Escape

There are days when my head buzzes. I feel a gaseous presence inside, which surrounds my brain and casts a thick fog. My thoughts are there, but I can’t hold onto them for more than an instant without feeling dizzy or forgetting them entirely. In the fog there is only restlessness, a deeply rooted itch to feel some sort of relief, but I never know how to get it. I was on vacation toward the end of July when I felt this way. Surrounded by people, I started to notice my head was pulsing and I stopped understanding what people were saying to me. I couldn’t talk either. Each time I tried, the effort used all the air in my lungs, and I could only get one- or two-word phrases out. Panicked, I left the house and started down the road, unaware of where I was going.

I remember the quiet sadness of Egypt Beach. In my nearly dissociative state, I walked down the open road towards the water, cradled by the biblical clouds that created an archway for me. I walked slowly and intentionally. No music. No thoughts. No idea when I was going to return home. The dunes bristled as the wind forced each blade of grass back into the earth until they sprang up again, unable to handle the pressure. I admired how the sand of the dunes would ebb and flow creating uneven and unstructured lumps, never looking unnatural and unintentional. My phone buzzed. I did not answer.

Walking down the shore, I had a compulsion to keep going farther, and with each step the sunset clouds grew darker and bluer to match the ocean until the sand too was blue and the moon became my only light source. I kept on walking, barely able to process it had become fully dark, and it never occurred to me that I should feel afraid to be alone on a strange beach.

At some point I collapsed and sank into the ground. I knew full well that with each movement I made the grains of sand rooted themselves deeper into my hair, preparing themselves for my nightmare of a hair wash later. I didn’t care to think about my hair then and soon realized I didn’t feel I cared for anything at that moment. The Earth was surrounding me l and I wanted to become part of it. I grew more and more detached from my thoughts and sank deeper into the sand, until what once grounded me became my tomb, dragging me deeper and deeper, filling my lungs until sand would leak from each pore. The ocean’s crescendo of waves silenced me as I suffocated.

My phone buzzed once more, bringing me out of my spiral. I tried to brush some of the sand off my clothes and realized I had been out for hours. I started towards home noticing a shortcut through an abandoned golf course. Four or five hours had passed, and nobody noticed I had left. My mom walked by me on the opposite side of the street immersed in a phone call. She looked away when I saw her and continued walking. I entered the darkened cottage near the beach and climbed the stairs to what was once my room. My head continued to pulse as it had hours before.