２０１２年３月１１日 ・ 揺れているのは私だけ。

[heartbeats]

I initially wasn't planning on making this entry - I don't want my truly pathetic experience to take time and interest from those people who truly suffered this time last year - but I think it deserves to be said, in part because I want to discuss a truly insane tweet I may have made last night and in part because if I've learned anything in the last week and in part because I think if this journal is to stand as any sort of record of my life this particular set of experiences might as well be shared.

I talked at this time last year about everything I went through on the day of the earthquake. There was shaking. I'd just had blood drawn, thought I was just passing out. The older ladies looking at my gray face, commiserating, she's not used to it. The walk home once the bus gave up halfway - shattered glass in the street. Any number of nights spent sleeping on the couch instead of the futon in my tiny one-room apartment. My classmates slowly leaving. My retreat to Nagoya and my host family. Buying banana sweets at Shinbashi station, thinking to myself how weird it was to be thinking about souvenirs at a time like this. Landing at Nagoya station, lining my feet up along the cracks of the street exit in the same way I'd done when I'd arrived for my first time studying abroad four years previously. How normal it all was. The beers I poured for Yumi and then for Tim, and the way I imagined my bed was shaking.

It's fine, I reminded myself. We're fine. The only thing shaking is you.

You all know the rest of my story. The cancellation of my program. Going home and then three weeks later coming back, knees locked. They told us we couldn't receive any instruction from our teachers in person, that it was unfair to those students who'd left. Unfair to whom? I thought as yet another aftershock woke me up. I set my mouth and went in every day anyway, sat by myself and studied 11 to 5. It wasn't quite the regimen I'd had before the earthquake, but it was something. Months passed. My illness got worse. I passed N1. I spent the summer in celebration, working one-on-one with instructors at IUC and spending evenings in the company of a close friend. When I arrived in Berkeley I felt fine. I'd been "over it", any fear, since April.

Last week there was a decently-sized earthquake on the Hayward fault, which is less than a mile from my house and runs straight down my campus. About a four on the richter scale - nothing compared to the aftershocks I'd been through.

Something about it was different.

I felt the same choking panic I felt the night after the earthquake, but this time it didn't subside. I didn't know what to do, so I went to the bathroom and threw up. I was awake for hours afterward, until I finally drifted into uncomfortable sleep. I got back up, got ready for class, but my panic still hadn't dissipated.

Googling plane tickets back home to my parents and looking up what Berkeley's policy is on sabbaticals in first year (I'd lose my funding), I called my parents. I just live so close, I told Dad on the phone.

He joked that I was probably doomed and I inexplicably burst into tears. So much for my makeup. So much for never taking myself too seriously. I went in with puffy eyes and tried to steer the topic of conversation away from the earthquake. During a break I called the student counseling center, but the earliest they could schedule me for an initial phone interview was a week from that Thursday.

I lasted until Thursday before I went into the crisis center.

I'm calmer now, at least for the time being. Honestly, much like my experience in Japan, it rather comes and goes, and inevitably I'm most afraid at night. I've begun feeling phantom earthquakes again - have resumed my previous behavior of sometimes going sheet gray and searching for a visual cue, only to realize that someone on the other side of the table is jiggling their leg a little too vigorously. Often I forget to be scared, but it always, always comes back.

I don't know what's going on, exactly, or how long this is going to last. I do know that I saw a "signal boost" on tumblr - 5.0 - 6.0 magnitude earthquake to hit California by 7 AM March 11th, stay safe you guys!! - and even as my rational brain was thinking, god, that's stupid, as if that kind of thing could be predicted!, the other half of my brain was sucking all of the oxygen out of my stomach. I spent four hours until my housemates got home sitting on the couch in the living room with both cats, flipping frantically through local news and trying desperately to get at least one article read for school.

I want to get better. Thousands of people live in this city without being afraid all the time. I was fine until a week ago. I don't want to be defined by this, and I wish I was someone strong enough to not have this reaction, especially when so many people were and are suffering so much more than me.

But it's back, I guess. The fear from last year. I've hung a necklace from my bedside lamp as visual verification. It never sways from side to side. The only thing still shaking is me.