Bugaboo

I bought a big red suitcase on Saturday. An optimistic gesture, since one of the pesky residual symptoms of the big post-miscarriage depression is a fucking fear or fucking flying. I was never afraid to fly before. I loved flying. I loved travel. It was one of my great strengths, having such a sporting attitude about adventure.

Now the thought of flying puts my stomach in knots. It's not a fear of terrorists or of falling out of the sky, but of having a big fat panic attack in a sealed container 38,000 feet above the earth. There are drugs for this. I know these drugs work. But my brain likes to invent scenarios in which the drugs suddenly don't work and I'm trapped! I'm the crazy lady on the plane, convulsing in the aisles, disrupting everyone's plans, forcing an emergency landing, sending the FAA into fits.

This will not happen. My rational brain tells my dinosaur brain that while it may send out crazy imaginings that feel real, they are mere obsessive fantasies with no more substance than fog. I have a cross-country flight coming up in less than two weeks and I'm trying to hold on to that fact. And packing drugs.

Yesterday, on the way back from a little Sunday road trip, my parents and I stopped for dinner at a casual restaurant in a fancy town. A really rather cute couple came in pushing a little dumpling of a baby in a Bugaboo stroller that was the same shade of red as my new suitcase. My mom rubbed my arm sympathetically. I didn't fail to note the poignancy of this parallel...that, rather than being whole and happy with a baby and toting my new red stroller (though I would never, ever buy a Bugaboo, nojudgementandallthat), I am left with a phobia and a discount suitcase.