New Years
Panaphobia: Constant Fear of an Unknown Cause
I was half-awake when the nurse carted me into the elevator. Somehow on a gurney in the hospital. There were black dots in my vision. The nurse saw my eyes flutter.
“Why’d you do it? You’re so young,” he said.
“I just had a bad night, I guess.”
Agateophobia: The Fear of Insanity
Desha and I were in theater classes together in high school. We would stay up all night watching Pajama Game or You Can’t Take it with You on VHS’s we borrowed from our drama class, and I would feed her lines. There was always food. Sometimes we would eat everything we could find, others we would eat nothing. That’s what life was like. I wouldn’t eat for days at a time, and then when I allowed myself too, I was starving. That’s what most of the girls I knew did. It was expected. It was the only way to be more beautiful. You had to feel the dull, sharp pain that came with being empty. It occupied my mind and got me away from the worry of deadlines and death. Even then we were both depressed. I could count every rib.
After our first viewing of You Can’t Take it with You, we laid down in her queen sized bed and she turned on the Christmas lights that were wrapped around the walls. She flipped through all the settings, and for a long time we laid together quietly, watching the lights appear and disappear. Then, she pressed the button once again and the room went dark.
I felt her body turn sideways next to me. “Will you hold me?” she said.
I reached my arm around her and tucked my hand in the space beneath her stomach.
“Thanks,” she said. My stomach growled against her spine, and I wondered what it would be like to starve to death, until I finally fell into a troubled sleep.
Dentophobia: The Fear of Dentists
Dentists have these highest suicide rate of any occupation. What terrible things do they see at the back of your throat and between your teeth? There’s choked down words, places where you’ve bit your tongue and your gums or is it the ground-down enamel that gets scratched away beneath junk food and worry?
Donald Hall once said, “I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in."
I wonder what his dentist thought when he saw his heart in his mouth. Did the dentist use a poem to let him in?
Atychiphobia: The Fear of failure
The psychiatric wing isn’t much different than the rest of the hospital, except for the occasional cross-eyed woman announcing the world’s end. That and you’ve gotta be buzzed in.
When I went to see Desha, it was fall of our freshman year of college. The walls were bare and the air was cold. Desha was at a long table coloring with a box of five dollar crayons. Everyone was calm. A doctor with a clipboard sat at a second long table beside Desha’s with five or six patients. One colored, two stared at the TV, and the others shuffled their feet or stared at the ceiling. Everything felt empty.
“I hate it here,” Desha said. Her hair was a frizzy red. It was a beautiful, messy fire around her.
“Why did you check yourself in?” I said. I looked at the floor and my bangs fell in my face. I nervously pushed them back.
“I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“Well, I’m proud of you,” I put my hand on top of hers.
She grabbed my hand then and squeezed it for a minute before dropping her hands to her lap.
“I told Dr. Eshelmeyer I was sick. He gave me an extension on my paper.”
“Don’t think about that now,” I said.
She looked down at the floor for a moment and nervously wrapped her hands around her lower arms.
Later, we would make jokes about how she was in the nuthouse. Sometimes, we cope by sickly, desperately twisting the situation until it’s funny. She calls her prescription happy pills. We both smile at that. We have a kind of understanding people can’t get in on. We are aware of each other, familiar the way only old friends can be.
“Write me a poem,” she said, pouting, when the doctors said I had to leave.
I brushed my hand across my forehead and push back my bangs again.
“Okay.”
Haphephobia: The Fear of Touch
Five days after New Years and I didn’t feel quite right.
When Mitch kissed the ink-stained curve between my ribcage and hip I laughed and pulled away a bit. He looked at me with a question: Okay? his eyes asked.
“It tickles.”
He touched me like I might break, lingered on the empty spaces between bones. I reached up to wrap my hand around his neck and he grabbed it delicately at the wrist, placed his lips lightly where, days before, a nurse had stuck the IV in.
“Where’s Mitch?” I had asked her.
“He’s in the waiting room. This is the emergency wing,” she said and then went back to poking at the monitors and checking my temperature.
Before she left, she paused and said, “Your boyfriend’s a good guy.”
Depression
Depression is a good word. Like the depression your body leaves in the sheets when you can’t bear to move your body, when there’s some pressing matter, some matter pressing into your chest.
Trypophobia: The Fear of Patterns
Some lines from poems stick with me. It’s like when you only know the chorus of a song. I keep CDs of Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot in my car, and on occasion listen, just so I can remember that next line, just so the words will stop repeating.
