What happened to me happened on an ordinary day. I coughed, and something invisible tore, and that is a more ordinary story than a story about how all the millions of things that needed to go right in order for my body to exist as a functioning, healthy body moving through the world unimpeded and unimperiled did go right and everything was fine.
I don’t know which story is more comforting: the story of a day when I imagined nothing bad or remarkable happening, or the story of a day when the bad thing that happened was, in the scheme of things, unremarkable. Inevitable. A simple fact in the midst of thousands of other facts that made up the story of that day, or any day before, or any day that might follow.
The content of my night terrors seemed like such obvious metaphors, they were barely even metaphors. They were direct statements from my brain, saying You did this, this calamity is your fault. It seemed barely worth interrogating, for what other meaning could it hold besides the one so overtly presented? And yet changing the story for myself didn’t fully banish them; I still found myself waking up mid-apocalypse, playing out the same scenario. It seemed, like with Emi and her toddler grief, there was some kind of fundamental loss my sleeping self was struggling to process, something I was searching for outside of the phantom medication or gas mask or prepared plan that perpetually eluded me in my dreams.
Perhaps it was reassurance that I craved, I reasoned, some sort of logical refutation of the worries of unpreparedness that characterized my night terrors. Perhaps the story I needed involved pointing out to myself the things I had done to mitigate the real-life calamities of divorce and illness, perhaps that would be enough to soothe the primal me that was tormented in the night. And so I tried reassuring myself before going to sleep, speaking to myself out loud, explicitly reminding myself: You did everything you could, you prepared for everything, there’s nothing you left undone or unattended to, you’ve done everything you needed to do. Sometimes it would be a general benediction; other times I would run down a list of concrete actions I had taken, or things I had done.
This helped, but, again, not enough.
One night, going through my litany of reassuring self-talk, trying to figure out what part of the story I was missing, I stopped for a moment and just lay in bed, listening to the sounds around me, feeling my breath, feeling the way it felt to be in my body. I heard cars going by, buses in the distance, the muffled conversation of people walking past my house on their way to a restaurant or bar or home, the sounds of the city at night. It was the soundscape of the past year or so of my life, lying in this bed. For some reason, recognizing this moved me, and I felt myself beginning to tear up. These ordinary sounds were the soundtrack of my own helplessness. Stuck in bed, unable to get up without pain, unable to stop this thing happening inside my own body, or fix this thing that was somehow broken; this was the background sound of hopelessness, of the frustration of feeling responsible for what was happening and yet utterly incapable of fixing it. Somehow it made sense to me that this was connected to the night terrors, this fear and horror and blame, and I had the sudden notion that what I needed in this moment was not my nighttime list of reassurances that I’d done everything I could do, not a note to myself reminding me what was real, not a soundtrack of relaxing delta waves.
I’d begun telling myself a better story, but what I needed wasn’t just a different narrative. What I needed was the thing I found when retelling the story of my marriage. What I needed was compassion.
What I needed was forgiveness.
Not me telling myself: You did everything you could.
But instead, me realizing: There’s nothing you could have done.
Who would expect the end of the world to strike in the dead of night, vines descending from the ceiling to strangle you, expert assassins with deadly lasers to slice through your walls, poison gas to seep in through your vents, a chemical attack requiring protective medicine or at least an antidote?
No one, because those things are ridiculous. Un-anticipatable. Unrealistic. Unlikely outside of a nonsensical, very bad disaster movie. No one could prepare for those scenarios, or, better yet, prevent them, because they are virtually impossible.
And who would expect that coughing due to an illness, a tickle in your throat, swallowing the wind, or just because you have to cough would cause a tear in the fabric of your reality? Who
