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“That I can get home.”
She’s silent. Thoughtful. “You don’t like being outside?”
I wish it were that simple. It’s not just open fields or open water that tear panic loose from its frame and burn down the gallery. It’s everywhere I might be prevented from returning to relative safety. My car can act as a proxy for the house for limited amounts of time, but I don’t spend the night anywhere else. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary.
My chest hurts like a heart attack.
Better to drown. Then you’d be sure.
The suggestion seems like a good one at moments like this. The best one. I do not tell Daphne that she’s the only thing keeping me from it. The tide is at its peak. So much pressure at my ears that my head might explode. Compressed lungs. Compressed brain.
“Does this always happen when you go outside?” Her brow furrows with deeper worry.
“No.”
“That time at the gallery—”
“I could get home.” It’s starting to show in my voice. Daphne doesn’t flinch, and I understand, finally, what she’s asking. “This didn’t happen when I saw you. I could get home.”
The words echo against each other until they carve themselves into the rock. Haphazard streaks of paint. I could get home. Can’t now. Can’t get home. Can’t get out. Locked in from the outside but the door will open, it will, and then I’ll be better off dead, much better off, the water would make it easy, a few painful breaths and then nothing nothing nothing—
“What does it feel like?”
The question halts, rather abruptly, the train wreck of my thoughts. “What?”
“Being away.” Daphne swallows. It’s just like her to ask this. She’s taken a step back. Become the artist. An artist has to observe. She has to know before she can engage with the subject. This is the least comfortable I’ve ever been. “What does it feel like?”
Like having my eyes gouged out. Like having all the air and beauty sucked from the world. Like being trapped in a closet and forced outside after. Narrow walls and open sky.
“Like dying.” It sounds dramatic. Fucking ridiculous. “It feels like dying.”
My chest constricts again. This might actually be a heart attack. I’d be grateful if it were over, but I don’t want to die in front of Daphne. That would hurt her.
“Like dying from cold?”
The shaking intensifies. This is the most mortifying, most unstoppable part of the whole process. I have no control over it or anything else. “Like suffocating or having my lungs explode.”
Both can be true, moment to moment. My chest won’t accept the air or it’s about to burst. What Daphne doesn’t know is that this is the easy part. When it closes in like darkness—that’s when things become more difficult.
I try to force it away by picturing myself as art. A flattened man in a cave.
Impossible. The world can’t be contained in a frame this size. Only small things. Smaller canvases. Daphne’s canvases don’t approach the size of these attacks. Nothing ever will. There’s only the act of living through it.
“What does it look like?” This quiet, murmured question guts me. I hate this about Daphne Morelli, and I love it. That she can see under my skin this way. I didn’t want to show her this. Perhaps I could never stop her. “In your mind.”
Because of course it does have a corresponding visual. Of fucking course it does.
“Bright.” Searing, almost, in its brightness. “Tall buildings. A towering sky. Black pressing—pressing—” Can’t get my breath. “Pressing in at the edges. If you’ve ever seen light—” I try to show her the shape with my hand. “Through a closed door. I can’t make this into anything else. It’s like black oil over canvas.”
It traps me inside myself, just like that closet.
“You look like you need a blanket.”
My bones are going to come out of my skin. They’re going to rupture and force themselves through muscle. Most of all, I hate the contradictory demands of the panic. I need a smaller space and a bigger one. Smaller out here, bigger at home. I had to work so hard to tolerate my own house, to be able to walk fifteen blocks. And now I’m in this cave.
“I can’t stop it, Daphne,” I admit. “You shouldn’t watch.”
Because who would want to? I know how this seems. I know how pathetic it is.
