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You woke up to an empty bed and the smell of coffee drifting through the house. And a grey haze, hanging low around your head.
For so long you had been able to keep these feelings at bay, but sometimes they’d come back, seeping into your life between the cracks. A nice day hiking with Frankie or dancing in the kitchen usually did the trick, but some days it was inevitable. Some days you would just have to live with it. And you could already tell today was one of those days.
If you had gotten the choice, you wouldn’t have gotten out of bed at all. You were fine staring up at the ceiling, the only light in the room the slivers between the shutters, slicing across the sheets. But just then, the door cracked open.
“You up?” Frankie asked.
You looked down to see his face, hanging inside the room. You nodded.
“Good,” he said. “I made waffles.”
You put a smile on your face, the way you always did growing up. “Sounds great.”
Frankie disappeared and you climbed out of bed. You grabbed the first shirt your hands touched in the closet and the pants at the front of the drawer. After putting on the same bra you wore yesterday and getting dressed, you padded out to the kitchen.
A waffle was sitting on a plate, already set at the breakfast table with a glass of your favorite drink and heaping bowls of fruits and toppings. A bottle of maple syrup sat in the center of it all. Any other morning and you would have been overjoyed by Frankie’s kindness, the colorful food lit up by the soft morning light and the late morning hour. But you couldn’t find it in yourself to care. You put on that same smile and turned to Frankie, who was pulling the last waffle off the iron.
“Thanks. This looks amazing, Frankie.” You slipped into your chair and waited for him to join you.
You had moved in with him five months ago and all your anxieties over whether or not your relationship would survive the move had dissolved by the first night. But the quick turnover to the shelter-in-place order was a test you still weren’t sure you were ready for.
Frankie was quick to adapt to things, and you, while a bit slower, had things sorted out soon after. Your job was secure, and working from home was easy. Weeks had gone by at the start without any snags. You worked in the living room, across from Frankie, the two of you sending smiles to each other during the middle of meetings. You get to eat lunch together and at the end of the day, you and Frankie would make dinner together, eat, go out on a walk or watch a movie, and curl up with each other every night in bed. It had been perfect.
But, your depression found its way back into your life as soon as it had figured out the patterns. On days where it insisted upon its presence, it snuck into your workdays and your weekends, into your dreams and your Zoom calls. It sat next to you during dinner and would follow you out the door when you went to get groceries.
He wasn’t unfamiliar with depression himself, and he knew about your own before you moved in. But it often reared its ugly head behind closed doors.
Living with Frankie had helped. The bad days were more manageable because he could tell. Those days, he’d drag you into the shower with him, taking things slow as he ran his hands across your body, massaging into your back and reminding you of how human and alive you were. When he saw you trying to work through a lunch break, he’d gently close your laptop and take you into the kitchen. When you were standing there, unsure of what to make, he’d tell you what to put onto a sandwich. He knew sometimes you needed the clear direction, and he gave it calmly.
Your deepest fear had always been that Frankie would one day realize how broken you were inside. How rotted out your brain had become, how dysfunctional you could be. You still hid it as much as you could. The parts you showed him, however, he had taken in stride.
It was a contrast from everything you were used to and by now you should have known you didn’t need to hide it anymore. But years with your family growing up had taught you to become good at hiding. Your mind was tied to the idea that hiding it was better than the shame of being depressed.
So this morning, when it was so much worse than usual, you chose to hide things.
Just before the virus hit, Frankie had a new shed delivered, saying the two of you would assemble it one day when the weather was nice. The boxes of parts had sat in the driveway for months. But this past week it was all Frankie could talk about. He had already taken it out of the boxes, all the parts were stacked on your back deck, and he had read through the instruction booklet twice. He was so excited to build it with you.
Yesterday morning he had built the platform while you had a Zoom call with some friends of yours so all that was left was the monumental task of building the thing.
You didn’t feel like doing it today. Not at all. You had no motivation to do anything but sit on the couch and stare at the wall. But you wanted to do it, for Frankie. He had been looking forward to this. So you would keep your mouth shut, keep the smile on, and pretend like everything was fine.
Construction was the sort of task that didn’t require much mental engagement, right?
Frankie sat down across from you at the table. “You’re going to want to wear a different shirt. We’re gonna get pretty dirty.”
You looked down at yourself. You hadn’t noticed, but you were wearing a black top with colorful embroidery and short lace sleeves. You had bought it for when Frankie took you to some fancy party he had been invited to, back when you had started dating. The two of you had escaped that night up to the event center’s rooftop garden where you danced underneath the stars. You were pretty sure that was the night you realized you were in love with Frankie but the grey haze kept you from remembering any of the emotions from that night, only the images.
