Introduction

Hello PoemStellium readers! I am Elena Sirett (they/them) and this is my first blog for the site. I am so excited to be a part of the wonderful team of writers discussing mental health. The following piece is about a panic attack and a breakup I experienced this summer, about the feeling of something bad coming, about how anxiety over being abandoned often causes behaviors that lead to that exact result. I am not sure how to define this genre wise, forever being stubbornly genre-fluid, but I suppose I’ll call it memoir/story/poem/confession. Thank you for reading.

Panic Attack Autopsy
I am in a marble floored hotel room in Naples and I am repeatedly scratching at the webbing-like piece of flesh between my thumb and my index finger. This piece of me aches, itches, part of me believes that if I can only find a flake of purchase this will be the place where the flaying starts. My skin feels tight, not just uncomfortable but suffocating, I say repeatedly as I scratch “I can’t get out, why can’t I get out”. This writhing goes on for hours. I can’t stop seeing myself as the alien in Under the Skin, when they finally shed their human disguise and are revealed all charcoal and screaming. I imagine it would feel like taking off a binder or a corset or peeling back a plaster on your heel just to see the adhesive rip the blister open, my skin is an outfit I
don’t like.

At 5am I shower, the shower door has no seal, the hotel room begins to flood. We use all the towels provided to soak up the mess, then pile them in a corner. At 6am my partner goes out to find a pharmacy. By the time he returns with hawthorn pills and brioche buns I am finally sleeping.

When does a panic attack start?

I perform the autopsy. I flip through the preceding days. I had been sick, an unfortunately timed 48 hour stomach flu immediately before a long awaited holiday, so I hadn’t eaten hardly at all let alone properly. My flight out to meet my partner in Italy was a stress. I find travel anxiety inducing at the best of times and with this one the queues were long, my suitcase was overweight so cost me more money than I had intended to spend, the plane was delayed. I realise that it was in my seat that the feeling creeped upwards. So maybe it was the journey and the lack of food. Maybe it was that plus the gnawing fears the holiday had conjured. Fears like: this holiday is a
test that I will fail and then I will be broken up with. Fears like: I don’t know how to relax. Fears like: Even if I did know how to relax I don’t deserve to.

Maybe it was the journey, the food and the fears plus everything else, sometimes it feels like I contain this absolute primal terror, this skin clawing screaming thing, that in those moments of panic I am the most honest I’ve ever been.

I remember being 18 on the floor of my first partner’s bedroom, I felt that I was drowning and in the moments I could gasp for air it was only because she was there to hold on to. I remember being curled up at the bottom of a stairwell on a snowy night whilst house party guests covered my convulsing body in coats as they waited for the paramedics to arrive. I remember being in a
bathroom with my mother, telling her that I was trying.

The following day my partner and I explore the city, we go to a museum, drink violet spritzes, eat pizza. It’s the usual tourism. Despite my exhaustion and fragility, we carry on with the holiday as planned. Each day I feel the itch between my fingers, each day I am subtle when I scratch it. We move on to the countryside, to the thinnest point of Italy’s boot, to the beaches, to
his grandfather’s home. I am afraid of my panic, of my need to leave my skin even as that skin freckles and occasionally burns in the sun. I mostly keep things at bay. It’s easy in a way, to be in a place where I don’t speak the language. It feels normal. Like how I always feel but without the
pressure of having to communicate. I have a reason to not understand people, a reason to zone out, a reason to allow others to speak for me. Most of my conversations are with stray cats and honestly that’s how I prefer things. I am insecure, hyper aware of every slight shift in my partner’s attentions, the mattress is too hard for me to sleep on so every night I create a nest of
pillows to protect my hips.

I naively hope I can leave my panic in the ocean. “Swim with the fishes” that’s a threat in mafia movies, a synonym for death. If death is like swimming with the fishes then I won’t mind it all that much. One day a yellow polka-dotted young moray eel gawps up at me. That night my partner’s grandfather told a story that was roughly translated to me. As a young man he would dive down to the eels’ porous rocky homes, forearm wrapped in white gauze. The morays would latch on to the arm, and then unable to move their mouths further would be brought up to land,cooked and eaten. There’s probably a lesson in that somewhere, something about knowing when to open up and not knowing when to let go.

There’s a lot of death at the dinner table, a lot of bones for the strays, at one point I am the token vegetarian at a steakhouse, I see young locals carry dead fish from the sea. Many days when I swim there are forest fires happening in the hills above the shore. The contrast of fire and water, of holiday paradise and tragedy, of the dead animal on the table and the living ones in the sea. I feel like a barely contained pustule, a sore and deep spot on a cheek bone, I feel like I will burst if brushed in the wrong way, I feel like I could ooze for days.

When I get back to London it is midnight, Stansted looks like hell in the rain.

When does a panic attack end?

I’m inclined to narrativise to say that all this was a premonition, that I knew my heart was on the brink of being broken, that after all I was right, I failed the test didn’t I?

When he tells me I cry, of course I cry. But I’m not surprised.

To say I’m a fortune teller would be a lie, I’m a fortune maker. I believe in my fears so strongly that they have no choice but to become reality.

By the river in those nights after. I drink wine from the bottle with a stranger, as we kiss I stare through their face, I stare at the steps back into the water.

Written by elena sirett

BLOGGER @POEMSTELLIUM