Early in the morning, I look out the window over the sink, and a disjointed line of shiny trucks and low sedans and SUVs is already shifting and halting down the road. I begin to retch. The birds ignore me from their cage. They are too busy bickering, leaping in flurries at one another to nip each other’s wings.
My husband is long out the door with his hair brushed up on-end and combed over wet, eyes glacial and weary. I would have told him how I was feeling, but I am a sphinx covered in layer upon layer of sand until it looks like the outline a kid traces with crayon around his hand. Ever since we moved to the prehistoric boneyard of the American West, to this wide Montana valley north of Yellowstone, I’ve felt uneasy. It’s hard to say why. When I speak, it takes eons for my words to reach another’s ears, and when they do, they are in pictograms too ancient for translation.
This morning, “I feel sick” is all my husband heard.
But if I could have, I would have said this. The first law of thermodynamics tells us energy cannot be created or destroyed. It simply passes from one form to another. Panic is a kind of energy. It looks like standing in a treeless valley, surrounded by the mountains. (The mountains are so big, you don't see them sometimes.) And meanwhile, the sky is a fleece blanket, and it is descending upon you, growing larger and larger until you cannot see the mountain peaks, and you are trapped in a bowl with a lid, and the lid is covered in cotton balls, and once it reaches your mouth, you won't be able to breathe, or feel, or know the bigness or smallness of anything.
I thought I was done with panic. My track coach told me I had to get out of myself, and I thought I’d succeeded. But I know now what I didn’t then. Panic is a kind of energy, and unless you keep on running, it will always catch you in the end. So, I’ll put on my shoes and take up my wallet and get in the car. I’ll drive to a godforsaken place on the edge of the Pacific, find a sea cave, and there reach ec-stasy. All alone in my cave, no identity or plan, just breathing in the air. (It's so sickeningly dry in Montana.) And I will see the little ocean crabs scurry in the current, and the clam holes will bubble, and I will have escaped.
And when I find myself once more and must once again escape, I’ll get up and keep on running. Further and further away, until the sphinx shifts, and the sands fall, and stone crumbles away, and sitting in the ruins is a pile of bones, jumbled and white. No hair, no skin, no me.
*
“Dad,” I whisper into the black emptiness of my iPhone. “I’ve been having dangerous thoughts of running away.”
He is hundreds of miles distant, but with his voice, soft as the forest floor, he speaks straight into my ear. He tells me beneath his words, in a language only a sphinx’s heart can translate: “You’re my daughter.”
As he speaks, I watch the bones in the desert shift imperceptibly. (The first law of thermodynamics tells us energy cannot be created or destroyed. It simply passes from one form into another.) Sinews stretch, muscles clothe, skin regrows.
I catch a sob in my throat and find myself at home in my body, lying on my back on the living room floor. I reach out my hand, feel the roughness of old carpet, and wonder at the ease of my rebirth.
Slowly, the clouds disintegrate into rain, breaking wonderfully on the mountains surrounding our valley. The wind comes rushing in. My birds have stopped their constant bickering and sit stretching their wings and legs in impossible directions.
*
“Behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to bone.” Ezekiel 37:7