Metamorphosis

By Alisha Karuvannur-Sandhu

Summer is the loneliest season. I thought with age I could escape it, but there I was, alone in a hot not-home, and I was so afraid to fall again, down and down and down.

~

In grade school, summertime brought a big empty house with broken air conditioning. Strict working parents kept me inside, playdates sparse, and most of my time was spent in quietly overwhelming solitude. I ate hot sticky peaches and watched America’s Got Talent and fended off the heaviness that always showed up in slow moments. It felt never-ending, and when escapism failed me, I sat wondering if this was all life had to offer. I thought about God and the afterlife, and how dreadful it must be to go to heaven and have to experience pleasant nothing forever.

 The loneliness always ended in the fall, though. It was the one thing I could count on, school starting again, my sense of smallness dissipating. Companionship breathed life into my lungs, and I became myself again, studious and motivated and together (as together as a child can be). I left that peach-eating cocoon on the couch to rot; I emerged whole and new and ready for the world

~

When the pandemic hit, despite my best efforts to stay occupied, it wasn’t long before I became startlingly aware of how big the world was and how little I felt. The warmth of my bed called to me. The air was balmy, yet I wanted nothing more than to bury myself underneath the comforter and let the heaviness of gravity wash over me, weigh me down until I sunk into my mattress, through the bed, through the floor, down below the dirt beneath my house, down all the way to the center of the Earth.

Every night, I would click off my screen after a who-knows-how-long session of scrolling, left with a buzzing sensation in my head. As I sat alone in my bed, I felt a familiar crushing solitude creep into the room. Is it hot in here?

 Vague unease brewed deep inside my chest. Once they were unlocked, all these uncomfortable sensations seemed to follow me everywhere, sometimes lying dormant but always under the surface.

~

I woke up one morning unable to breathe. I checked the time on my phone. Just past 6am.

Inhale.

Exhale.

There was no use, it was too shallow. How could this happen? I had been so careful. My chest tightened and my heart fluttered. Heaviness reincarnated into something new. I started to feel lightheaded. Surely my blood oxygen levels must have been abysmal. I felt my pulse rapidly speed up.

Thump thump thump.

 My mind raced with questions. Do I go tell Mom? Do I go to the emergency room? What if I gave it to the family? What the fuck have I done?

 I had to get up and let her know. My father was gone already (he worked upstate and was only home some weekends), but I listened at her door and could hear her getting ready for work. I knocked quietly, then with more urgency. 

“Mom?” I called, my voice cracking.

After a few long seconds, she opened the door.

“Why are you up so early?”
            “I think I have COVID.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m short of breath.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I can’t breathe, Mom.”

My face contorted against my will. Fat round teardrops fell out of nowhere, and suddenly I was bawling into her shoulder like a baby, unable to stop. Shhhh, it’s okay. My face was caked in tears and snot. I gasped for air, but it was like breathing in a vacuum. You’re hyperventilating. You’re having a panic attack. I watched her hurry to the kitchen and return with a paper bag. She held it to my face as I heaved in and out.

A few days later, my test results came back negative.

As my summer continued its descent into malaise, I found refuge in the fact that I would be back in school soon, with classes to keep me busy, friends around me at all times, and bustling city air to cleanse away this steady taste of isolated suburbia. I spent most of the days lying in bed with the blinds shut—sunlight was too bright—scrolling through my phone or simply falling in and out of half-sleep. I reminded myself that fall would come again and revive me, as it always had before.

Rebirth was just in my grasp when the stories started coming out. All these kids going off to college only to be packing everything back up four days later. I joked about it with my friends, but the concern was real and growing. Then, one by one, they decided not to come back for the fall. Each housing cancellation was a light going out, until I had only one roommate left. A week before I was to fly back, I got a text from her. I’m sorry, Alisha. The last light fizzled into blackness. I looked out ahead at the dark apartment waiting for me.

I thought about staying in California, but I couldn’t do it. I had to get out. Change seemed my only hope of becoming myself again. I was going to make it work.~

The dark roots of something insidious were starting to take hold. Just a few days into the start of the fall semester, my senses began failing me. I sat in neurobiosomething listening to the professor speak sounds I couldn’t hear. I could feel the words go into my ears, I could feel my brain as it passively watched them float into my skull and spat them right back out, raw and jumbled and unprocessed. I narrowed my eyes at the slides on the projector screen, at the text that surely had to be English. I must have forgotten how to read, the way the letters amounted to gibberish.

Day after day, my comprehension diminished. Instead, I became acutely aware of the fluorescent lights humming in the classroom. My head buzzed in unison. Everything was too bright, always. Too hot, too. I shifted my weight back and forth in my chair, tugging at the collar of my shirt and stroking my sternum, my arms, my hair. Swallowing became manual; I compulsively gulped til I forgot how and would choke on my own dry throat. Day after day, the world became increasingly unintelligible. I was consumed by the thought that I was trapped in my seat with no escape. I feared my body would cease to function unless I kept it in check. Breathing was no longer autonomic; I had to shakily force air in and out of my lungs. I pressed two fingers to my neck to make sure I was still alive, that my heart hadn’t spontaneously decided to shut off. Dread shrouded my head like a fog, made me deaf and blind, day after day, day after day, I was falling, faster, harder, day after day. Eventually I stopped going to classes.

I took up shelter in that big empty apartment. Barely furnished, no air conditioning. I let oppressive heat overtake my body. A proverbial sinking feeling nudged me towards the couch, where I sat watching Zoom lectures, where I ate my paltry meals, where I slept less-than-soundly at night, where I could not fall, only sink, slow and steady. Although I felt barely alive, I found a strange assurance in my deadened state. Familiarity bred affection; I became so well acquainted with solitude that I developed a sense of dependency on it, the only stability in my life. I isolated myself from the world, scarcely communicating with friends or family, avoiding the news, embracing seclusion. Days blurred into each other, dishes piled up and up, the air outside grew frigid. I stayed glued to the cushions through it all, wrapping myself in blankets. Roots gripped me, enveloped my cocoon-bound body. This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen. Time after time I had broken free without exertion. Where was my renewal, my sacred rebirth? Now I lay there immobile—a carcass decomposing.

Images of my destruction, in endless variations, flashed through my brain like strobe lights. Flesh torn apart. Water rushing into my lungs. Carbon monoxide silently putting me to eternal sleep. Medleys of pills bubbling in my stomach, poison coursing through my veins and shutting down my organs. Jumping off a bridge and into the Charles—one final, irreversible fall.

Things got too bright and too hot and too loud and too much one night, and I concluded my only options were to get help or die. I thought of Mom. I wondered how long it would take for her to realize I was gone (she would surely be the first to realize). I wondered who would have to find my decaying remains, who would have to call her to relay my fate. I wondered what she would say at my funeral. I wondered if she would blame herself, if she would pick apart my life trying to find where she went wrong.

 I dialed her number with tears in my eyes.

~

With effort, heaviness, in all its incarnations, always proves fleeting.

Alisha is a third-year student at Northeastern University majoring in Philosophy, with a minor in Health, Humanities, and Society. She plans to pursue medical school after college and is particularly interested in healthcare ethics and narrative medicine.

Read more from our Writing to Heal: College Student Stories series.