Letters to Darcy: An LGBTQ+ Novella

December 11, 2014:

December 11, 2014:

I wake to an odd feeling that the bed, (no) the room, (no) the world is quaking with an intensity, indescribable. An earthquake. My chest tightens. My hands shape themselves into a tightly woven knot. My heart strikes my chest—beats sharply against my rapidly undulating ribcage. I heave—gasping for air. The room's not safe. This shoddy, uncomfortable mattress is. Not. Safe. I need to get to safety. But where? There's nowhere to hide in this damn one-room rental. One-room. That's not entirely true. The bathroom. Should I hide in the bathroom?

I strain, attempting to haul my body up, but remain unmoved. Why can't I move? I try again but am met with the same result. With every ounce of willpower, I hoist and heft. I push—force my body to submit to the commands of my mind, to no avail. By now, I'm panicking more than I ever have. Panic, anxiety—I've felt it all before: the crying, the inability to breathe, though unbearable, they've never been quite as terrifying as the, seeming, disconnect of my brain from my body.

Acceptance creeps into my mind. And as it does, so does oxygen creep into my lungs. I've pressed and pressed and failed to command myself over and over. But suddenly, without much effort, I can my fingers relax. The seams sewing them together, unravel. I've lost track of time. Just as seconds could have passed, so could minutes or hours. The idea of feeling them, at all, is a foreign concept.

As the blood cells in my body reform their assembly line and proceed with delivering themselves to their destinations, I find the strength to move building in my body.

My eyes dart around the room, searching—hunting for their prey: a small rectangular box, crafted from metal and glass. As my outstretched arm grasps my phone, I rush to my contacts, panicking. Panicking. And just before I press my fingers against the grey silhouette of a landline to call my mother, I stop myself and I breathe. I breathe the first, honest, heart-healing breath I allow myself to take. Now, suddenly, I see. The room is unstirred. Even the recently chipped, dollar store wine glass, is sat on the edge of the nightstand, still, as if time, itself, had been frozen.

Realization dawns on me. Although my heart rate is high and rapid, my body seems to be rested. True, my mind has been alert, but my body's been still. Sleep paralysis.

My sight line drifts up toward the upper-left corner of the screen. It's 8:26 a.m. My heart begins to settle as the world around me comes into focus. Breathing, though easier, is still a conscious effort.

I lurch from my bed, pull on my shoes—a ragged pair of orange Converse—and, for the first time in days, I escape the confines of my temporary bedroom.

The thick, metallic air fills my lungs as the unmistakable fumes of the New York atmosphere assault my senses. Small, humid clouds of breath escape my mouth and mix with pollution emitting from the tailpipes of the motionless vehicles, sitting still in the city's inevitable traffic in the frigid autumnal air. The city's soundscape is a cacophony of nonsensical clamor.

Many browning leaves—lifelessly coating the sidewalk—crunch beneath the weight of my person. A homeless man calls out to me as I walk by. At this, I find that averting my gaze has become second nature during my short time spent in the city. His words are drowned out by the sound of Mariana's Trench blasting in my AirPods—"There's no yellow bricks to follow back and run from that disaster". Still, I didn't need to hear him to know what was being said.

A tiny, black speck scurries past my feet and into a nearby storm drain. A cockroach. Beyond all prior beliefs, I've nearly grown accustomed to them. As the bug disappears into the channel, an image of it commandeering a mysterious something, flowing with the water and sailing it into the Hudson comes to mind—the start of an adventure. Probably, it was just five feet away, ingesting the feces of a fictitious New York sewer alligator, but I don't care. I often find myself indulging in the curious happenings that occur when a creature is just out of sight of the prying, human gaze. Be it a Pigeon, a squirrel, a rat, or a cockroach, I often find myself dreaming up the daring adventures that transpire in the shadows.