A heightened sense of emotion

I locked myself in a bathroom when I was eight. Justin is thirteen now, and I’m twenty two, which is old enough for me to be able to remember what it was like to be a little boy and scared. When Justin was eight, he was afraid of the beeping noises that elevators make. Every time we rode in one, he cried. My mother often shushed him and let him hug her leg. A heightened sense of emotion – that’s what she called his phobia. My father occasionally complained to my mother that she was “babying” his son.

But I think everyone needs to be babied once in a while. When I locked myself in the bathroom I thought I was going to starve to death. The lock had a tricky mechanism because the keyhole was slightly too large, and when I tried to leave the key didn’t work. Panic set in. I could not escape on my own, so I shouted until my mother came. She talked to me, calmed me down. And then got my grandfather to unhinge the door.

I later learned that the lock was not actually broken. I’d just been too anxious to figure out how to work it properly. This all seems rather silly in retrospect. At the time, though, it was very real and very scary. My father said she babied me that day. He’s a smart kid, he’ll figure it out, he’d said. Meanwhile I sat on the floor of the bathroom and cried. I was too scared to do anything else.