I was taught this fifteen years ago, and somehow I have carried it everywhere since. When panic comes, look outward. Name what is real. Give the mind something it cannot argue with.
A roof is a roof. A tree is a tree. The sky is blue.
Start there.
Inhale slowly. Exhale longer.
Again.
Panic is strange because even when you know exactly what it is, your body does not care.
My mind says, I know this feeling.
My body takes longer to trust me.
So I pull over.
I park beneath a tree, lean the seat back, and wait. Because that is what you do. You wait for your body to catch up with what your mind already knows.
You are okay. You are okay. You are okay.
And then panic does this other strange thing to me.
It takes me backward. Not to one particular day, but to that old maternal terror of loving something I cannot control.
That fear.
The one that says, fix it, fix it, fix it, even when there is nothing you can fix in that exact second.
It makes me younger somehow.
Not in years. In fear.
So I do not follow it there.
Bricks. Roof. Trees. Sky.
Come back.
There is a bird in the tree above me. I watch it flap its wings, chirp, move from one branch to another. Its entire purpose, for that moment, is exactly that.
And I envy it.
Not because it is free.
Because it is only where it is.
No yesterday. No next thing. No inventory of everything that could go wrong.
Just branch. Wing. Sound. Gone.
Birds are fleeting that way.
Maybe that is why I notice them when I am afraid. They arrive without explanation and leave before I can ask anything of them.
And for a second, I follow that instead.
My breathing gets better. I can feel myself coming back into my body.
And then I cry.
Not because I am more afraid.
Because I am not.
Because sometimes after all that fear, there is nowhere for it to go except out.
So I let it.
I write this down quickly because later I know what I will do. I will be fine. I will get up. I will drive. I will go do whatever comes next.
And I will say, I had a panic attack, as though those four words could possibly explain what it felt like while I was inside it.
So I write it now.
Before I make it smaller. Before I forget the fear. Before I forget the relief.
I watched the edges curl inward the leaf blacken the handwriting vanish before the wish did.
I have believed in candles. In numbers appearing twice. In dreams arriving before dawn. In songs playing at exactly the wrong moment and therefore meaning something.
I have asked the dead for signs.
I have left coffee where no living person would drink it.
But the bay leaf—
I believed in that one.
Maybe because it came from the kitchen.
Because it was ordinary.
Because it had spent its whole life being dropped into pots to make something taste deeper without ever being eaten.
There are things I wrote on those leaves that never came true.
People who did not stay.
Doors that remained closed.
Bodies that did not heal.
Love that arrived and still could not belong to me.
I used to wonder if I had done something wrong.
Used the wrong ink.
Burned it incorrectly.
Asked for too much.
Still—
every once in a while I open the cabinet and see the little glass jar.
Dry leaves pressed against one another.
Quiet.
Waiting.
And for one second I become the woman I was—
the one who believed the distance between wanting something and having it
My mother says I cannot speak like a normal person. She says every conversation with me turns into a metaphor with no parking.
“Talk to me like a human being,” she says. “I don’t need a poem. I asked you a question.”
And I laugh, because she is right.
Then I tell her, “Well, I’m not human. So why would I speak to you like one?”
This, of course, does not help.
She looks at me like I have personally insulted common sense.
“Enough.”
“Speak normally.”
But somewhere along the way, my thoughts stopped walking in straight lines. They started taking the scenic route, turning left where everyone else would have simply answered.
And please understand—
this is incredibly amusing to me.
Because my mother is not a woman without language. No. My mother has language. She can say one sentence and make it sound like a door being thrown open during a storm.
So when she tells me not to speak in poetry, do you understand how funny that is?
This woman, who can slice the air with one sentence, wants me to hand her plain bread.
I own the entire collection of Sylvia Plath.
Every book.
Every page.
Every bruise.
I have not opened a single one in over a decade. Not because I stopped admiring her. I didn’t.
It is just that somewhere along the way, those books became less about Sylvia Plath and more about my mother.
Once, while we were rearranging books, I left my Sylvia Plath collection on the coffee table. My mother and I both own a ridiculous number of books, but I do not write in mine. I do not underline. I leave the pages alone.
So when I came back and saw ink on Sylvia Plath, I almost left my body.
My mother had underlined things.
Not gently.
Not in pencil.
Ink.
On the page.
In my book.
As if Sylvia Plath had not already suffered enough.
Then she looked at me and asked, “Does this make any sense to you?”
And I said, “Well, you have to look at her from where she was standing.”
My mother shook her head.
“This is the most heartbreaking thing. There is no joy in these books.”
And I was upset.
Obviously.
Because again,
actual ink.
But I also laughed, because somehow my mother had managed to vandalize Sylvia Plath and prove my entire point at the same time.
Ever since that day, I have quoted Sylvia Plath to my mother every chance I get. Not because I’m feeling particularly Plath-like. Not always.
Sometimes I do it simply because she underlined my books.
This is what you get.
You touch my Sylvia Plath, and now you have to live with Sylvia Plath.
Forever.
Every now and then, she’ll ask, “What are you doing today? What plans do you have?”
And instead of saying work, errands, laundry, coffee, like a normal daughter, I’ll answer,
“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end”
She closes her eyes.
And I smile, because she knows.
This has nothing to do with today.
This is an old debt.
The punishment for underlining my books.
And I have every intention of collecting it for the rest of her life.
My mother has no patience for Sylvia Plath.
To me, she is a poet.
To my mother, she is a weather warning. A pressure drop. A room losing air. An anxiety rash waiting to happen.
The kind of poet who makes my mother’s soul reach for antihistamines.
Too much ache.
Too much bell jar.
Too much woman
making pain answer back.
So when my mother tells me not to speak in metaphors, I try.
I really do.
But I don’t know where normal ends and language begins.
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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