DAVID LACY
After my ex-wife moved out, I flew to my hometown to visit family and friends nearly every other weekend.
This was difficult because I was terrified of flying. As soon as we reached cruising altitudes, I’d order two miniature bottles of tart airline chardonnay for the one-hour flight between Southern and Northern California. The wine, of course, chased the pre-flight Xanax, dusty pills that slid out of a bottle with a warning label that read, DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL.
Some people who are afraid of flying will never voluntarily take the window seat. I needed it. As soon as the plane took off, I pressed my temple firmly against the glass and stared intently at the receding features of the earth. I somehow believed that if I remained acutely focused on the rattles and bumps of the flight, I could control it, thereby ensuring the continued levitation of a massive airborne cylinder of steel traveling at speeds in excess of 400 miles per hour. A teacher of mine once referred to this as magical thinking.
I desired the window seat for an additional reason: I wanted—needed—to scout for planes. Scanning the skies, I would search compulsively for little specks of metal crisscrossing the horizons. Somehow, and I still have difficulty explaining this to people, I found solace in the companionship of other moving airplanes. Their presence—along with the Xanax and the shitty chardonnay—steadied my nerves in a curious way. Clearly, they could be of no aid in case of an emergency, but spotting them out there—planes full of humans floating below, above, and around me—made me feel more secure. When one flew silently out of sight, I’d ball up my fists anxiously, my eyes frantically searching for the next plane. In my head I referred to them as airplane allies, and I didn’t truly comprehend their powers until recently.
Even when you know it’s coming, you don’t really know.
I say “moved out,” but if there were a more clinical way to describe my wife’s departure I’d use that term instead. Before I left for a friend’s house that weekend—a mutually agreed upon time where my wife’s parents would help their daughter pack up without having to experience the pained and embarrassing confrontation with a son-in-law they had known for nearly a decade—we had drawn up a HIS and HERS list.
I didn’t return until I was sure they had gone (confirmed with a text), and as I unlocked the same stubborn lock I had battled with daily for years, I stepped into an apartment that was exactly half empty. The surgical precision with which our home had been bisected and vacated was remarkable: There were exactly half as many electronics, half as many dishes, half as many Pottery Barn furnishings.
She was nothing if not judicious.
I walked slowly to the center of the living room, sweeping my head from side to side, seeking something, but unsure what. Suddenly, I felt a heavy pressure, as if I had been immured into the space between two repelling magnets, and I dropped to the floor. I doubled over, crossed my arms over my chest, and clenched my fists. I began rocking back and forth and breathing faster, sucking sips of air in increasingly quick, fierce intervals. When the numb tingling began prickling my face, neck, and arms, I knew a panic attack was imminent. The sips became gulps, and the tremulous sobs began.
The ugly, twisted, thick, labored sobs, each ending in a deep moan and mumbling lips that offered an incoherent plea over and over again in broken-record fashion: “Please no.” Tears streamed from my eyes and merged with viscous snot.
What I remember most vividly is that no one was there. I spent the remainder of the evening completely alone.
I awoke in a daze, unmoved from that self-same spot on the floor. I reached out without lifting my head, grabbed my phone, and checked the time. It was 11:45 PM. I had slept through the entire day. Now I had the rest of the night to contend with.
I pulled myself up with considerable effort and went in search of Benadryl. I found two in my bathroom medicine cabinet (I didn’t even bother looking on her side; I already knew what wasn’t there), tossed the pink tablets in my mouth, stuck my head under the faucet, and swallowed.
I returned to nearly the exact same spot where I had passed out earlier and curled back up on the floor.
I’ve never stared at the base of a wall for so long. Memories played on loop in my mind: the intractable anxieties that had chipped at our relationship for years, shaving away small pieces of trust and security, one compulsive thought at a time.
More nights just like this came and went. Never reorganizing the furniture into a functional living pattern. Never throwing clothes in hampers, simply tossing articles into a corner of the room that quickly developed a stench. Never buying food. Never eating. Never hungry. It was as if the pendulum of self-restraint had swung in the other direction, from a fierce compulsion to regulate every minutiae of my existence to apathetic abandon. My therapist, Dr. Thai, had accumulated two decades of my crazy into a generic manila folder—my unconscious need to control bound together with notes chronicling anxiety, obsessive thoughts, and male anorexia.
