Barcelona

I went to Barcelona after graduating high school in 1995. Going to college in the U.S. wasn't going to be far enough away. The first couple of months went well. I was 17 and turned 18 while I was there. I played a lot of soccer. There was this bar called La Bolsa. Drinks were all listed on a computer screens. The prices of the drinks went up and down over the course of the night. It was like the stock market and every night the market would crash and the prices of drinks would all drop. It was fun.

In the beginning of December, I got what felt like a cold. I stopped attending classes at the language school I was enrolled in. Dorotea Blanco, the older woman whose flat I lived in kept trying to get me out of the house. She didn't like having her boarders in the house during the day. After a couple days of feeling mildly sick, I started to feel worse. It had been a week and horrible thoughts were inhabiting my brain. It didn't help that during this time I was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, which is all about a man, death, and Spain.

At sunset I would become terrified. As the day ended and night began, I would often attempt to call my parents from the one telephone in the flat, a flat shared by four boarders including myself, Dorotea Blanco and her thirty-something son. I would call my parents wanting to start balling, just let the fear and terror transform into tears. But the placement of the phone in the living room didn't allow for the space to do that.

I went to a doctor and attempted to explain my situation in Spanish. If memory serves, he said that something was wrong with my head and I was homesick but not sick in the "you have the flu" sense. I was sure I had mono or AIDS. I was sure I was going to die. I would lie in bed and visualize a planet billions and billions and billions of light years from Earth. A planet all alone in black space. Only I lived on this planet.

These were the first panic attacks I experienced in my life. I didn't know it then. Sadly, they wouldn't be the last. My mom had to come and rescue me. She stayed in a hotel not far from my flat. I went to her room and cried until I couldn't breathe. We went out where she loved the city all decorated for Christmas. It was hard for me to pay attention, I stared off into space a lot during those few days. They call that disaffectation or severe lack of emotional awareness. I hurt everywhere but felt numb.

I decided to go home with my mom, spend a few weeks with my family, and then come back. The day before I was to return I was filled with such fear, such poignant and precise fear, I couldn't go back. It felt too sickening. This was a difficult time in my life. But I learned. I learned what a panic attack is. I learned that they suck. That's all. Panic attacks suck.

With so much love,
Anthony