The email said that all our diving would be free.

There was a time, before premature menopause, when I didn't dream. Or, I didn't really remember what I had dreamt about. Now I dream in vivid nightmares. I just finished Augusten Burroughs' new book, "A Wolf at the Table," and having read it at night, before I'd fall asleep, I'd find myself ridden with some crazy anxiety. Judging and terrified.
I used to have anxiety attacks living overseas, usually following or during chaotic events, like, waking up in the morning. Sometimes I would have them in my sleep, sometimes I would be asleep on someone's floor, on the flip-n-fuck mattress, there would be an orange and white cat attacking me, and I'd have to pull a Jack Bauer on that cat, happening between the hours of 2 am and 3 am.
Oskar, cat from Hades. That cat belonged on the streets in Bulgaria. It needed daily affirmation of it's masculinity. We were no challenge for it, it had left blood, scars, tears.
Once, I got an email, "is it ok to fight back when the cat attacks me like that?"
This cat, given as a gift from the heart her by a then-boyfriend, also picked out by said boyfriend, resembling said boyfriend in many ways, including inner-ugliness and passive-aggressive bullying.
Said boyfriend encountered me as we climbed a mountain in the Carpathians, in a blizzard. "So, I think she's amazing. Can you talk to her? Get her to maybe go out with me?"
"Why? You live pretty far apart. Besides, I thought you...were..."
"What? Thought I was what?"
"Uh, you were just telling me about another person in your life...back home."
"Oh, him. My gut told me..."
And that was the beginning of the end. The gut. This plane had come crashing down before it even took off. I blame myself for saying, "Sure, I'll talk to her. It'll be fun to all hang out together."
This was before he drove her to the brink of a suicidal breakdown, before he turned on us all, before we were exploited our instant messengers to deliver scathing words to each other, about each other. This was before our trip home on the Russian train of icy-finger death.
"So, I don't know, he says he likes you."
"How does he even really know me?"
He got to know. He would travel from his town to hers on the weekends, when he was done doing heroic deeds in his town. He turned into single white male. He wanted a new personality and she was his fodder, his host.
I called him one day and he answered the phone listening to AFI. Keep in mind, our superhero was a Rufus Wainwright-kind-of-guy.
"What the hell are you listening to."
"This band AFI, they're from Cali."
"C-Cali?"
"You know, California. I used to live there."
"mmm. I know California. Why are you listening to them?"
"I thought if I was going to hang out with her, I'd have to get to liking punk."
"As a thirty-something year old man, you're deciding to 'get to like punk'?"
"I like to meld."
I heard a bomb drop in the background somewhere, and wasn't sure if it was just the Bulgarian hunters throwing leftover grenades at deer or if it was all in my head, a harbinger of things to come.
Anxiety. Panic. You name it, we'd all suffered from it there. Good thing the government didn't ask relevant questions about our mental health, or we would have not been so fortunate with the piles of Xanax that were handed out like stotinki to orphans.
Sometimes, I pretend like we've gotten over it. Then i step back and see that we haven't. We strip ourselves of our pasts, convince our limbic system that it never happened. Close the door, close the door, but it's still open a crack, lets this grey light in, and beckons us like little girls in pigtails, pale yellow Monchichi pajamas, stuffed animal in tow, heading for the door, we never know if we'll open it and face the demon, or if we'll shut it completely. This actually sets the tone for the rest of our lives. I always needed someone else to shut the door. I was terrified of what was in there. I knew what was there and still I will not face it. I always shut the door to dark places.
My parents would get high and be funny with me sometimes, come into my room and open the doors back up. I'd wake up and be terrified. I never knew why they did it. I was never sure which one of them did it. My grandma would yell at them, "leave her alone."
"Why does she care about the door being open or closed?" they would ask.
Our parents still torture us today. They drag us to the middle and use us as a barrier, use us as punching bags, let out all the dirty laundry until we have no room to breathe, until we choose a side. This is why I close the door. So I don't have to hear it. So I don't have to see their faces. So I can't hear their whimpers, barely audible.
Bulgaria brought out those fears in us again. Fears of being alone, being someone we wanted to be, being someone we weren't. Fears of being helpless, of needing to help. We began to strip ourselves of what we thought we were, down to the bone. Some of us continue to strip, like taking old wallpaper off, deciding the bare underneath is much prettier than what we covered it up with. Some of us continue to travel, running, searching, falling into the same trap.
"I follow girl, girl decides she doesn't want this anymore. How many times does this have to happen?"
Enough for us to realize that if we chase, we will never get anything but turned on and bitten out of fear.
I look out the window and see this driving rain that has just begun. It's June. 55 degrees. I check the Yahoo weather page. 66 in SF. It's always the same. It's always pleasant. Maybe that's why she moved from the south to California. Maybe volatile turbulence there leads to such chaotic family situations. Never knowing what to expect, never know when you're going to be roused in the dead of night by the wail of a haunting tornado siren or the sound of an alcoholic mother screaming.
There were tornado sirens that night. It was green everywhere. My grandmother and I were upstairs in my grandfather's room, he was still at the VFW, a pint of pale Pabst in hand. We were digging through his old cedar chest, as I often liked to do. Scrambling through bits of a past, newspapers that raved WAR! He was in that war. He fought on a ship in that war. He was awarded medals for his heroic service in that war. He came home from that war. Broken. Like all the other men who came home from that war. He lied about his age, fought like a man defending his country, came home and gambled the rest away. I didn't know what this all meant. I don't claim to have had such abstract adult thought patterns at that age. I do know the look in my grandmother's eyes. She would tell me stories about the man she was supposed to marry. Someone who had died earlier in the war, someone who didn't come home. She settled for a man with money, instead of love. A man who wasn't so sensitive to her fragility, her depression, her captivity. A man who wasn't thrown by her model-esque looks, her magazine shoots. He simply wanted a wife.
Bradbury reveals endless bounty and seasonal beauty when he speaks of Illinois. I suppose I could, as well, but the day we sat in front of that chest, the sheer white curtains sweeping in and out, attaching themselves to the screens, holding their breath before they exhaled, falling to the floor in a sigh that filled the room. She explained every medal to me. We read the papers. She told me who we'd fought in that war and why, and why it was important to us. But she never explained why she was so unhappy, why they fought constantly, why they never spoke otherwise, or what was hidden in their closets.
We listened to the radio, and to the sirens that blared in town. We needed to go to the basement. I didn't want to leave the chest. I was afraid that if tornadoes came, the chest would be swept away, along with all I knew about my grandfather.
He came home, drenched with rain, wet leaves, he took off his filthy fisherman's hat, stinking of beer and cigar, sat down in his leather chair, and asked us if we'd heard the sirens.
I nodded, ran over to him and asked him why he never talked about what was in the chest.
"The past is the past. No one needs to talk about that."
I had a feeling the chest was not the only place he buried things. Something felt heavy.
"But you have medals that say you were hurt, and a hero,"
"There are no heroes in war. There are no heroes, period. And there were people hurt worse than I was. People who didn't need to be hurt, men, women and children that didn't need to die. I didn't need to die inside, either. But they don't give out medals for emotions."
He went to bed.
I turned to my grandmother. She shrugged her shoulders.
"What if the tornado comes and he's sleeping?"
"I'm pretty sure it wouldn't matter."