On days like this, it’s better to wear light clothing, and throw on a hooded windbreaker. The rain outside is just a drizzle, so it’s comfortably cool. Pay no attention to the hydraulic hiss of the windshield wipers, or you won’t be able to help hearing them through the quiet parts of every song. Window seats are prime. There are fewer distractions from people walking down the aisle.

The 95 goes from one end of the city to the other, straight through the heart of Ottawa. Every stop is a memory. Old haunts. Past lives.

Here was your first apartment. Sometimes you’d find Christie waiting for you here on the benches between classes. How long ago those days seem, how immature and relatively innocent. The next two stops are on the edge of the university campus, four years of scattered truancy. Two stops later is where you use to buy a medium caramel corretto every morning after an exhausting night with Louise. Your old government office is another two on. The concrete building looks so foreign now, and you wonder if the same people are still inside. Another few stops is your last apartment, before buying the house, the end of bus rides home every day.

Music never meant so much.

You pass by construction sites, finished buildings, see the evolution of the city.

Six years of experience, six years of shifting, ever-changing anima.

Six years passed.

Six years lived.

Six years grown.

Worry does not empty tomorrow of sorrow — it empties today of strength.

—Corrie ten Boom

It started with a single panic attack, at work, in the middle of the day.

Heart racing, difficulty breathing, paralyzing terror, fear that I was about to die.

If you’ve ever had a bad trip off psilocybe, or magic mushrooms, the effects are very similar. Not that I’ve ever had a good one. Half an hour into ingestion, I start to feel nauseated. At the back of my head there’s a creeping sense that something is wrong. My hands start to tremble, my mind feels like it’s shuddering. Eventually, there’s a complete uneasiness in the body, both physically and mentally. Around that time, the body reacts quickly to rid the stomach of whatever is causing these symptoms, and violently ejects them in the form of vomiting. Stems and caps come out as dark brown flecks, and you wonder how eating something so small thing can make you feel so terrible.

It comes without warning, without obvious reason. All you want is to end the attack. To crawl into a corner and hide. To tear off your strangling clothes. To die.

Afterward, you’re not wondering what you’re going to listen to on the way home, or how to get the attention of that cutie in the porcelain department, or when you’ll have time to go buy more shampoo. All you’re thinking about is when the next one will happen. All you’re left with is a bunch of questions and a sense of instability. I have my suspicions, but I’ve chosen not to write about them until I’m certain, something which I believe will come in time. There’s no simple diagnosis, no easy answer.

Recently, scientists have discovered that the word “wheeze” can activate asthma attacks in asthmatics. The mind triggers an associated emotional response, and the body manifests the reaction. It’s the same after a panic attack. Sometimes, people with panic disorder can bring on an attack just worrying or thinking too much about it.

Not that I have a disorder. The fear of an attack isn’t detrimental enough to stunt me socially, and doesn’t prevent me from functioning as what the DSM IV would consider “normal”. It was only a single episode, but habit of constant self-evaluation means that the threat of it happening again is always there. It’s in the back of my mind whether I’m at work, or playing games, or cooking dinner. Every minute of every day becomes a struggle not to think about it. And when you know you feel like dying during an attack, you start to wonder whether it’s worth living at all.

People face this question when they’re diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Told that they have only have a few years left, they live more in those numbered days than they do in their entire lives until then.

They awaken.

The Awakening Series

1. Introduction
2. Cause
3. The Reborn Dreamer

It’s Friday, and Hurricane Katrina, more than 2000 kilometres away, has thrown cold winds and scattered showers over parts of Southern Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick. As I step outside to grill something on the barbeque, the cats quickly run to the screen door. They temporarily forget that they’re enemies, that they normally can’t walk past each other without a swipe or a hiss, and sit side-by-side to carefully smell the damp wind coming through.

People name hurricanes after their former lovers. The headlines are always the same:

After cheating with co-worker, Hurricane Camille leaves 250 dead from Louisiana to Virginia

$400 million dollars in damage and 1145 fatalities as Hurricane Gordon weaves through the Caribbean and takes half my CD collection with him before disappearing in his Camaro.

The cats know that something has happened. They can tell that this weather is coming from somewhere else, and that many have been affected, the way some dogs know that their owners are dating the wrong people and won’t stop defending them with their lips drawn back in a snarl.

But all the cats can do is sit and sniff.

I have an extremely difficult time dealing with people who choose to complain about something and do nothing about it. These are the people who gripe about the jobs that feed them, decry the relationships they’re too scared to leave, pine for better lives when a better life is only a few steps away. Religious doctrines of predestination aside, as humans we’re the masters of our fate. We control what happens, because we have the responsibility — the response ability — to make change happen.

And when life hands you lemons, make lemonade, try to find a guy whose life has given him vodka, and have a party.

Her unwitting nickname in high school was Fudd (as in Elmer), because her “r”s came out as babyish “w”s.

This was partially due to the fact that she would imitate her older brother in admiration during childhood, after he developed his own impediment from an orofacial sports injury. The other, and much more severe, aspect of her impediment was a random and sudden inability to speak. No stutter, no slur.

As her speech therapist explained, it was a short-circuit in the brain, causing her to believe that a sentence was finished when she was only half-way through saying it. The only problem was that she would get stuck on a word. On good days she simply couldn’t repeat it, on bad days she couldn’t speak at all. Most people thought it was brought on by a rather traumatic series of events brought on by her supposed friends in high school. The wascals.

I always found it endearing, but she never cared for it. One of the tricks she used to get by was to take her time in saying a word. E-nun-ci-ate. It was like massaging the tension from a muscle, and slowly, she would be able to speak again. Another trick was to imagine being in a comfort zone, which was her room, to relax when she was flustered.

I’ve always found that girls share some intrinsic bond with their rooms. It’s almost as if they’re following an evolutionary nesting instinct, and their rooms become their homes. A place to grow and be safe. Along with the carefully lined-up books and the random pieces of jewellery, the hidden cache of photos and the purposefully placed candles (some of which must never be lit), are the characteristic quirks.

In time, Christie’s comfort zone became the walk-in-closet of my room. She was old enough to make love, but simultaneously too young to stay overnight, so we would spend most of our time in there, the place where we could reach out and feel the walls around us, confined to the intimacy of the enclosure. We spread out the blanket, lit the candles, and closed the door.

After a while, the humidity would build up, and this was no more apparent than in the winter when we would crack open the door and tangibly feel the chill on our skin. Opening the sun she called it, as the daylight sharply spilled on the blanket that covered us. It was the only place where we could shut out the world, the only place that felt like night.

In a relationship, sharing the night is more important than sharing fluids. Falling asleep with someone is an acceptance of trust, a way of saying that we’re comfortable enough to drift into our subconscious minds. Perhaps it was the unavailability of such a ritual that’s given the night so much significance.

Having no night of our own, we had to make due. I covered one side of a cardboard panel with glow-in-the-dark stars and suspended it from the top of the room. The panel was large enough to fill the vision, and in the darkness the closet became a microcosm of the starry sky. Even in the middle of day it was near blackness, and we’d lose track of time, huddled under the blankets with her sleeping at my chest, or lying there face-to-face, talking while I ran my fingers through her hair. Sometimes, all we would do was get together and nap.

And eventually, Christie didn’t have much trouble speaking anymore.