You Call it “Irrational Fear” but For me the Terror is Real
Sometimes, living everyday life is traumatic
The only item of clothing that wasn’t completely drenched in the pissing down rain was the swimsuit top I had bought with the purpose of wearing it as a bra.
My nice tank top, the one I got on sale at Hot Topic with Stitch drinking boba tea on it, was clinging to me in a most uncomfortable and unflattering way.
My obnoxious, stretchy, tie dye shorts that are normally comfortable but supposedly something that I as a fat woman shouldn’t wear, were also saturated.
I can’t use umbrellas, I need both hands to use my walker so that I don’t fall over, and so I don’t waste money and energy carrying them. Not that an umbrella would have done very much.
I had been in the Goodwill less than an hour. It had not been raining when I went in, but now it was raining so hard that I was rushing to my car as best I could seeing as I was wearing slides and using my walker, to try and move it because the water was almost to the bottom of the front drivers side door.
I didn’t have much time. I knew it might even be too late.
I had rushed out as soon as I realized the parking lot was flooding. The moment when I looked out and thought my car was completely flooded and therefore destroyed was a moment of deep and sinking hopelessness.
I was already struggling with depression, the lonely kind which is the worst. I had been trying to act fine for more than a week already, but this was like a punch to my stomach, and I wanted to throw up.
It was already a shitty day, and now as I looked in defeat at my car, the only car I had, I was crushed. I had begun to cry even before I got all the way to the car. I could tell the water was pretty deep.
The water came to about 3/4 of the way up my calves, right above the top of my tattoo of a Saint Benedict medal. I wasn’t thinking of that tattoo, or the crucifix tattoo on my left arm.
I wasn’t even thinking about the stainless steel and enamel, blue miraculous medal on a stainless steel ball chain around my neck at all when I saw the water. I just felt fear and grief.
I had lost or was losing something important, my only way of transportation. I’ve had two good cars in my life, the rest have been shit. Both of the good ones have been Toyotas.
I bought my first car in 2002, when I was seventeen. It was a 1977 Toyota Corolla, the mustard-puke paint job in pristine condition, as was the fake leather upholstery.
It had the granny sunshade flap above the windshield. I had struggled to remember to use the choke, but it was an excellent car.
The city council had dropped a piece of machinery on it and scratched and dented it, but because I was legally parked on the street in front of my own apartment, the council had to pay to restore it to its original condition.
While I was crusing around where I lived in Australia in 2002 with my Corolla, someone else was driving around somewhere in the USA in a black, deluxe model, 2002 Toyota Avalon, which is the car I drive today, twenty years later, in America.
I didn’t want to lose my car, much less such a good car, but I was out of time. I threw my walker in the trunk and struggled to the door and climbed in the car.
I turned the key, and the car turned on. I put it into reverse to attempt to get it out of the water and…nothing…it wouldn’t move.
I had no idea what I was going to do, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stay sitting in a car that was still flooding.
I got my walker back out of the trunk, returned to the Goodwill, crying my eyes out. I figured the store was at least dry and I could sit on my walker and figure out what to do next.
I remember someone asking me if I was okay when I came in the door, and I’m not sure exactly what I said, but a woman came over to talk to me. I said it was my only car, that I couldn’t afford to lose it, and that it was flooding in the parking lot.
There was a man waiting in line to check out, and he came and asked me for the keys to see if he could move it. I handed the keys over, pointed out which car was mine, and he went to see what he could do.
He too got the car started, and put it in reverse, and it worked for him. He pulled it up in front of the door like it was nothing. I was elated, but still shaking.
The man let me thank him and hug him, and then he hurried back inside. I got into my car, drove back the way I’d come.
I got to the drawbridge, and it was still pissing down rain.
I’m afraid of bridges, for the same reason I wouldn’t stay in my my flooding car, because I’m terrified of the idea of death via drowning in a sinking vehicle full of water.
I was driving over the steel grate, and the breeze was blowing pretty hard. My car shook some. I focused my breathing, so that I could work through the trauma of driving over that bridge in the rain.
People laugh and tell me that it’s an irrational fear, and for them that’s true, but my terror is real.
I practice memento mori as a meditation, and I speak to the dead. It’s not death itself that scares me.
I’ve been terrified of it ever since I was old enough to know what fear was. It’s something deep and primal.
I got home eventually, took off my wet clothes, had a shower, sat down. I still have the sick feeling in my stomach. I didn’t drown in a car full of water today, but what about next time?
