I AM NO LONGER CONSTANTLY WORRIED THAT EVERYONE I LOVE IS GOING TO DIE A HORRIBLE, PAINFUL DEATH

an affirmation

I stand at my kitchen island zooming in on Find My Friends like a sorority girl dating a J name. I watch a small dot with my boyfriend’s initials (neither of which are J) make its way down a two-lane highway somewhere in upstate New York. There is jazz music playing in the background, and it’s from a Spotify curated playlist called “Jazz in the Background.”

There are people who played in sexy nasty legendary jazz clubs who pioneered entire genres, who inadvertently are responsible for my own tastes a la what-you-don’t-know-is-that-that-sweater-is not-just-blue-it’s-not-turquoise-it’s-not-lapis-it’s-actually-cerulean, who thousands, including me, know only as the artist responsible for that one song on the “Jazz in the Background” playlist, and this makes me sad. Though, not as sad as imagining my boyfriend’s head split open like a watermelon on the side of the road in buttfuck nowhere, which I have been imagining several times a day for the past week.

My boyfriend is on a biking trip for which he is ill-prepared, but overly zealous about. He trained for about two weeks. I know that he is smart and responsible, even if I had to be the one to buy him several highlighter yellow bike jerseys. He enjoys the journey and loves to be challenged. I love to pretend to be totally fucking cool with all of this until the moment he leaves the house.

When I was around twelve, my therapist diagnosed me with something called Catastrophic Thinking Disorder. This developed after a few traumatic years of, frankly, Looney Toons proportions — my mother suffered a psychotic break and left me on a train in another state, the next summer she got robbed at gunpoint while I was on the phone with her, meanwhile my father was having an amazing time dating a woman who literally wanted me dead, the house got foreclosed on, and also I was super worried that I was getting like, really fat for a twelve year old.

A few weeks prior, my mom had left the dog in the care of her friend for the weekend while she went on a work trip. I told my mom that I had a “bad omen” about the friend, but it was probably the reasonable choice not to take my concerns into consideration. I was a superstitious, witchy kid who regularly made her own ouija boards and read a lot of fantasy. However, the dog did immediately get hit by a car within hours of us leaving her at that house, so when the therapist informed me that my catastrophic concerns were outsized, I respectfully disagreed.

I struggled for a while with the fact that my parents would continue to be flawed human beings and make decisions outside of my recommendations. I tried my best to get ahead of the bullshit before the bullshit got ahead of me. I demanded that my parents keep in touch with me about each and every one of their whereabouts and they mostly didn’t but were truly, I think, trying to. I don’t blame my mother for not texting me in the middle of her booty calls, I only wish I weren’t home alone with cucumbers over my eyes trying to breathe deeply through the tears like a great-aunt on a soap opera, pretending it wasn’t happening.

I mostly do not struggle with this kind of anxiety now. The life I live today is sickeningly cushy. I am purposely boring. I genuinely find excitement in new produce at the farmer’s market and reading a particularly good essay collection on the couch with my cat. My twelve year old self was in the trenches so that I could one day be twenty three, asking my boyfriend in a baby voice if he could fill up my water bottle.

When he returns from his bike trip a week later, I’m ready to pop the champagne and welcome the many friends I’d invited over for the occasion. And then I looked into his face and realized that he literally looked like those before-and-after photos of when they sent teenagers into WWI. He was shell-shocked from the journey, stumbling into our apartment, absolutely insane tan lines marking the tops of his elbows.

His journey had indeed been harrowing, and he was very happy to be home. He told me he had spent days biking past eighteen-wheelers on a narrow shoulder of the road (my nails are breaking the skin on my thighs at this point in the story, while I keep smiling and trying to remind myself that he already had his brush with death so I probably shouldn’t threaten it again now). He stayed with strangers and ran on just a few hours of sleep every day.

I was worried the whole time and, hearing this, I know that I was right to be. But at this point, I am very practiced at leveling with myself. I can’t and shouldn’t be the arbiter of someone else’s decisions, and ultimately there’s nothing I can do but wait for him to die or come home.

Any single day of the week, every person I love could step out into traffic and get hit by a bus, or run into a cyclist who throws them into the street where they get hit by a bus, or trip on the sidewalk which sends them into the path of a cyclist, who then throws them into the street, into the path of the bus, or dies from undetected terminal cancer, or is in the bodega when it gets shot up, or is on the Earth when the sun explodes. I decide to love them anyway.

Also I told my boyfriend that he should just do something normal next year like run a marathon.