The Long Journey Through Night, VII: …and When Fear Falls

A week ago Tuesday, that happened. Cooking class. Practicing knife technique left me raw with a feeling of inadequacy. I started skipping ingredients and closing myself off. By the time we got to a particularly tricky cut for me, I felt it coming. My chest tightened. My throat closed up. A sense of claustrophobia settled over me. I felt tears and paranoia rising up.

Then I heard the cawing in my head. And wise mind took over: “E, if you leave now, you won’t come back. Not today, not next week. And if that happens, you’ll cascade. You’ll stop riding and going to the bike workshop. You’ll be back where you’ve been for years. And I say no. I want this. I signed up for this. I was hoping for exactly this lesson and I want to stay. And so I will. So, if you need to break down, you go ahead. But you’d BEST find someplace else to do it other than over this cutting board, because this where I intend to keep cutting until I say I’m done and I won’t relinquish this spot until then.”

And the panic was gone. Just like that. I went back and added all the ingredients I’d skipped. I’d resolved earlier to throw the whole thing away when done. Now I was resolved to take it home and eat every bite of it. Which I did.

I rode my bike back home, food in my backpack. I was exhausted beyond description. And a half block from home, a crow swooped overhead, cawing over and over in a pattern. And it didn’t sound like “Fight!” or like raucous laughter. It sounded like a teammate shouting in triumph at me as I left the field. And then another crow took up the same pattern, in unison with the first. Then a third. And there was a cascade of at least nine, all joining as one in that sound that jolted me so. I got to my door and looked up. They were all on the highest branch of all the trees and houses around me in a circle looking down. When I took my helmet off, they all stopped as one.

That was the first day in a couple of years I opened my curtains and let the world back into where I lived.

And that was the first night I danced again after a year of sitting-by, too terrified to stand.