Day 60: Don't Look Down

Yesterday, leaving Cold Lake, we listened to a country song where an 18-year-old girl escapes her family and small town life with some guy in a white pick-up truck. It was a pretty song, but somewhere in the second chorus, I got a weird feeling. It wasn't wondering why rural teens seem to require pick-up trucks as getaway cars. It was that I'd forgotten who I was.

I was sitting in a moving vehicle, next to someone I know (and who supposedly knows me), but I felt completely disconnected and cut off. The person called Melanie stopped existing and not in a Zen meditation renouncing-of-the-ego way. More like waking up, strapped to a lab table yelling, 'Who am I? Where am I? How the hell did I end up here?'

Maybe Cold Lake is to blame.

Before, when I had a job, I had a place to go every day. A place where, when I walked in the door, people validated my existence with words like, "Good morning" and "How are you?" People looked me in the eye. People said my name and required my services. Even when I quit my job to work freelance, there was validation. Cheques to cash. Plays to rehearse. Coffees to share.

Now? There's nothing. A bizarre no-man's-land of cheap hotels, duffel bags and gas station pit stops. Normally I find it freeing and adventurous. Yesterday, I was terrified.

I felt like Wile E. Coyote when he runs off the cliff and there's that moment when he stops in mid-air and you know he's about to look down and when he looks down, he falls. It's the rule of cartoons. And in the moment of suspension and stillness in the air, even he knows he's about to look down. He's compelled by forces greater than him. The Animators, I guess.

My mid-air moment yesterday wasn't from running off any cliffs. It was a stupid, sad country song about a girl taking off in the middle of the night. I got this feeling that I am completely alone. Isolated and unfastened. Floating in mid-air with sharp rocks waiting below. And if I look down, I'm fucked.

Only I'm not Wile E. Coyote, I'm a person people used to call Melanie. And while I don't have Animators drawing my every frame, I supposedly have something guiding me. Something I haven't relied on lately. Or been grateful for. Something that could be as made-up as all those things I thought validated my existence.

Right now, that force, that animating God force, is keeping me here, perfectly still and floating in space. I'm terrified up here, but that force is trying to speak to me through the rising panic and that weird compulsion to get it over with and dash myself into the rocks. There's a pounding in my ears and I feel like any minute I'm going to start clawing the air, desperate, reaching for solid ground. I'm trying hard to stay still and stay up here. If I breathe a little, maybe I can make it out. Hear that voice through the fear and the panic and forgetting who I am. It's speaking to me, yelling, even. Screaming: Don't. Look. Down.