Maybe if it didn’t keep the memory of emotions from you, you could start to feel something again.
“Right,” you said. “I was gonna change anyway.”
“You look beautiful, though,” Frankie said, and yeah, your smile there was genuine. Even in the deepest darkness, those little peaks of happiness? They were enough to convince you things were okay enough not to need any help.
You could smile. That was good.
“Thanks,” you said, before digging into the breakfast he prepared.
The waffles were good. You could recognize that, and you knew what they had tasted like in the past, but you felt like it was out of grasp. The whole meal was good, satisfying, filling, whatever you would use to describe a meal above just-functional. But it was lacking whatever made it exciting.
You were surprised Frankie couldn’t tell. Maybe it was his own giddiness over today’s plans, but he usually was so attuned. You had so much practice hiding it as a teen, but Frankie could see right through it.
Your therapist would probably ask you if you blamed him for not noticing. You didn’t.
If anything, it was a little serotonin boost, in the sense that your acting was good enough to even fool him.
Your therapist would probably tell you to not try to hide around the person you loved. She’d never get to ask you. When were you ever truly honest with your therapist about some things? When were you ever truly honest with anyone? Your parents had ensured your life would be full of pointless secrets the second they decided anything about you that wasn’t part of their picture-perfect image was to be punished unless you learned to hide it.
After breakfast, you cleaned up the kitchen while Frankie collected tools from the garage. You were more competent with a screwdriver than Frankie, but he was the one who liked to have a well-stocked workbench, even if he didn’t often know how to use it. So you let him have his fun, knowing once the construction began, you would be the one in charge. Plus you had no idea how he organized everything down there.
You changed out of the formal top and put all your mental energy into choosing a work-appropriate shirt. It shouldn’t have been a hard task, but times like this, your body didn’t respond well to stress. You liked instructions and things you could do without too much thought. The analytical and handiwork things won out. And choosing a shirt did not fit the bill.
Frankie had spread out all the parts across the deck and lined up the various plastic bags of hardware for the different parts of the shed.
Despite the numerous read-throughs of the instructions, Frankie still didn’t know where to begin, so you grabbed the thick packet of paper and flipped to the first page. You pulled out the hardware bag that corresponded to the letter code on the page and started counting out screws and washers to ensure everything was there. You instructed Frankie to find the metal pieces that would make up the trusses of the shed.
The process was relaxing.
Frankie would babble on about different things happening with his friends, about random funny news stories, about the new dumb thing people were doing to try to prevent the virus, and how the person he saw in the grocery store the previous week wearing a vintage gas mask scared the crap out of him.
All the while, you got to grab metal bars and slot them together, giving Frankie pieces to hold while you inserted screws through the structures and tightened domed caps onto their ends.
The energy you had to output was grounding. It was easy to forget about everything going on in your head; it was you and the metal and the screwdriver and Frankie’s voice.
After the trusses were done, you moved onto putting together the gables and Frankie set up the bluetooth speaker.
You’re not sure what playlist he had chosen, and it would have been music you both enjoyed, except it was the wrong day to try to enjoy the artist. It started with a sad song, nothing you had a personal connection to, nothing that would make you start crying. But sad nonetheless. But then the next and the next were just as depressing.
You could feel yourself slip back into the place you were that morning. Gone was the control. And there were so many things to do.
You had to be looking at the directions, and what was originally counting parts became a duel with the dozens of little screws you were destined to lose.
You had to listen and respond to Frankie’s conversation.
The music was playing.
Every time Frankie used the drill to tighten another screw, the noise piled on top of the music.
Frankie was asking what was next. He was asking for the small screws and the washers.
You had to find the next large piece of the gable that needed to be added on.
You had to find the vent pieces. And the mesh.
You handed the piece of plastic to him and he started adding it to what was already constructed. You took the moment to take a deep breath. You had to calm yourself. If not for yourself, then for Frankie.
You’re scared of what would happen if you broke down. Frankie would be okay with it, right? But you couldn’t be sure. Your own family, who was supposed to love you, who chose to have you as a kid and raise you, lost their patience as soon as you showed the first sign of losing yours. They could snap and you had to tiptoe around them. But as soon as you snapped, it was like all hell broke loose and it was your fault. Some part of you, larger than you cared to admit, was scared Frankie would do the same.
