It happened again..

It happened again..

Ironically, just before a flight I took a million times.

I felt it creeping. I couldn’t stop it.

It was a large wave, a heavy one. I watched as it crashed in my head.

Everything around me constricted, my mind went into a spin.. I was locked into this body of mine — claustrophobic in my body, at the airport. Trapped. All sense and order was replaced with irrational chaos and whirlpool. I couldn’t breath.

I thought it was from the heat exhaustion I suffered a few days ago, but there was no use to make reason out of the mess I was in. It was happening again: the thing I feared for years. The anxiety crippled me in my seat in front of the gate.

I took deep breaths. I ran around. I tried to find ways to escape the airport. I tried to tell someone that I couldn’t fly. I rang my mother. I prayed. I cursed the devil. I got a pill from the pharmacy.

I watched hopelessly as my heart ran everywhere except in my body, as my mind wandered everywhere except my head. My thoughts got darker and my sense got cloudier.

“It’s one small step for man,” I told my self, “but one large step for mankind” I half-joked to myself, as I took a step after another towards the airplane, taking off towards the mundane flight home. I was jealous of the passengers beside me unbeknownst to the world war happening inside my head.

I thought that speaking out to someone about it was going to help me overcome the waves. I told the flight attendant: He looked at my seat number and told me that there is nothing to fear, that I’m on the safest seat in the airplane. I smiled, as I didn’t know how to explain that I had no fear of flying, I was actually afraid of “nothing”.

I sat on my seat as I watched the buildings and roads got smaller, I imagined the waves getting smaller.. One by one.

•••

The waves surprised me after years of calm. Though I’m now learning we aren’t supposed to fight the waves.

We need understand them.

Let them wash over us.

And float.

Until the seas are calm again.

🌊