Merging

Then he was on the freeway.

He realized he was alone, all alone in his car, and this was a problem. He’d been running around, running errands, lifting stuff, just generally active, and this was going to be a problem. Wasn’t it. How could it not be?

His mind had been blissful until he hit that ramp, where you can’t just stop and put it into reverse. He was really on it now.

He performed his usual calculations: his blood sugar at sunrise was a little high, 180, but it’s usually higher in the morning. He had 2 beers the evening before that should not interfere. He had soy milk instead of usual milk with breakfast, but this shouldn’t be a great factor. He made a trip to the junction, picked up cat food and candles and spent a lot of time at the record store. Not that it amounts to a lot of activity, but it isn’t sitting, either. And he was walking briskly. He thinks that he should be even. Perhaps even a little high, not too high, but safely high.

But he was shaking and his heart was racing and he could feel the tickling at his scalp, and it started once he got on the freeway.

His breath was labored. He has to be suffering insulin shock. And he is stuck. He is captive of this vehicle that continues to go forward, and even if he stopped, then what? Running back would burn him out to a finish. Even if he managed to wave a car to a stop, they would have to have food. What are the chances of that? His arms felt heavy on the steering wheel. He resolved to just go forward and pray there are no delays and that it doesn’t take more than eight or ten minutes to get off this freeway and to a small drugstore or market where he can collapse, no maybe he’ll have time to grab a sports drink or something and he’ll make it but fuck, eight minutes? He knows he has half that, and there is simply no way. He has four or three or two.

His heart rate gets faster and faster, but that is it.

He doesn’t feel like he’s losing consciousness; he doesn’t feel like he is dying. He only feels the stress and the panic, and he comes to feel that that is all this is. Panic. Because he made a bad turn, got into a situation where he wasn’t in control, where he was a bug trapped on his back to chance’s indiscriminate heel. He feels a little silly about it.

Because it undermined his logic. Ever since day one, he had taken the diabetes in stride. He was neither depressed nor catastrophic about it when diagnosed: the doctor even commented on how calmly he took it in as he listened to all the things he would have to do, all the changes he would have to make. There was a simple reason for this. He had already absorbed his own death as a possibility, as a scenario, imagining it in hundreds of contingents. The diabetes meant nothing to him but to bring death a little closer. He had already desensitized death to make life more enjoyable – something he was thankful for on those first nights home from the hospitable when he would go to sleep not knowing if he would wake up in the morning.

The panic attack proved he was somehow afraid of death. He felt like he was ending a long run of irrational bravado. And he could not figure out for how long this fear had been creeping into his mind. All of this he thought as his shoulders shook and his heart went mad with beating; that these were the signs that he wanted to survive.