Alone

The other night I was driving home from a friends house at almost 11PM. I had been feeling weird--kinda... off--before I left, and I wasn't really looking forward to my 40-minute drive. Now, I had noticed that my tires were looking a little low on air, but I just hadn't gotten around to putting air in (I know, bad car owner, bad). As I was driving, I kept feeling like something was wrong. Somehow the idea got stuck in my head, not that I could get a flat tire, but that I most certainly would get on on my way home tonight. So the whole time I'm driving, I felt this anxiety closing in on me, and a voice in my head saying over and over, "You're gonna get a flat tire! You're gonna get a flat tire!" Then, out there on the freeway, I heard a thump and the smell of burning rubber quickly filled my nostrils. My hands shaking on the steering wheel, I pulled onto the shoulder. This was a busy freeway, with lots of traffic and virtually no streetlights. I carefully got out of the car and checked my tires. All four perfectly intact. At this point I was near tears, and I climbed back into my car, and carefully merged back onto the road.

You would think that nagging voice and anxiety would have gone away, right? Wrong. The anxiety turned into a thick wool turtleneck that was somehow shrinking in on my as the voice changed it's persistent screaming inside my head: "What if you had a flat tire? You would be stuck out here, in the middle of nowhere. There's no one you could call, everyone's busy at work or too far away and would probably say they couldn't come out to help. You'd be stuck alone. Alone. Alone." By this time, I was grateful that my apartment was less than 5 miles away. When I pulled into my parking spot, my hands were shaking, I was choking on dry sobs, and the chant in my head had turned into just one word: "ALONE. ALONE. ALONE."

I think it was a panic attack that shook me that night. But since that night, that word has been haunting me. Loneliness is not unfamiliar to me, in fact it had been my constant companion for years. But since moving into an apartment by myself again a few months ago, I hadn't felt that loneliness. These past few months, I felt satisfied with how my life was. Maybe not completely happy, but I really had no reason to complain. I kept holding my breath, those first few weeks, to see if the loneliness would come settle around me again, but every morning, I was pleased when it didn't. Now, all of a sudden, it came back into my life out of nowhere like a slap in the face. For the past few days, that word, that disgusting, hateful word has taken up residence in my mind, coming out and taking over, usually when my defenses are down as I try to fall asleep (much like right now). When it comes, it's like my body is a plane of glass, and someone just very gently hammers a small nail smack in the middle--where the heart is--and as the cracks slowly spread a vacuum sucks the tiny shards into oblivion, from the inside out. And I just wait for sleep to mercifully pull me into unconsciousness, but not before that empty, hollow feeling settles deep in my bones.

I'm hoping it's just a phase. A very short phase.