My Mom and I arrived in Chicago, made our way to the El. We boarded the Orange Line and settle in for our ride to the north side. We were rested but still tired. Mom would be with us for two nights before she got back on the train for home.
It was Saturday afternoon, we were sitting at the dining room table finishing up some work. I had brewed some loose leaf Ginko and Ginseng green tea earlier that day and been drinking it iced through out the afternoon.
Jeff was in the living room watching the moving There Will Be Blood. I have found that there are movies that should never be listened to. What I mean is they need to be watched because the soundtrack is very disturbing. Several years ago we had taken a long weekend with friends in the Smoky mountains. Sitting on the screened in porch of the house we were staying at, the men had put in Terminator and the women were sitting at a table doing a jig saw puzzle. Unable to see the TV screen we were left with hearing the soundtrack. There were several scenes in which the soundtrack became extremely intense. The volume also seemed to increased tremendously. Thinking that our husbands were aware of how loud it had become we glanced over at them only to find their eyes glued to the set, completely unaware of how the soundtrack was playing a major part in their captivation. There Will Be Blood had some of those same moments.
At one point I stood up from the table and headed to the kitchen. I was tense, bothered by the noise from the other room and clearly overdosed on the green tea. As I stepped inside the kitchen door the back door leading to the porch was to my left. On the counter to my right sat a set of kitchen knives. As I looked at the back door I was overcome with a sense of fear. “If you go out there you will jump off the porch” was what I heard in my head. As I turned to look the other way my eyes stopped at the knives; “If you pick those up you will cut yourself”. I could not breath. Fear fulled every part of me. I did not want to say anything to Jeff or my mom, it scared the shit out of me, what would it do to them? Not knowing what to do I excused myself and made my way to the bedroom and laid down.
This was the beginning of several months of panic attaches. In all my effort not to rush through the year, to feel the emotions of each major change that was occurring, I had not taken into account the emotional and physical effects of so many life changing events happening so close together. I had also not allowed myself to feel the fear that was obvious boiling inside of me of the pending move ahead of us. The fear of being so far away, alone in a strange place, disconnected from the world I knew. Without realizing it, I was beginning to feel trapped.