Bringing my mug to my lips, I let the warm autumnal aromas steady my breath.Hi brain, if you could not hyper-fixate on Emy’s last sentence, that would be great. We have enough to panic about today. Okay?
Emy is sick of my pain. Notme.
I repeat the reassurance again because, despite my pleas, my brain’s already blurred the lines between my pain and me. We’ve been one for as long as I can remember.
“Yeah, I’ll try to speak up. Promise.” Which is a lie because I know myself well enough to be certain I’m going to melt the minute I’m in that office. In general, assertiveness is difficult for me, but at the doctor’s office? With my feet hitched in the stirrups and all of me out on display? Too vulnerable. Too impossible. Not going to happen.
“Hey, maybe we try to go out this weekend? Take your mind off things and get out of the books for a second,” Emy says, trying to be helpful. Unfortunately, her request only piles on top of my mountain of anxiety. Everything that’s gone wrong already this morning tumbles down in an avalanche.
After years of keeping my feelings buried for Jack, one—far too alluring—picture is threatening to unearth everything.
I’m behind on planning for a fair that makes up over seventy percent of the museum’s income for the year.
Lydia and Wickham eloped.
Which is only supposed to happen fictionally!
And I have a doctor’s appointment in a few hours, and the odds of being dismissed for the twenty-millionth time are infinitely higher than coming away with answers.
“Uhm. Yeah, sure. We can go out.” Or at least I’ll try. Unfortunately, my obsession with reading isn’t a choice. It’s the result of my far too dramatic body gasping its dying breath whenever it comes time to socialize with others.
Again, another prick of anxiety bypasses the calming comfort of my warm mug of coffee and nettles its way into my chest.
The audacity of it all. Coffee should cure everything.
But seriously. What happens when Emy grows sick of my severe failings as a human?
Everyone has their limits. My parental figures certainly did. My father left my mother, brother, and me shortly after my birth. Then came my mother’s turn. It was too hard for her to pursue new romantic relationships with children, so we were left in the care of our grandmother, Memere, and all of our great-tantes and oncles, when I was only four years old.
There’s no way my “sick with nothing to show for it” disposition lately is fun to be around.
But Emy’s a forever friend, right? That’s what we promised each other in the third grade. The year we both learned during a family tree assignment that we had memeres who made the best baked beans and meat pies and spoke to us in a mix of French and English.
Panic seizes my lungs as I breathe through the escalating thoughts.
Directing my mind to the world around me, I try to calm the rapid-fire worries spiraling inside. In the crook of a shedding maple, a dew-spotted spiderweb glistens in the morning sun. The tips of the tree set ablaze in an autumnal flame of crimson red and blood orange leaves. The song of a black-capped chickadee greets the new day on the perch of a nearby birch. Queen’s Anne Lace edges the banks of the pond.
Everything is fine.
“Hey.” Emy clasps my hand. Her eyes land softly on my face and wrap around me in a warm mocha embrace. “It’s going to be okay. They’re going to figure this out. I promise you. It’s not in your head.”
I nod and hope against all hopes that maybe this time, Emy is right. Even if ten years of experience with these appointments suggests otherwise.
ChapterTwo
Aulie Desfleurs
Play:Keep Breathing by Ingrid Michaelson
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a doctor in possession of the wealth of knowledge provided from a single seminar class twelve years ago will consider themself an infallible expert regarding the hellish reproductive organs housed within their fragile, unstable, constipated patient.
Laying on the exam table, I recite the satirical line of Jane Austen Emy left on my car a few years ago to combat my anxiety. Reading the note before my appointment started as a calming ritual for me, until three years later and far too many doctor’s appointments, the note is tattered and tear stained. Luckily, I committed it to memory. Now, I mentally recite it when the appointment is going south and I need something else to focus on.
Today, I’m on recitation number nine.
Eleven is the record.
“Have you tried using a vibrator?” Two gray caterpillars in serious need of grooming raise, meeting what brief eye contact I can muster in this position. Conversations are never a good idea while your feet are high in stirrups.