I set the alarm on my phone, curled up on the floor, and attempted to make it through the next fitful night.
I would leave for work early, move through my days in a haze, and come home to repeat the same chores that felt more arduous than they truly were, which amounted to the bare minimum: showering and changing my clothes. My fridge remained stocked with a box of wine and a collection of half-used condiments.
In less than two weeks, I was practically climbing the walls in desperation. I needed to get the hell out.
“I love it. I want it. I’ll take it.”
“It” was a free-standing unit in Laguna Beach, California, built in the 1960s, and only minutes from the ocean. Original hardwood floors surfaced most of the home. The living room boasted a fireplace with brick mantle on one side and a long window offering glimpses of the sea on the other. Smaller windows cranked open with stiff, jerky motions, allowing the coastal breeze to circulate through. There was a back patio with potted oregano, basil, and thyme, and a garage in which to store pieces of my past life.
“It” was also the kind of place my ex and I had discussed renting on several occasions. When we had those occasional “fuck-it-let’s-just-do-something-completely-and-utterly-fucking-different-just-for-the-fuck’s-sake-of-it” conversations. The conversations that breathed the only brief gusts of oxygen into an otherwise exanimate marriage.
The conversations that went nowhere.
I launched myself into my work (I taught at three different colleges) and spent my limited free time exploring the quirky beach town. Soon, my neighbor—a colleague who’d told me about the rental the same hour the landlord had taped up a “For Rent” sign, and who lived in an attached studio the size of a walk-in-closet—began accompanying me on my regular jaunts through town.
“I want it. I’ll take it.”
This time “it” was a 2007 Mercedes Benz. It was also the lowest-end model on the used side of the dealer lot, but most importantly, it was about as far removed as possible from the family-sized American SUV I had traded it in for. Potential infant car-seat space was replaced by shiny black leather. Extra safety features supplanted by a sunroof and bucket seats.
My neighbor and I explored the town once again, this time racing up and down Pacific Coast Highway at night. The moon shimmered on the water, reflecting soft white light across the western edges of town. I felt alive for the first time in ages.
As I dropped her off and made the five-foot trek back to my home, my neighbor turned and paused.
“You’re going to be okay, you know that, right?”
And she retreated into her walk-in closet.
They swept in from the east, west, south, and north.
Each time I flew home to Sacramento, friends would drive in from around the region to meet up. Though pockets of turbulence continued to rattle my nerves, I found myself glancing out the windows less frequently with each flight. Slowly, nearly imperceptibly at first, both my anxiety and grief seemed to abate, as if they were operating in some sort of strange alliance. Still, I breathed an audible sigh of relief whenever we landed, my childhood allies parked curbside, waiting to scoop me up.
Once home, we danced through the streets until three in the morning, kings and queens of our little empire.
In Southern California, several colleagues who had previously occupied mere acquaintance status evolved into close, personal friends. We traveled to Vancouver together for work and play. It was one of the first times I sampled seafood, and not just one or two items either, but dozens of pieces of fresh catch from the steel-silver waters of the Pacific Northwest. My friends also introduced me to Canadian whiskey and espresso martinis.
The socialization, the tasting, the laughing, the smiling, even the frequent flying, were working wonders on my soul. I felt like I was approaching some yet-unseen foundation, like a pilot coming in for a soft landing through dense fog. But I still could not make out the ground beneath my feet.
Nearly a year had passed since my wife left and there was nothing but radio silence between us. I was surprisingly grateful for this enormous gift, and I wished her no ill will. It was a healing quietude. I was in my campus office one morning near the end of a particularly exhausting semester when another colleague in the office next to mine walked over and began telling me about her upcoming trip to Holland and Belgium. She mentioned she would be spending several days attending a conference before sightseeing the two nations for an additional week.
“You should come,” she offered, nonchalantly.
To this day I am unsure why I responded with similar nonchalance, as if agreeing to travel to Europe on a whim was a perfectly normal thing for people to do.
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
“Next Wednesday.”
Twenty minutes later I had booked a flight to Brussels that would depart in under a week. Though it would be the longest flight I had ever taken, my anxiety barely reared its monstrous head in the days leading up to take-off. It had been replaced by an intoxicating excitement, a thrilling anticipation of the upcoming adventure.
