Ohio

July 12, 2013

Asheville Airport– the syllables sound melancholy this morning. Met Becky Cochran in the lobby. She said she found one of my books in a hotel in London. “Of course I nicked it. Never read it. . . can’t remember the title. . . but I had to have it. You know how that is.”

Detroit Airport Clean, bright, almost empty. Probably not many people come to Detroit. My seat mate from Asheville was an 11th grader named Ocean. Ocean is going home to Duluth after 11 months at a school in Flat Rock for girls with anxiety. She changed seats with me because she has particular anxiety about flying, and she was afraid to be by the window. But, moved from the window, she spent all her time looking out it, waiting (it seemed to me) for something to be anxious about. She was anxious during turbulence, anxious when the plane banked or changed altitude, incidents which she detected with exquisite sensitivity. Part of anxiety is, apparently, focusing on the very things which upset you. She has been taking therapy at a school designed for her for almost a year, and no one, it seems, told her “think of something else,” or suggested she might read or listen to music or meditate in order to pry her mind away from the things that make her miserable. She sits in a rictus of anticipation, awaiting with horrible concentration the very things which frighted her. It must be a kind of hell-- though also, I think, a voluntary hell. I wanted to say, “You know, you could stop this if you really wanted to.”  In my time I have had obsessions and anxieties, and when I could finally endure them no longer, I found a way to break free. I did say, “You know, you could think of something else. You could sleep. You could meditate. “ She stiffened, felt the plane beneath us, and said, “Oh! We’re turning now. . . I hate when we turn!” Her 16th birthday was two days ago.

I was not prepared for my emotions passing through Akron and on to Hiram, by dead reckoning left over from when the route was usual to me. I considered nostalgia, exhaustion, depression, but the actual emotion was flat hard grief.