“There will be time, there will be time….”
Ergophobia: The Fear of Work
When are you a dentist? Is it the day you finally find a job or the moment you get your degree? Is it the first time you look down a stranger’s mouth? Or the first time you think maybe life isn’t worth living?
Are you depressed? Was it the moment when you met your broken best friend? The first thought about death? The moment you walked in the hospital? Was it when you waited in the cushioned dentist chair gazing at the pictures of teeth and tongues? Or was it the first taste of a poem?
Monophobia: The Fear of Being Alone
Only two hours to 2011 and I was crying hysterically. The tears wouldn’t turn off. My body was a painful pile: burning chest, hot cheeks, dry throat and emptiness.
“You’re gonna be fine,” Mitch said. I nodded my head, hardly hearing, hardly there at all, and tried to tighten my lips into a smile. I knew he had to leave for work.
“Alone,” I thought, “Alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea.”
I’m embarrassed. I hate to be so dramatic, but this is what I thought about, this line from a dead poet. I felt alone, all, all alone, alone on New Year’s Eve. I thought about how I never wrote Desha that poem, how so many things remain unsaid, undone. I thought of all the tests I’d have to take, all the essays I’d have to write, all the people I’d have to see, but mostly I felt a burning emptiness. There was a terrible pain in my chest. I thought that it would never stop, I thought there could be no worse pain, but I was wrong.
Scopophobia: The Fear of Being Stared At
“This will go very smoothly. If the patient complies.” The doctor stared straight at me.
“If the patient complies,” he said again and again.
The words replayed in my mind, but I wasn’t a part of all this. I was slipping away, half conscious. Somewhere people were counting down to 2011 and I had started the process of dying. I often dream I’m flying, but I never get far off the ground. I felt that then. It was a pain like you couldn’t imagine, something inhuman.
Mitch was sitting in the corner staring at me. His hair was pushed up. He looked crazy. He nervously ran his hand over his head again and again. I tried to smile at him. My lips wouldn’t tighten. I stared at him. His blue eyes were stuck to me. I thought maybe I’d never see him again. This thought was overwhelming. More overwhelming than the thought of poems I might never write, than the thought of midterms or two more years of school or the four years of grad school to follow. My heart picked up to a rapid “I am, I am, I am,” which filled the room. When the doctor finally pushed the tube down my throat there was a panic, a rapid, “beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” the doctor said, but the nurses were still as statues. The tube was still stuck in my throat and there was vomit all over me.
Necrophobia: The Fear of Death
Last December was three years after my suicide attempt. I was sitting in a white chair in our messy living room, across from Mitch. He was watching Louie on Netflix. The curtain opened and Louie said, “More suicides occur on New Year’s Eve than any day of the year.”
I cringed a bit. I didn’t look at Mitch and he didn’t look at me.
Neophobia: The Fear of New Experiences
Humans have completely new cells every seven years. Every seven years you are brand new. Every seven years you’ve lost everything about you. New Years is about changing, about starting new, about resolution. Then why do so many people want to die?
It’s the presents, the pictures of perfect families, the catalogs full of yuletide joy, and the constant reminder from everyone around that they have friends and families and material things. It’s the way the winter makes you want to crawl back in bed, the way cold makes you shiver, how everything outside is dead. It’s the way the past creeps up on you, the memories of failures and loneliness. It’s all the things you know you’ll have to do again and it’s the fear of the unknown, of something coming that’s worse than anything you’ve experienced already. It’s the way the fear of death can strike so hard you wish you could just get it over with. It’s fear. At least, that’s what it was for me.
Bibliophobia: The Fear of Books
Some dentists die like stars. They burnout.
They study themselves sick, die from maxilla, where the lower teeth are located, in the upper arch, from mandible, the lower arch, from dentin, what the bulk of the tooth is composed of, from pulp and ligaments and gingiva. They die with the definitions repeating again and again.
Some dentists die like Sylvia Plath, with gas lines cut and heads in ovens; like Anne Sexton, with gas and a glass of vodka; like David Foster Wallace, with a rope around his neck. Some dentists die with the last line of a poem still on their lips. Some dentist die like Richard Cory did, but I am not a dentist.
“There will be time, there will be time…
ALLISSA HERTZ is part of the Mile-High Creative Writing MFA at Regis University and was the Fall 2013 Editor of Nebo: A Literary Magazine. Her works have appeared in Literary Review-East and Black Couch Literary Magazine.