Amsterdam and Belgium remain an astonishing whirlwind of memories: Dining each night on wine and tapas and chocolates and scotch until the summer sun set at nearly midnight; dancing in crowded clubs until four in the morning alongside people of every nationality; stumbling drunkenly through cobblestone alleys at sunrise in search of breakfast to stave off impending hangovers; racing bicycles across cobblestone streets, narrowly avoiding mopeds and pedestrians; screaming our lungs out at a carnival ride in the quiet town of Bruges—the type of horror “fun” house that United States regulators would have promptly shut down.
However, there were occasions amidst these adventures when I broke down. I might be staring fixedly at a particular piece of art in a Belgian museum and tears would trickle unexpectedly from the corners of my eyes. I stood at the top of a steep and ancient belfry in Bruges and felt an aching for something absent. And sometimes, I am ashamed to admit, when I was most vulnerable and overwhelmed with emotion, I would lash out verbally at those same people who allowed themselves to come into the closest proximity. But for the most part, inertia kept me moving, and I never slowed long enough to experience inertia’s dangerous flip-side.
The side that could have sent me directly back to that barren apartment, locked in a haze of depression and dirty laundry.
I still have no clue where the idea to go skydiving came from. It set up residence in my mind one morning and refused to depart, until I was thinking about it almost daily.
I assumed I would have a difficult time persuading my sister to join me. To be honest, my invite was more of a tease than anything else. Brothers enjoy teasing their younger sisters. It’s a scientific fact.
“I just have to be at work by eleven,” she replied. Nonchalance appeared to be the new norm and I was beginning to love it. Rebecca was a barista at a coffee shop. “The clientele get irritable if I’m not there to hook in their caffeine IV drips.”
“If any of them get grumpy with you, stare them square in the eyes and state in your most expressionless tone, ‘You just walked through that swinging glass door. I just fell from the motherfucking sky. Get in line.’”
She chuckled and agreed to meet me at the county airport on the appointed day.
The night before our trip, I camped out at the tiny airfield in the middle of the countryside with one of my best friends, Greg. We drove into town around sunset and purchased hamburgers and trimmings; on the way back we blasted the stereo as we sped across the empty back highways of rural northern California.
Greg fired up the portable barbecue when we returned to the makeshift camp. I chopped tomatoes and onions while he crisped slices of bacon and made sure the burgers remained a bit on the bloody side. He went to the trunk of the car and retrieved a six-pack of beer. Knowing I loathed beer, he leaned back into the trunk and re-emerged a moment later with a glimmering bottle of chilled chardonnay.
“It ain’t the shitty stuff either,” he said, handing me the bottle. I took a swig. It was indeed good. I was done with the shitty stuff. The next morning, the weather was perfect, but my nerves, which had been surprisingly calm until that point, were finally beginning to fray. My sister, along with family and friends, had arrived and we went up on the small plane together. As the plane climbed noisily, our instructors latched us in, buckled, clipped, pulled, and tugged taut the myriad straps and cords.
In that instant I was hyperaware of two distinct selves: one, who would refuse to budge, and who would remain obstinately affixed to the relative safety of the craft. And another, about to be loosed into the sky like one of those planes. One of those allies.
The door slid open.
“Ohfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckshitshitshit,” I hissed. I’m not certain how long the stream of profanities lasted, but they sent most of the plane into a laughing fit and my instructor patted me on the shoulder reassuringly. As the person who had orchestrated this event, I was first. I felt my body lift against my will as my instructor stood halfway up and we began walking to the edge.
There are no words that describe the combination of sensations that flowed through me at that precise moment. Terror, excitement, astonishment—all of these terms are woefully inadequate. I stood thirteen thousand feet above ground and readied myself to jump.
And then I did.
The air blasted my cheeks, which flapped wildly as if attempting to flee from my face. Every movement, no matter how small, required significant effort, but after a moment I gained control of my body’s position. I sailed through the air, staring open-mouthed at what looked like a cartoon checkerboard thousands of feet below. The sheer quiet of it all shocked me.
“This is amazing,” I half whispered.
The feeling wasn’t one of falling, but rather of floating. Below me lay everything: Every fear, every anxiety, every human I had ever interacted with.
And it wasn’t a checkerboard below me, it was a puzzle. And in that moment the final piece had snapped, victoriously, splendidly into place.
I was alone in the sky, and I was no longer afraid.