Sufficiently calmed, and with a small but heavy stone of fear in your stomach you willed to disappear, you walked back over to the instruction manual to see what was next.
Frankie was finishing up the gables and you went over to the piles of parts, digging around to find the left door, the metal bar that would run through the one side of it to function as the hinge, and the thick casing that would be slid onto the handle side, creating a better seal when paired with the right door. There were two of the bars and two of the casings, both of which looked the exact same.
There hadn’t been any distinction between the two in the instructions, so you just picked one of each.
You brought over everything to where Frankie was working and explained what you would be doing. The bar slid down a channel on the plastic door piece. And you lined up the casing, Frankie assisting with the weight of the thing.
Just as you were about to tell him to push it on, you glanced at the instructions again. The orientation of the casing didn’t match the illustration.
“Frankie, wait.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think we’re putting it in right,” you explained. You leaned over, handing him the manual. “See that? The weird shape is on the front side of the door, not the back.”
Maybe if your brain wasn’t on the verge of exploding, you would have been able to tell you needed to flip the casing around. But you were too fried to even think of that being a possibility. You rotated it, figuring that would fix it. It didn’t.
Frankie was staring at the illustration. “The other casing piece is the same. I think we just do it this way.”
“I don’t know, what if it’s wrong?”
“It’s fine.”
“Okay,” you said. You didn’t want to argue.
You got down to the bottom of the door, holding the end so Frankie could push the metal onto the edge. He started and it moved smoothly for the first foot, and then stopped. Frankie grunted as he pushed. A couple shoves and it moved about three inches. Stuck again.
Two minutes went by and it was about halfway on. It shouldn’t have been that hard. But it was.
Frankie was getting frustrated with the thing, and you were already as stressed as you thought to be possible. So when he suggested standing the door up and trying to pull the casing down onto the frame, rather than pushing it, you nodded. As long as it worked, you didn’t care.
You sat at the bottom, holding the door steady while Frankie yanked the metal bar down as hard as he could. It made it almost all the way down within a minute, but the last few inches wouldn’t go.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “It might be a little loud.”
“Yeah?”
“I could try to hammer it down, I think it’d work.”
“Okay.” You shrugged. At least you got a warning.
He found a block of wood, and setting it on top of the metal, started hammering it down.
It was like the hammer was inside your head, echoing inside empty chambers and causing microscopic vibrations deep within and behind your eyes. You blinked back some tears, hoping Frankie wouldn’t notice. One more bang and the casing was flush with the bottom of the door.
“Imagine if we put it on the wrong way?” Frankie laughed, clearly exhausted and relieved it was done. He set the door down. “I need a break before doing the next one.”
You let out a soft laugh, and maybe it was convincing, as Frankie smiled at you and grabbed the water bottles he had left on the patio table, handing one to you and taking a large sip out of his own.
You looked over at the instruction manual, reading ahead to the next steps: installing the handle.
The illustration showed a handle being screwed into the doors, and then the latch aligned next to it, with some screws going through where the holes in the casing aligned with ones in the door inside. You walked over to the door, trying to figure out where everything would go, and there were holes in the casing a foot below where the handle would be, and they didn’t go all the way through, stopped by the flat face of the door.
“Uh, Frankie?” you asked. “Could you grab the other casing?”
“Yeah, why?” He grabbed the part and brought it to you.
You set it up next to the already-installed one, noting that one way the holes would be down below the handle, but if you flipped it over the holes would line up. “...I think it’s on the wrong way.”
“Fuck.” You could see the energy deflate from his body. Removing the casing was going to be as hard, if not harder, than putting it on. He ran his fingers through his hair and took the door in his hands, inspecting the thing.
“I’m sorry, that’s why I had paused, thought maybe we should—”
“It’s fine, it’s already happened, can’t change it,” Frankie said, his voice clipped with frustration.
You felt your body tense up. You knew it had already happened, you just didn’t want him blaming you. You didn’t want to feel the crushing sense of betrayal you had conditioned yourself to feel whenever something around you was messed up.
“Go get one of our phones, we can see if there’s a video,” Frankie instructed.
Usually, instructions were good. They set a course. A plan. A destination. But Frankie grabbed the block of wood and started trying to hammer the casing back out, the banging ringing in your ears.
Get a phone . But that required taking off your shoes, and they were dirty, and the floor inside the backdoor wasn’t someplace you liked to track in dirt. Then you’d have to find a phone. Your phone was on the table inside, but Frankie’s phone was better but upstairs, and everything else was racing through your brain, too fast to even comprehend as you felt yourself start to break down.
