I sipped my Northeast Style IPA and couldn’t stop picturing my girlfriend building pipe bombs out of the explosive powder from fireworks in the back room.
It was the first time I met her activist friends, Martin, Tania, Angela, Nancy, Sri, Emiliano, Mohandas and Cesar, and I was dying of anxiety. This is the story of the time I met Cielo’s grassroots organizer friends, decided that they’re terrorist revolutionaries, and stole a girl’s phone.
I started a Medium because the whole internet says journaling is good for mental health. I’m using a pen name, Ernest Salvador, because I don’t want my girlfriend — let’s call her Cielo — to find it. I have a worry disorder, and I’m worried the world is ending. Like maybe all the protests will start a revolution.
Three blocks from the march on Valencia, we pulled some patio tables together. It was after Daylight Savings time, and by 5:04 it was after sunset dark. I’m still surprised Cielo’s friends wanted to grab a beer before. Wouldn’t they be late for the protest?
I couldn’t hear a thing they said over the clop of news chopper propellors and the nightclub volume chating of the protestors. Cielo had yet to show.
I didn’t know anybody and no one was talking to me, so I stared down at my phone between sips of beer and refreshed my email inbox constantly. I’d felt anxious since savasana at yoga that day. Lying helpless prostrate in the dark I had touched a girl’s hand and the panic was like an electric shock. Anxiety feels like electrocution. I could still feel it at the nape of my neck. Zap.
Tania and Emiliano leaned closer to each other and farther from me. If I got an email accepting me to the Coalition Activist Mobilizer Program, I could start a conversation with these cool kids who were ignoring me. Hey Tania, I got into organizer training, I start tomorrow. Now Cielo won’t break up with me, haha. I have a lot to offer an activist organization. I’m a marketing proofreader at Ars Mercata Media, but I’m trying to get on the creative team. Yes, I do like it, thanks for asking.
They were staring at Tania’s phone, maybe innocently scrolling Tumblr memes. Every time the bomb blasts of noise from the march quieted, Tania shouted words like “country!” and “death!” and “¡venceremos!” which sounded like Che Guevara’s communist chant, “¡Patria o muerte, venceremos!”
By 5:26 p.m., after approximately twenty-two minutes of feeling sorry for myself, halfway through my second 7% ABV ale (this one an English Strong Ale), I decided Tania and Emiliano were violent revolutionaries, and I should just fake it and say I did get in.
I opened my mouth, an an unmufflered motorcycle deafened everyone. We all shut up.
Once it was past, I tried again, but an echo of a pileup crashed down the street from the direction of Valencia — like a metal on metal chomp, like one semi-truck chewing into another semi-truck. Later I checked my phone to see if anyone died. Nothing on Twitter.
The third time it got quiet, I tried again. “Guys, holy shit — ” An ambulance siren groaned toward us, so I perched on the edge of my seat and yelled, “Guys, I got into the Coalition Mobilizer Program!” The siren passed in a Doppler whine, but I had shouted over it. Loud.
Tania and Emiliano never looked up.
I’m not sure I can explain the feeling of humiliation a shy person gets when we try to put ourselves out there and fail. We’re pushed to do our best, fake it till we make it, just be ourselves, just to get to the level of confidence that comes naturally to seemingly everyone else. When you wait all night to get up the nerve to shout to someone over the club music and it never occurs to them that you spoke at all, you just . . . sink.
Twenty-nine years old, and I’m incapable of making friends.
There are five types of anxiety disorders. I have two of them. Generalized worry disorder, and social anxiety. The anxiety disorders I don’t have are PTSD, OCD and panic disorder. Now you know all five.
I can’t be alone in feeling like the sky is falling. Everyone must feel like the world is ending. Like it’s the end of times. Everything is going wrong at the same time. There was a collision right outside my window while I was writing this. Every time I go outside, there’s cracked window glass from car windows. Every day this week I found a pair of shoes somewhere on the sidewalk — I kid you not — as if someone was raptured and all they left behind was a pair of torn tan Toms.
My Fitbit showed my heartrate was 93, just sitting down. Was that a bloop from a cop car? Were those pops shots or fireworks? A bull horn speaker muttered an authoritarian command too muffled for me to comprehend.
I was imagining Cielo was late because she was constructing homemade explosives for the uprising. Maybe smuggling converted automatic weapons and high capacity magazines into San Francisco. I pulled out my phone to look into each of these comrades on the internet while Tania was demanding direct democracy because her representatives take PAC money and her parents oppose gas taxes — unlike 61 percent of Californians.
Don’t call it Facebook stalking when it’s a matter of national security.
