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Sideswiped.

Article Excerpt
In the middle of my life, at age fifty-seven, I suddenly know a secret about myself. Or rather, I re-remember a traumatic event in my twenties that left me shaky and confused. Confused, that is, until it collided with a night this year when I came back from giving a reading from a recently published collection of essays feeling depressed, my mind a little pocket of psychic debris. It was October 3. A night I'd worn the black jeans and black sweater that were meant to protect me. A night I'd spent the requisite hour preparing. A night I'd had neither too much nor too little coffee. I'd taken care of all the magical things I knew to take care of. The air that evening had the first chill of fall and I shivered pleasurably when I locked my car, hunching my shoulders as I walked toward the reading. Two teenage boys raced past me, night-runners full of youthful exuberance. "Fucking loser," one shouted to the other as he surged ahead. I smiled at that. Smiled, until during my reading something odd happened. Something went wrong, went sideways. Something I couldn't put my finger on though I felt panic as a dark-haired woman watched me, a lock of her hair falling loose from her ponytail. The moment I noticed her scrutiny, my mind sealed up, my voice quavered, and I mis-read a sentence. I wanted to turn to the woman and say, "Leave." Instead, I continued reading.

But driving home that night I felt shaky, confused.

Fucking loser. I thought, as I walked inside my house.

It wasn't until hours later, when I sat at my desk and read this sentence from Carruth--"just as Tancred does not hear the voice of Clorinda until the second wounding, so trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature--the way it is precisely not known in the first instance--returns to haunt the survivor ..." that the two moments--the troubled afternoon in my twenties and the night's reading--smashed up against each other in an odd grammar of symmetry. The "unassimilated nature of an original event" I suddenly understood. "Returns to haunt the survivor" I immediately grasped. I intuitively recognized that this collision clarified a sense of imminent danger I'd carried inside me for the last twenty-something years. It was a fear that had often brought me close to panic. To subdue the panic, I'd needed...

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