The music was still playing. The hammering. The casing was in the wrong damn way and it wasn’t your fault but it felt like it, and you didn’t know if Frankie blamed you for it, and everything was ruined.
And you were frozen on the deck, not sure where to go or what to do. Your breathing quickened. It felt like you were back in middle school, staring down your angered father, knowing anything you do would be the wrong thing.
Frankie stopped for a moment, looking up at your frozen figure. “Hey, I said go—”
“I know ,” you cried, everything crumbling inside your head.
You felt your knees give out as you dropped to the ground, your chest starting to heave as tears began running down your face. Within half a second, your breathing had changed from a fast pace to out of control.
Suddenly, you were gasping for air and the last thing you heard before the only sound in your head was your own labored breathing and shaky cries was a frantic “shit” from Frankie.
Your chest wasn’t on fire, no. It felt ice cold and empty. Your lungs collapsing on nothing and attempting to expand with no space to do so. The breathing pattern you couldn’t seem to escape was too fast to get more than a little glimpse of air with each inhale, and the air you got was rough, cutting across your throat as it got halfway to your lungs before being expelled out again.
In. Out. In. Out. But no oxygen made it to your brain.
The only thing running through your head was a dark and dangerous thought: you were going to die.
Something warm surrounded your hand and a voice started speaking into your ear.
“It’s okay, you’re okay. You’re having a panic attack.” Frankie was sitting next to you. You were somehow aware of that fact. “You’re going to be fine. I need you to breathe with me, okay?”
You were still stuck. You didn’t have control of your lungs anymore.
Frankie started talking. “In… and out... then in… and out.”
You could hear it and it made you feel a bit better, knowing he was there. But you couldn’t. You were trapped in your own body which had turned against you. It was trying to kill you.
In. Out. In. Out. Faster than anything Frankie was saying.
The tears running down your face were hot and there was definitely snot dripping out of your nose. This was the ugliest crying you had ever experienced, and you couldn’t even think enough to be embarrassed Frankie was seeing it.
Your chest kept heaving and it was tiring, so tiring. Your body was being driven to exhaustion and you were sweating with the exertion, everything out of your control. It hurt. So much. You could move your body, but nothing stopped the breathing. Nothing seemed to slow it down.
In. Out. In. Out. It didn’t slow. You couldn’t stop. You couldn’t do anything about it.
“I can’t…” you sobbed out between breaths. “Frankie… it won’t… stop… I can’t—I can’t breathe.”
“I know it feels that way,” he said. He squeezed your hand before letting go, returning moments later with a paper bag that had held some small parts for the shed. “Breathe into this.”
You looked at the bag in front of your face, and Frankie helped bring it to your lips. The bag sealed around your mouth and you kept breathing, the bag crinkling as it inflated and deflated rapidly. But as you were doing it, the bag seemed to slow.
It took you a lot longer to realize your breathing was slowing down too.
“You’re okay,” Frankie soothed, pulling the bag down from your mouth and wrapping an arm around your shoulders.
You leaned into him, trying to pay attention to every inhale and exhale. It felt like if you didn’t focus on them, you’d stop breathing altogether.
“Why don’t we go inside,” Frankie said. All you could do was nod.
He helped you to your feet and let you lean against him as he guided you through the back door, past the kitchen, and onto the couch in the living room.
“Wait here,” he said. He ran back into the kitchen, rummaged around, and emerged again with a glass of water, a piece of the banana bread you had made last night, a couple cubed watermelon pieces, and a few thin slices of smoked salmon. “For when you’re ready,” he said as he sat down next to you and placed the plate of food on the ottoman in front of you. “Can you describe what you see?”
“Frankie, I’m fine,” you said, trying to push yourself back up even though you knew the words were a lie. “We can keep working.”
“You just had a panic attack, we’re not finishing the damn shed,” he said. He put a hand down on your thigh, keeping you seated.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” you protested. This was Frankie’s day, and you wanted to do it for him.
“No, it’s not. You need to rest, okay?”
“But—” you stopped yourself. Why? Why did you need to protest? You weren’t fine.
And Frankie wasn’t one of the shitty people from your past. He wasn’t one of the people who looked down upon you if you took a break. There was no reason to keep going even when you were hurt with him. He had always been there to help, why wouldn’t he support you now?
You had to stop assuming he would treat you as terribly as others had. Frankie was the best person you knew.
“You came and helped,” you whispered. Breathing was still difficult and one of your hands had moved onto your chest, the motion of it lying flat across your body keeping you grounded. Frankie’s side was warm and you had leaned into it subconsciously.