A Google search took me to articles trying them to terrorist organizations. I shit you not. Take Nancy Fahizah, for example. In college, she belonged to a group called the Symbionese Liberal Anarchist, or SLA, the leader of which was sentenced to life in San Quintin for the assassination of an Oakland school superintendent who introduced ID cards in public schools. They called him a fascist and executed him “on behalf of the people.” While I was Googling it, an email notification dropped over the top of the screen: “Coalition Re-Organize and Re-Mobilize program application declined.”
I tried to take a breath and just observe how I was feeling. Like in Buddhist mindfulness meditation. That shit helps me sometimes. I considered whether to lie and say I got in anyway. I considered confiding in them that I didn’t.
I glanced tentatively at Tania and she happened to make eye contact with me for the first time since I introduced myself to a chorus of “nice to meet you”s. Now she was like, “Hey Ernest, could you take a picture?” She held out her iPhone before I said yes, and leaned into Emiliano, the other six Coalition radicals pulling inward together as if by gravity. I took five or six pictures like I was paparazzi and offered Tania her phone back, but she didn’t see. Mohandas raised a cheers. “To round three!” I put Tania’s phone down and raised my empty glass to them. The eight present Coalition Comrades debated whether to enjoy a third round on the prime patio spot or head to the protest.
The screen of Tania’s phone was still on.
I had left the camera app open. It would go to sleep in a second or two. I kind of wanted to know what she and Emiliano had been up to for 36 minutes while they ignored the fact that I was sitting right next to them with no one to talk to.
Tania yelled what sounded like “¡venceremos!” a second time. I lifted her phone and pressed the home button. Pretending it was my own iPhone, real casual. Feeling like a spy, I opened the web app and copied the link address of the article she had open, “Do You Get There By Violence,” and texted the link to myself. Then I deleted the text.
Next I found the FB messenger app. Clicked into a group chat featuring my present comrades, plus my girlfriend, and felt a pang of rejection that no one had added me. Even though I hate group chats.
I scrolled upwards back in time, past Cielo’s message, “Shit! Mierda! Blyat! Still stuck at work, I will be another 15 minutes.” Scrolling back in time, past an invitation to pre-drink before the beers before the protest, but before I could get to anything good, part-way through Cielo saying “Sorry, I feel bad I won’t be able to introduce you to — ” came her voice IRL saying, “Sorry I’m late, who has a beer I can throw back real quick?” I dropped the phone into my lap and Cielo found my eyes and waved with the hand that wasn’t accepting a mostly empty schooner from Angela. Cielo wore a rocker jacket and a rainbow HRC tee and carried more than one bristol board sign. And finally Tania noticed her phone was missing.
“Blyat!” she said. She checked her purse, panicked and dropped her purse, and patted the pockets of her olive anorak. “Blyat.” That must have been where Cielo got the Russian word for shit. “Fuck, I lost my phone again.” She looked left and right over her shoulder, and ducked under her chair.
I was going to give it back. Hand it over like, “Sorry, I put it down after I took the picture.” But Cielo came around the table and flopped over the back of the chair to give me a hug from behind, and I sank into a deep, terrified paralysis in her arms. What if Tania gave me hell for stealing it? If she accused me, my act would crack. What would Cielo think? It sank in that I had wronged someone. I had gone through her phone and read her messages without permission. I slid the phone into my pocket, and I sat there sweating and sinking while Cielo helped Tania look for it. I considered helping her look, pretending to find it, and decided I was too shook to pull it off. Instead I sank out of sight in my chair. Out of mind in my chair.
On the way to the protest, I dropped Tania’s phone in the mailbox of a defunct convenience store. Newspapers were piled on a dirty welcome mat, but there was enough room in the mailbox. If I came back tomorrow, maybe I could retrieve it and give it to the bartender, say I found it on the sidewalk outside. Maybe Tania would call and ask.
Thirty marching steps later it occured to me why the mailbox had been empty, probably. Probably people had been robbing it of mail, hoping for envelopes of cash or small packages with valuables that could be sold on the sidewalk — or an iPhone XR, as the case may be? Most nights all they would get was a pre-approved Discover Card or 50 dollars off a 300 dollar meal prep subscription.
When I told Cielo I didn’t get into the Coalition Mobilizer Program, I’m not sure I deserved her sympathy. But when I read that article I sent myself from Tania’s phone I realized maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get in. I’m pretty sure they really are frigging revolutionaries.
This is a work of fiction — a fictional millennial with an anxiety disorder is writing a Medium account under the pen name Ernest Salvador.
Originally published on Ernest Salvador’s Medium on February 15, 2019. Please Follow Ernest for more of his stories.
