Deep Panic

*Although not a poem, I need an outlet.

The COVID-era anxiety has returned. I close the bathroom door and press the red towel against my face so my partner can’t hear my suffocated sobs. It’s a relief to have my tears absorbed. Too much is happening. The CDC is instructing scientists to retract and pause any research containing terms on sexuality and gender diversity. Modified references to transgender people, gender identity, and equity have been removed from their website, in addition to vaccine consideration information, environmental justice, HIV risk behaviors, and fact sheets pertaining to HIV across different races, ethnicities, and within transgender populations. I am worried about my friends and my community and I am worried about not doing more to support my best friend and her transgender wife to leave the country when they proposed the idea last month. Maybe if I had been a better friend, less judgemental, they would have gone. Oklahoma’s 1st session of the 60th Legislature proposes removing school-based therapeutic services for children to access FAPE from their public school system. Effective June 1, 2025. Marco Rubio is in Panama threatening to retake control of the canal. USAid is in the process of being shut down. History is being whitewashed as government DEI programs are shut down. Guantanamo Bay is now prepared for indefinite detainment of migrants. Hundreds of Marine soldiers were sent out this weekend. “Due process,” my ass. Kristi Noem, why don’t you ask Mohammed El Gharani about the “due process” he received while detained there? The fact remains that torture on U.S. soil versus on U.S.-occupied territory will always be an atrocity. The responsibility will always stay close to home. There is no difference between Guantanamo and the 457 camps implemented in German-occupied Poland. Distance and time cannot change the liability. Think of El Salvador. Over 900 innocent civilians massacred in El Mozote. Their deaths funded by the USA. Killers trained here in Fort Benning, Georgia. Makes me think of the bombs Nikki Haley wrote on before they were sent into Gaza.

I opened Instagram. Learned how to respond to ICE if they enter the hospital. Watched another reel about what to do if they arrive at your door. What if they come to a home I am working in? Last year, they came into a neighborhood I still work in. I saw them in my rearview mirror walking up the driveway. One flashed his badge as he stalked over to my car door. Talked to me through my cracked window. I only gave a five-word response. Maybe that was too much. I don’t see the family’s grey pickup truck, or their pride flag anymore. In December, I wrote a plea to the court for reinstatement of financial support for a three-year-old patient with significant needs due to her developmental disability resulting from chromosomal abnormalities. What if I said something wrong and the courts continue to deny her access to care? What if the family is deported? Maybe I didn’t say enough.

And there’s more. There will continue to be more. Each day brings undue hardship. Last week, during the federal program funding freeze, I thought I would lose my job. Which may still happen. Every conversation I have with my parents is like chewing on glass. My tongue bleeds from restraint. “I just care about the economy,” my mother said. I hope she is enjoying the stock market losses, social security threats, and the price of eggs. Despite our family breakfast this morning, she is urging (guilting) me to have a birthday party with my church family. All of them unable to crawl out of their religious conviction for one moment to recognize their harm. Can I stomach it? Can I choke down the bile long enough to remember that they conditionally love me? Or at least an inauthentic version of me. “Safety” not necessarily being a word in their lexicon.

Alexander Motovilov’s “Hijo de la Luna” plays on loop now. Reminding me that I gazed at the crescent moon while pulled over in the court parking lot. Moments before, the wind had blown so carelessly that something crashed into my car and got stuck. I watched move it in my side mirror as I cruised down the street. Flailing around, it deafeningly collided with the body of my car over and over. Worried it might be my wired-on bumper somehow ripped off in the gusts of wind, I got out to check. How am I going to deal with this? How can I handle rearranging my schedule that I put so much effort into creating? But nothing is amiss except the suffocatingly too-warm February gale and the hazy Earthshine glow above the mountains.

Passing through the city to the highway was eerie. All of my senses were on high alert as I passed block after block of darkness. The power cut off in all directions. When going through the major intersection, I was reminded of the uncertainty that wind and power can bring. The air feels too much like it did when I went for a walk around my neighborhood in 2021 and 6,000 acres proceeded to burn. This is fire danger territory. The air is too dry here in Colorado. We have to prepare. I need to make a go-bag, just in case. I hope my passport is where I usually keep it but if it isn’t there when I get home, where else would I have placed it? I need to renew my passport. I wonder when I’ll have time to do that. What If I get home and there’s no power and I can’t charge my computer or phone? What will I do if a fire happens in the middle of the night? Do my partner and I take separate vehicles? Where are our meet-up places to the east and west? I am almost out of gas. I imagined myself loading up my car with belongings as I rush out of the apartment, only to run out of gas down the street and be forced to watch my building go up in flames. What if the evacuation orders don’t come to our phones and we burn alive? I don’t think I’d mind if I died right now. My uncle is dying sometime soon. He’s made peace with it. I think I can too. A jolt of nerve pain ran up abdomen from right below my belly button and to the bottom of my right breast as I held my breath to not cry. Have I felt this pain before? Is something new wrong? What if I’m having another flare up? I forgot to order the new prescriptions the surgeon placed last week. Maybe that’s what I’ll do first when I get home. But maybe I need to pack a go-bag first. Oh shit. I forgot to get gas.

At home, I sat on the couch and stared at the dust on my baseboard. I spent three hours cleaning the floors of the four-story home today. Grime had turned all of the white baseboards brown. The neglect visible like a bruise on skin. “Too tight,” N told me when I hugged her goodbye. That’s what my chest felt like too. My heartbeat pounding so intensely, noticeably vibrating the surface of my skin. Too tight. I felt it all constricting as I strain to suck in a breath through the red towel over my mouth. The litany of stressors muted temporarily to cope with the hyperventilating.