Pan(dem)ic
My local coffee shop has started a poetry collaboration whereby they print poems on their cup sleeves. Today’s is by Sojourner Ahebee:
Desire your garden, you flood with hope. Hope is a flood, blue with desire. Oh to be born of all the right water.
Oh indeed.
I had several panic attacks in 2022 that I might have misconstrued as some version of falling in love when really it was high blood pressure. My triggers are always the same—being in rooms full of people with more energy than me, trying to discover the source of mine. My doctor and therapist helped me understand that the condition of my heart made it so that a natural rise in heart rate would feel like a psychiatric event. Here I thought my emotions were now actually governing my literal cardiac vehicle. It was the other way around.
I also thought I had this under control after taking a regimen of beta blocker and smoking cessation more seriously, but I went to an event recently, and was so panicked at the thought of answering any more questions about my source, that I fled the scene as soon as I could. I drowned myself in a wine too bold for me.
I should not drink coffee but I am lately of the mind that lunacy is an attribute and not an illness. So what if my feelings are a psychiatric event.
There’s a fruit fly that keeps populating my desk space. I can imagine how you must taste to it. So whenever I want to clap my hands around those things swarming my head space, I remember this is blood pressure, not a thought crime. I am in love. That’s my disability. I remember to look at my reflection in the coffee before remembering poetry is allowed to be self-regarding. Before drinking it to mad effect. Our reflections make love an entire episode of panic, the entire heart’s beat.
