my online-friends. I've briefly mentioned them. Don't laugh. We're going to visit jazz clubs, eat, explore, and—other things, I guess. I mean, whatever you'd do in New York, I'm probably going to do. I don't suspect I'll be that far off the norm. Lydia's heart grew strained, deciding what course of conversation to take; there was no way to concisely respond, and every response she could think of splintered off into series and series of dialogue trees. But then she settled on, "I'm going to see some friends there."
But none of this changed the fact that Lydia was panicked and felt like she was about to die.
Trembling, she got up, tottered to the vestibule. She locked herself in the bathroom, which had always been a refuge for her. She looked at herself in the mirror: Lydia. There she was. Twenty-two years old, this was her first time crossing state lines; and without her parents driving her! She did not have a license owing to her vehement vehophobia. If many childhood fears develop subtly, this one did not. When she was ten years old, her grandmother had been tasked with driving her to school. It was raining thick and the roads were slippery. Simply: they hydroplaned off the road, into a cluster of trees, and her grandmother was no more. That her grandmother was dead was obvious from one glance. Thus her grandmother’s final gift, premature (it was three days until Lydia’s birthday), were two fears: the fear of driving, the fear of death. She was the only member of her online group that could not drive. Life caught up with her. How ambitious she was, between the ages of nine and thirteen! Mathematics could not be any less intuitive to her anymore. She felt like something in her mind had gone awry, as if she were growing lamer as the years drew on. Tears streaked her reflection’s face, but she could not feel them on her own. She was alone; only she knew the gravity of the endpoint on the vessel in which she was boarded—but would she be able to pull it off? She took her thumb and pointer finger and crushed the pimple, producing its glob of face-fluid, which she addressed with soap and water. Yes, Lydia would be able to pull it off; she would arrive at New York, and then—voila—life would change forever!