An apology to my daughter while having a panic attack

An apology to my daughter while having an anxiety attack: 

I am sorry 

that I cannot 

tell you 

How to corral the fear 

inside your blood 

or how to cleave 

its froth from bones. 

I am sorry I can only 

tell you truths due to all my vice. 

I am sorry I've imparted,

Through genetics 

or chronic example 

or some bastardization of the two, 

the impression of 

a woman consumed. 

I dreamt deeply of a strength

who's aroma I could no longer  detect at dawn 

but I promise I mean it

When I say I wanted to give you 

What I had never seen.

I am the daughter of a daughter of a hysterical daughter 

and I've aspired to be 

the mutation that rights  

a distressed line.

It never occurred to me

that my lungs are not designed

to breathe the fresh air of this new, uncharted space; 

that even if I ensure you survive,

I will not have the stamina 

To show you how running is done. 

It never occurred to me

that my bones are not trusting 

of the emotional summits 

I command they scale 

or that I would be chronically overcome 

by the demons 

I allow to squat in my brain. 

I wanted to be a woman 

habituated in self-love,

and yet all I've mastered 

is ancestrally self-sabotage.

Please believe me, 

despite the paucity of evidence, 

That I wanted to give you 

what I never saw, 

Up close and personal, 

a woman of 2,500 feelings

and not enslaved by a single one, 

a woman, 

who quit spiraling through

an expired evolution,

who has not broken 

hearts and promises,

who has nothing to apologize for,

so that maybe, 

Just maybe,  

my pitfalls

would remain my own 

And not have to be the trigger 

announcing 

where some of your real work 

begins. 

A request only true love could fulfill

Take me away.

To the dewy haven you described in scents and textures, rather than landmarks and catchphrase. Someplace surrounded with the rocks like bone marrow jutting out from the land, bleeding foliage, bleeding striated earth, bleeding a million insects intertwined.

My nerves will rumble with adventure on the car ride over. I’ll be diluted with a nonspecific hope for our nonspecific destination. Because it doesn’t matter if it’s precise. We will rock back and forth in our tumble of language, laughter weaving in and out of the open, racing windows of the car. Your car will feel bigger and then smaller depending on the talks—maybe we’ll poke fun at some remnant memory between ourselves, maybe I’ll tell you about the vodka vomit I spewed at age 19, maybe you will tell me about the quiet intimacies of married life that I know nothing about. I don’t know what will get mined and pecked and what will get split and shared. It doesn’t matter. There are always syllables between us and though profuse they are never superficial.

The landscape will change, churn into a different season as we climb north. And the trees will look like graduated clusters of broccoli trying hard to masquerade like Indian corn. I’ll want to stick my hand into the horizon and sweep their branches in my palm, letting all the rough edges chaff the callouses on my hands. The catch of the calluses will make me feel satisfied, will make me feel as if I have lived a life that is meaningful and profound. You’ll catch the drift of that thought, even if I don’t say it; you’ll squeeze my hand to say you understand.

We will get to the place that you promised to take me, a place of seeped with silent woods and subtle sounds perpetually rising from the dead forest floor. We’ll be stiff when we arrive. Our limbs will be saturated with the burdens of our conversations, with the limitedness of words, with the panged parameters of too much time in your tiny car. We’ll stretch and splay, in our own unique devises and we’ll smile, quietly, knowingly.

My blood will rush again, remembering the nonspecific hope of nonspecific novelty. We’ll walk, into the preserving, chilled scent of earth, into the enclosures of life without tools, into dirt and water and ash. Into trees that may have existed before the creation of human names. My blood will rush again, so zealously it will feel purple inside my pulse, it will be purple all wrapped up into my booming heart.

You’ll hold my hand and it will be much warmer than mine. There is always an inferno in the palm of your hand, as if it is your enthusiasm for life is always in your clutches. You’ll stroke the exposed skin of my neck with your lips, feeling the low thud of my jugular. I will relish that prelude, a gamete of a kiss. I’ll be smiling when my hand breaks away from your hands, blood heightened to such speeds that the stillness of an autumn forest will become the most animated setting I’ve seen. It will be a beauty that will almost inspire me to turn back.

But I won’t because I asked you to take me away. I don’t know where we are going but this is beautiful, all of it.  None of this has to be precise.

Maybe I will hear the trigger startling the silence of the forest. Maybe I will feel the fear stowed away in the trees when unnatural sounds disrupt their meditation. Maybe there is an eternity of insight between the entry and exit points of a bullet.

I will wish I could let you know but not as much as I want you to take me away.