Free The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse

emptiness just beyond the horizon, exponentially gathering momentum like a breaker waiting to crest. It pressed at the edge of my thoughts and I’d closed my eyes and pulled the pillow tight around my head, praying that sleep would ward it off and deliver me safely into the next morning.
    But now the feeling was in my stomach, a spasming, nauseating anxiety that left no room for any positive thought or even volition. Panic was all there was. I turned on my side and curled into a foetal position but it only spilled further into my body, a viscous liquid slowly finding its level again. Getting out of bed was impossible. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t see any reason to: a paralysis had taken hold of me, as if my brain had lost the ability to send instructions to my limbs. A familiar sense of agoraphobic limitlessness stretched and stretched until I became the centre of a world that I could fall through for ever without coming to anything solid.
    One afternoon when I was twelve, Dad and Matt had gone to look at a neighbour’s new telescope and I had been left alone in the house for the first time. As soon as the front door closed behind them, a strange quiet had settled. I wandered from room to room, enjoying the peace and the subtle air of difference that seemed to have come over the familiar things. I had a vision of myself as an adult, the house and the furniture and objects in it mine to do with as I wanted. I was the owner, independent, and my roles as daughter and sister fell away.
    Then the feeling had changed. The silence became oppressive, a great weight that threatened to crush me. There was nothing in it, no distractions, nothing but more of the same: silent time rolling on into an empty future. It had been a mild day, still only April, but sweat broke out on my forehead. There was no structure to anything, I suddenly understood, nothing apart from what you could make. I’d recently learned about agoraphobia and I hadn’t been able to imagine it. Then, though, I could: it was panic at the sheer limitlessness of everything. There was nothing to keep you rooted down.
    That was the first time I’d had the feeling but I had come to recognise it since then, to sense it rolling towards me, gathering pace and momentum like an avalanche. The only way to deal with it, experience had taught me, was to throw things in its way, create barriers of distractions – work, going out with Helen, talking to my brother, the flings with the men whom I saw for a week or two and then pushed away before they got close, trips to galleries and concerts and films: anything that could ward it off, even for an hour. Now, though, here on the Island, I was cut off from my old life and the little structure it had offered me. I was on my own.
    If you want to be alone, then be alone . Richard’s last message ran through my mind, finding its mark over and over again. He knew exactly how to get to me, of course; he had learned me inside out, storing information about me with an avidity I had loved. He had asked me question after question about my life, as if he had been swotting for a cool metropolitan version of Mr and Mrs in which prizes depended on him providing the correct answers. He was so different to my previous boyfriend, David, a teacher and a sweet man whose avuncular warmth had reminded me a little of my father. I’d tried with David, I’d really tried, but I’d begun to feel first stultified, then smothered by his mildness and his references to ‘settling down’, an expression and idea which I’d loathed. It had been three years since we’d split up and in the months before I’d met Richard I’d started to wonder whether I’d been stupid to throw it away. The excitement I felt with Richard, however, the intensity of his focus, was confirmation that I’d been right: stability wasn’t enough.
    One evening at our table in the corner of the French restaurant in Kensington – it had become our regular haunt – the candle