Back in the summer of ‘22, my now-husband and I drove through the entire state of Kansas in a day. It’s a six-hour, non-stop stretch from the city hilariously named Kanorado, CO, to Kansas City, MO. Kansas is so flat, we always fall asleep whenever it comes up in conversation. We tried to watch Traveling Robert’s Kansas trip on YouTube twice. No luck.
Yet, for two people who grew up surrounded by mountains and cities and beaches and density, driving through Kansas was, in and of itself, a serene experience. There is a sweet, almost nostalgic feeling to the golden-colored rolling plains of nothing but grass and space.
Everything is flat and expected and nothing has changed, but then there is one thing that sticks out on the horizon, and I hope that maybe, just maybe, this is the one thing that brings me closer to our destination.
We did have more caffeine than usual, just in case. The very last thing we needed on a cross-country road trip, while living out of our truck, was to get into an accident in freaking Kansas.
A heartbeat that stops beating.
Six months ago, during a routine visit, my primary care doctor made me strip down and get an EKG after I told her I had trouble at night due to palpitations. The nurse, who I adore because I’ve met her father and her daughter and her daughter’s wedding through photos, comes in and, with her hands on her hips, asks me what happened.
“I just mentioned I might be drinking too much coffee and she freaked out,” I said, sulky to my last breath.
The EKG confirms what I know: my heartbeats are fine. It doesn’t happen all the time. Only at night. Around 3 a.m., I wake up in the middle of the night, heart about to leave my chest. It takes me ten minutes to go back to normal and about an hour to fall asleep again. So maybe I am drinking too much coffee, but not in the middle of the night.
I had to wear a cardiac event monitor for two long weeks. I couldn’t get the tracker wet, so I had to look like a Bavarian pretzel trying to wash my hair or wash the rest of my body not near my left boob. The technician who attached it to my body told me to wrap it in a sandwich bag and tape it, as if that made the experience twice as pleasant.
The study came back normal. Of course it did. Everything works as intended. I’m the epitome of health! Except I wake up with the same palpitations that night. After half an hour of telling myself I am not, in fact, dying, I get up.
For the first year after the fire that burned down my life, I went to therapy because I knew I had just gotten a bucketful of trauma and that shit would stay with me for the rest of my life. I refused to be my mother, carrying her grief for decades. I refused to be my father, burying his grief in the deepest side of him. So I sat in front of a stranger once a week for an hour, telling them how it felt to go through my new life.
I swear, if someone else asks me and how does that make you feel? one more time, I might lose the little sanity I have left.
How does not remembering what my pet looked like make me feel?
How does hating my favorite colors make me feel?
How does losing time make me feel?
Everything makes me feel fine, because if I really tell my therapist that all I want is to curl up and let life pass me by and get back to me once all the shit in my brain reworks itself, they might ask me to come visit three times a week.
If there is something that will put you off consumerism, it’s having to re-buy every single thing you own from the ground up. The last time I had to buy a mattress, I was nineteen years old, moving to New Hampshire, and Dad asked me, “What mattress do you want?” and I responded with, “One where I can sleep. Firm, but not a piece of wood.”
I am fine. The world’s most used phrase. You know the one that’s barely used? I am feeling fine. Because everyone will expect you to be fine, but no one will ever ask you how you’re feeling unless you’re paying them to make you tell them. And even then, you say I am fine, because if you’re not, there’s a problem to solve.
I was fine until I wasn’t anymore, and everything came tumbling down, and it was the second crappiest day of my life. The morning after, I sat up, made sure I didn’t look like a pufferfish, threw out my vape, and got on with my life. And I never went back to my therapist. Problem solved.
I started feeling fine. Not great. Not ecstatic. Not even sad. Just fine. Exactly like the Kansas flats.
Falling asleep, then waking up.
Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t sleep, I get up, to the dismay of my dog. He opens his eyes but doesn’t move, and I don’t expect him to, so I pet him and go to my office to write, because when the house is quiet and there are no responsibilities, I can write freely and nothing interrupts me.
The low lights of the room and the dark mode of my laptop soothe me in a way few things do. Like here, in these four walls, talking to this electronic device, I can be a mess. I can write about anything, even if it makes no sense at first. There is always something good that comes out of it.
An essay.
A short story.
A longer story.
An idea.
A plan.
There is one thing I remember late at night, when I can’t sleep. I hate plans. The worst time of high school and college wasn’t the homework. It was the career advisor asking me about my five-year plan. I never understood why people plan that far ahead in their lives. One blink and things change and you have to adapt. One switch flips and a flame starts and thirty-six families have to adapt. Even years after that day, plans give me palpitations.
Who cares? Life’s going to happen anyway. Let’s live it one day at a time.
One day, I am fine. The next day, I am in love. The next day, I buy a house. And the day after, I get a dog. A thin line on a piece of paper that keeps drawing itself with every minute that passes by and nothing sticks out on the horizon. It’s just rolling hills after rolling hills after rolling hills.
There’s something that’ll stick out on the horizon. I just need to get to it.