Supermarket - Bobby Hall Page 0,27
I held the back of her neck. I was suspended in the moment. The fact that she kissed me like it was no big deal? That let me know just how special she was. But even then, in the middle of our kiss, my mind raced. Thinking of where this could go, thinking that I was still not fully over Lola. That I wasn’t ready to move on. Thinking about how Mia had been there for me through this terrifying experience and then . . .
Well, in that very same moment, as my mind raced, as I was in the middle of kissing this beautiful woman . . . I thought about how spot-on the doctor was.
My mind truly was hyperattentive, and I needed to chill the fuck out. Writing this novel was messing with my head.
I mean, even in this moment, I wasn’t fully present. I couldn’t just enjoy something I had fantasized about for weeks.
As Mia pulled back from our kiss with a bite to my bottom lip, I looked into her eyes and had one final thought.
Maybe I should talk to somebody.
CHAPTER 7
DEREALIZATION
And that somebody was . . . Google.
Ted Daniels had no problem giving me a few days off to myself. Mental health days, if you will. Honestly, I thought he was going to be a bitch about it, but he was fairly understanding. In those days I thought a lot about, well, a lot. Essentially the only time I went outside was to walk Bennett. And the biggest thing on my mind, besides my novel? That feeling of not being in my body.
It’s hard to explain, but the next day when I woke up, I didn’t feel quite myself. My mind felt sharp, and yet at the same time it didn’t. It was the same reason I didn’t smoke pot, actually.
You see, when I smoked weed, I felt like there was a little person inside my brain watching me live. Did I really just pick up that glass of water and drink it? Did I really just scratch my arm? Did I really just awkwardly look at the person next to me? Did I really just say “Yeah,” while shaking my head no? What the fuck was I talking about? Who am I? What even is I? You know the kind of feeling, when you are questioning your own existence. When you know you are real but are not exactly convinced. When you feel barely tethered to reality? That’s the reason I didn’t smoke, and that’s the sensation I had been feeling all the time lately. Now I felt it when I was sober.
So as you can imagine, I was alarmed. I wanted to fix myself. I was so sure the doctor was wrong—this wasn’t anxiety. This was something else. This felt different.
I began constantly thinking. Thinking all the time. Worrying about the things I had never really thought about before, you know? Like death. Obviously, death is going to happen; it’s unavoidable. It is what it is. But then it hit me: YO! You’re gonna DIE! One day! It’ll be all OVER! And then I got scared because I didn’t know when I was going to die, and I began to wonder . . . if there was an invisible ticking clock above my head, would I want to know the number it was counting down to? Or how, or why . . . and it gets worse.
When I took Bennett for walks I would see the world entirely differently. Obviously, at that point in my life, I was scared. Flat-out petrified. When I was around other people, I wouldn’t want to be there anymore. I’d be too anxious to speak. I wouldn’t want to give a fake smile as they walked by, didn’t want to try to pretend. I just wanted to stay inside and do . . . nothing. I couldn’t even write. It was different than when I was super depressed. My mind was racing, but my thoughts were stuck in the confines of my head, and they couldn’t get out and be turned into actions. I had more panic attacks. But now I knew what they were. That didn’t necessarily make them any easier to get through, but I could at least intellectually understand that I wasn’t dying. Or was I?
I would force myself to interact with others, even just the slightest interaction. The anxiety I was feeling was not crippling, exactly, but it seemed to hurt more to “white