Clean Chest by Miranda Carter

When I was a child and still felt affection for my grandfather, I crawled into the stuffy cab of his SUV next to my sister, the metal of the seatbelt scorching, a boat hitched to the back. We corkscrewed down the Lewiston grade and streamlined to a boat dock on the shining ribbon of the Snake River. Mom strapped bulky life vests to our bodies, the tops pushing against our cheeks. Grandpa and Dad roped a yellow, cookie-shaped tube to the back of the boat, and once we were out far enough along the sparkling rivulets, the sun unbearably sharp, they wrangled us onto the tube by our skinny arms and encouraged us to situate on our stomachs, long legs behind us, hands gripping the floppy handles tightly. We did as we were told, then heard the boat pick up with a mighty roar. The tube suddenly elevated in the front and we shrieked, white-knuckling the handles as we cut through the water in clean curves, droplets splaying outward from the front like we had conquered a way through the deep and the dark.

Of course, there came a time when the boat sped and turned for the mere purpose of bucking us off. The day could not end without a first-time heavy skidding fall from one or both of us into the crushing cool of the river. I felt my body pull sideways, my thin limbs scrambling to hold on. My stomach swung and pitted when I realized that despite my every-fiber effort, my body would be ripped from its spot of safety, and I would not be able to control what happened next, or how it felt. And that’s exactly what happened. My body skidded over the water, then tumbled and sunk. I felt the shock of cold submergence, the rapid churning of the wake. My breath was stolen by the slapping impact. My eyes squeezed shut, and my ears filled. And though the inside of me was rushing, keening, grasping, the muffling weight of the water snubbed my efforts to reclaim my position in the world. After what felt like a profound amount of time, the lifejacket pulled me to the surface and I came up sputtering, tiny and distraught. Tears mixed with the droplets of water peppering my face, and as the boat treaded closer, I heard the deep laugh of my grandfather, the kind of laugh that adults force when trying to convince children that their fear, their pain, is not actually happening. I heard my father encourage me not to cry.

~

At age eleven I was baptized in that river, and then for the next ten years was plagued with several diagnosable, ever-evolving anxieties, all with ugly names. I came to liken my anxiety to the derailing of my little body from the yellow inflatable on that summer day: Sudden. Disorienting. Painful.

Minimized. Misunderstood.

I knew it made me ugly, this new relentless shadow that made me want to sleep all the time and say no to previous normalities like food and sleepovers, doorknobs, and car rides. Panicked cries and thrashing limbs took up residence in our formerly mild household. The sponge-painted walls looked on in silence. I felt myself become a source of burdensome concern and frustration, like an overstuffed backpack with curious items no one asked to shoulder.

I tried to joke with a therapist once, to show there was some lightness in me. When she didn’t laugh, I treaded to the bathroom where I remember looking into a very old mirror in a very old, tiled bathroom with a black fire escape in the window, and wondered, at age eleven, if I would ever want to die.

There were seasons in which anxiety perched inside of me waiting to respond to a stomachache or sour social interaction, and other times glared like a 24-hour gas station sign for several months with no cause: heavy and blinding. Puzzles, Pac-Man, basketball, That 70s Show, sugary pop songs like “Baby” by Justin Bieber when my heart was pounding in science class—I hoarded all that was strategic and distracting because sometimes the only thing that felt real was the punishing, intrusive pressure of fuzzy-minded darkness; the drowning, with no verbalized cause. My dreams were pale and empty.

What an agreeable but unlovable thing I felt I was, silent in libraries and blushing in front of the boy I liked, tripping over words with girls who thought my thinness was chicer than their budding bodies. I was driven to smallness. Girls in my written stories were always leaving behind things that did not serve them, going places they could become new, but driving alone filled me with such sorrow. I scrambled, often subconsciously, for moments or actions that would build to an a-ha moment in which everything revolutionized, like rearranging my room every few months or sitting on braided hills. I willed these things to align the spine of my existence because I usually wanted to be anywhere but myself. But I also had such compassion for myself. I liked being my friend, as shattering as it could be.

In college I remember telling Cara in front of the brown cupboards of our kitchen that I just wanted to remember what it was like before eleven, to wake up clear-eyed and clean in the chest. She seemed to know what I meant.

~

Nowadays, by the grace of the God I claimed at my baptism—my submergence into a life that is not mine alone—anxiety is not a condition, but an occasion. A momentary response. More often than not, a memory.

If it returns with the same impact of a speeding river, I feel for that eleven-year-old in the hammock by the garden, trying to sleep away the roiling fear while Mom pulled weeds from the earth and Grandpa roamed indoors, singing old songs and chalking up my sleepiness to my age. It would be tidy to call God the lifejacket, and he is that. He is the air I breathe, and my lungs are full, and I praise him, but I have no seamless explanation for the length of time it all took. It is past. It is sometimes shamefully easy to forget any of it happened at all.

Miranda R. Carter is a twenty-eight-year-old writer, teacher, and adventurer based in Sacramento, California. Her work has appeared or will appear in River Teeth Journal, Idaho Magazine, Eunoia Review, and more.