Free Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir by Rita Zoey Chin

what he’d practiced: “Respectful greetings, honorable Mother and Father.” Then, as people kept scurrying past him, he bowed.
    I have always loved this story of Larry as a four-year-old boy about to meet his parents, in part because every time I think about it, it breaks my heart. I imagine Larry in his bow tie, wanting so desperately to be a good boy, a boy his parents would want to keep. And as he grew up, he never lost the awareness that parents can put you on a plane and send you away, so he fashioned himself into a boy whose indisputable goodness would prevent that from happening again. He never got into trouble, never missed a day of school, and skipped two grades in the process. There was never a temper tantrum, never a stolen pack of gum, never a cigarette smoked. There was never dirt trackedinto the house or a harsh word spoken or a grade less than an A. Still, his mother was quick to point out when another boy got higher accolades on a science project or when another boy was more adoring of his mother. So for Larry, love was a constant negotiation based on merit. And the formality he’d first experienced when he was reunited with his parents lasted. His parents shared it, too: his father, when he became enraged at his mother, would lock himself in a closet and mutter under his breath. In their home, this was how you dealt with emotion: you quite literally locked it in a closet. Part of what I found comforting about Larry when we started dating was his emotional steadfastness: he didn’t like things that were messy and unpredictable, and after years with parents so violent that the police were regular guests at our apartment, that was fine by me. But the panic attacks happening to me now were exactly that: messy and unpredictable. And they threatened everything that Larry had grown up believing; they threatened the white-picket parcel of his life.
    In the weeks following my first encounter with the ambulance staff, my panic attacks had proliferated like mice. I simply woke up one day, infested. I began to fear things I didn’t know were possible to fear: the shower, the grocery store checkout line, open spaces, small spaces, heat, crossing a street, driving, any form of exertion—even climbing a flight of stairs filled me with dread, because most of all, I feared my heart: despite what the paramedics said, despite what Larry said, I was convinced my heart was a time bomb. I didn’t trust it. So I tiptoed around it carefully, as if it were a sleeping monster. And I began to avoid anything that might disrupt it. If I just sat very still, maybe my heart and I could coexist.
    But of course, I had to get up. I had to pee, wash my hair, buy eggs. And when I did those things, I panicked. I panicked in the shower, in the car, in the grocery store. I panicked slicing avocados, running a brush through my hair. I panicked for no apparent reason, over and over again, each time feeling slightly more battered than the last. Most of the time I ran outside to the front step, as if it were the magical placeof safety, the cusp, the line between out and in, the place where both options were possible.
    When I wasn’t panicking, I worried about panicking and about all the grizzly calamities that can befall a person. I began to narrate everything as if it were a scene in a horror movie. As I got dressed, I’d think, You’re going to fall down the stairs and break your neck. No matter what I did or where I went, there were the thoughts: A plane will crash into the living room. A tree branch will fall on your head. You will choke on a bite of sandwich . A mosquito will infect you with eastern equine encephalitis . There was no end or escape. Everything seemed fraught with danger, even the most benign things, even the most absurd.
    Sometimes I couldn’t make it through the checkout line at the grocery store. I’d drop my basket and run from the store trying to catch my breath, my body trembling. Even in the safety of my own