On Water

The year was 1995, the season was autumn, and I was standing just outside the rear passenger door of my mother’s boxy, black Mazda in the middle of the Sweezy’s department store parking lot in Riverhead, New York. My five year old fingertips clutched the roll-down window in distress, leaving prints that would linger long after the incident and long after the Mazda was a mere memory. I was coughing in such a way that my trachea and larynx and bronchioles seemed to vibrate with pain. I was coughing in such a way that my chest, small even for its age, barely rose and fell. My mom looked into my eyes with horror, distress clearly visible across her own face. “What is wrong?” she cried, tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t know I said,” myself on the verge of tears, gasping for breath.

Asthma was what was wrong. In a small doctor’s office adjacent to Saint Joseph’s College in Patchogue, itself adjacent to a Dunkin’ Donuts that I now frequent from time to time, I remember being hooked up to some machine. Whether imagined or real, I remember the doctor telling my parents that I was experiencing a severe asthma attack. Whether imagined or real, I remember the doctor telling my parents that I had a 50% chance of living. Whether imagined or real, I remember laying in my grandmother’s bed when we finally got home, her soft, discernible hands rubbing my back as I lay on my stomach. I asked her if I was going to die. “No,” she cooed. She then sang me to sleep. “Unforgettable, that’s what you are,” she sang in her uneven and lovable trill. “Unforgettable, though near or far.”

A year later, my mother and I moved to what would become my childhood home on the East End of Long Island in a small, charming village called Quogue. I perpetually experienced “Sunday dread” as a child for reasons both known and unknown to me. I remember laying on the kitchen floor on my back, my body adorned in a cloth prison that most call footed pajamas. I phoned the oldest person whose number I knew: my grandmother. “Does life go by fast?” I asked her in a panicked tone. “Well, yes,” she said, honestly. “Oh no!” I cried.

Since that day in the Sweezy’s parking lot and that afternoon in the doctor’s office adjacent to the Dunkin’ Donuts and that night on the floor of my centuries’ old kitchen, I have been acutely aware of my own mortality. This inconvenient truth has followed me for twenty-five years, lurking beyond a corner around which my uninhibited happiness exists, lying just out of arm’s reach.

It wasn’t until years after the parking lot and the doctor’s office and the kitchen floor that I, with the help of others, was able to name this existential dread that plagued me. It was called, interchangeably and often incorrectly, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, depression, and, in my own perception, the burden of being myself.

Even before naming this monster who possessed an audacity such that it did not hide under the bed, but instead pinned me down to the mattress, unrelenting, I knew one remedy to the symptoms that I experienced daily was to drink water. Each night, I’d shuffle to the water cooler in the kitchen and fill a blue wine glass with water, return to my room, and station it on my night stand. More often than not the glass would never be touched and, much to my mother’s rightful annoyance, glass after glass would accumulate in my bedroom, leaving no blue wine glasses for anyone else.

The first time I boarded a plane alone, a traumatic enough experience, I was 13, and I was sure to bring with me two liter bottles of water, just in case the flight attendants decided I wasn’t deserving of such a luxury in that flying metal penitentiary called a Boeing 737. Prior to attending a Juanes concert in Miami with my high school Spanish teacher, I Googled the arena’s regulations regarding what could be brought inside. I found that small water bottles were permitted, so I packed a drawstring backpack full of fifteen of them, never to be touched during the concert. I rarely enter an elevator without a bottle of water, assuming it will surely trap me within its confines, leaving me without a basic necessity for sustained life.

For so long, my need to possess water has plagued me as an annoyance and a sure sign or symptom of some terrifying mental disorder. It wasn’t until recently, with the help of others, that I realized that the frequent perceived threats to my very existence have activated a primal reaction within me, causing me to hold close to what might ensure my continued survival.

For so long I’ve dreaded boarding planes, assuming that if I were to experience some medical catastrophe aboard, no one would care enough about me to come to my aid. For so long I’ve abhorred car rides through desolate areas, assuming I’ll break down and, without the assistance of a kind stranger, surely perish there, on the side of I-95, miles from the Molly Pitcher rest stop, a Shangri-La to my distressed, panicked mind.

I no longer feel shame for this primal reaction. And, concurrently, I no longer feel shame for ensuring my possession of an extra-large Essentia prior to boarding flights or driving to a country getaway in the Catskills.

This is who I am. This is what I need.

This blog was originally published in 2022 on Medium.