“Of course I did.”
“No one ever stops what they’re doing for me.”
“You’ve had these before?”
“Sometimes.” You nodded. Another thing you didn’t talk to Frankie about. Maybe you should have. Obviously, he would have listened.
“And your family didn’t help?” You couldn’t place the tone of voice he was using, but it was close to disgust, you thought.
“No, not really,” you said. You glanced up at Frankie and saw his face do the familiar morph into anger. That was your cue to backtrack. “Well, sometimes my mom would sit by me if the hyperventilation didn’t stop after a couple minutes. So I wasn’t totally alone.”
“What the hell?”
Shit . That didn’t work. “I’m sorry—”
“Why are you apologizing?” Frankie asked. He still sounded mad but it was calming down. Almost like he had noticed his anger only served to freak you out. “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at your family. You had a panic attack, they’re supposed to help. Not make you feel even more alone.”
“I don’t know, that was always how it worked,” you said. You knew there was no way to explain things without it sounding fucked up.
Even now, years after leaving them, years after having your therapist tell you they were abusive, it was still hard to convince yourself it was the truth. They said they loved you all the time. There were moments, sometimes even days or weeks, where things were amazing. Where it felt like they cared. But then it would drop in an instant. Over the years your tolerance for things increased; hitting your limit for stress or frustration took even more and more work.
You never asked for help, that was shameful enough as it was. Your parents wanted you to develop ‘resilience.’
You never expressed anger. That wasn’t ever appropriate. It was never mature.
And your infinite patience for their ever-changing moods was never returned, with the slightest moment of confusion they would snap, tired of everything you did and said. You still didn’t know how to train yourself out of all the learned behaviors. And you didn’t have a clue how to begin to explain it to Frankie.
He could tell you were thinking, hard. “Hey, I know you don’t have a great relationship with them, and I don’t know the depth of that,” he said. “You don’t have to talk about it, but if you want to, you don’t need to keep it all inside, you know that, right?”
You could feel the tears bristling at the backs of your eyes. How many nights had you cried yourself to sleep, wishing your parents would tell you it was okay to vent your feelings, to let go of the things weighing you down? You didn’t deserve Frankie, a man a hundred times better than the family you came from. And yet, here he was, loving you without even needing to say those words. You could only nod again.
“Do you know what brought it on? The panic attack?” he asked.
You thought back to everything that led up to it. “There was just too much. Everything. Noise. Feelings. Emotions. Or, lack of emotions. Too much nothing and then too much everything, and I don’t really know, it just bubbled up and—”
“Have you been feeling okay today?” Frankie cut you off as your words began to slur together as they sped up. You had to take a moment to control your breathing again.
“Yeah, I’ve been fine.” A lie. You knew it was wrong, but you couldn’t seem to stop.
“Really? Are you sure you woke up alright? I know the shelter-in-place order’s been hard, and losing the structure of work can’t be great. Are you sure that you’re not depressed?”
“...I’m not,” you said. But it didn’t feel as strong as it usually did.
You’re looking at Frankie and he closed his eyes for a moment. You tense up, hoping he won’t be angry.
“Why didn’t you tell me this morning?” he asked. Of course, Frankie wouldn’t be mad. Why couldn’t you learn this? Time and time again, even in the last ten minutes, he had proven how much you could trust him.
“I didn’t want to ruin your day,” you admitted.
“It wouldn’t have ruined my day.” He pulled you in closer to his side, wrapping his arms around you and pressing his lips into your forehead. “Why don’t you drink some water and then try and take a nap? Or eat if you feel up to it.”
“A nap sounds good,” you said. You grabbed the glass of water Frankie was handing you and the cool liquid running down your throat soothed, but also reminded you of how much it had hurt. How much you might have injured. Not physically, but emotionally. And your body was exhausted. You wanted to curl up and sleep. “Can you stay here?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “We’re not going to do anything else today. Just be here together. We can watch a movie when you wake up and we’ll order takeout. I want you to rest.”
You nodded. You set down the glass and shuffled around, sliding your hips away from Frankie and lowering your head into his lap. Your eyes fluttered closed almost immediately but his hand, which had migrated down towards your waist, moved again, up to your head. He threaded his fingers through your hair, the pads of his fingers making their way to your scalp. With a little bit of pressure, he started massaging your head. You were pretty sure he thought you were already asleep, but you were glad you were still awake to know what he was doing, and it was enough to lull you out of consciousness, safely in the arms of the first person you ever truly trusted.