One foot after another, he gulps in a breath and focuses on what he sees in front of him.
An arrivals board. A luggage area. A train pulling in. A blue-haired man on a bench. A dog running off its leash. A suitcase spilling open.
He glances back, thrilled he has not imagined it. There Charlie is, in the flesh! Near the far platform, Charlie stares down at his shoes while clutching his passport in antsy hands.
Dario whizzes through the throngs to get to Charlie, who looks up just in time. Dario slides across the bench and crushes Charlie with the world’s most relieved hug. All the anxious energy pounds on top of his skin like an extra layer, donned and zipped and suffocating.
“Grazie a Dio! You are okay.” Dario takes a sharp inhale of Charlie’s scent. That sunscreen fragrance lingers beneath a day’s worth of sweat. It’s a weak balm for his frazzled nerves.
“Oh, good. I thought I was imagining you,” Charlie says, while sagging against him, as if he trusts Dario enough to hold him up when he’s not strong enough to do it himself.
“I am here.” Dario reassures Charlie. But it’s hard to reassure someone when a stampede of anxiety elephants clomps through his chest.
“Are you okay? You’re shaking.” Charlie’s hands splay strong against Dario’s back.
Overwhelmed, he buries his head in the crook of Charlie’s neck and shuts his eyes against the world. His fingers claw at the fabric of Charlie’s shirt, needing to ground himself in this moment, which is impossible when it feels like the bench is sliding out from under him, little by little.
“Dario, I’m here. I’m okay. We’re okay.” Charlie’s voice sounds a million miles away, stuck behind several panes of glass. It’s like he’s missing all over again even though he sits right there, has his arms around him. Why must his brain play tricks like this?
Charlie takes him by the elbow to the nearby, single-stall bathroom. Dario barely registers as he gives Charlie a euro to pop in the lock and twist.
The tile floor is grimy, and the lights are an off-putting yellow, making the white walls look like bruised banana peels. But this room with its four walls and its lock is like an oasis. And Charlie Moore is a beautiful mirage in the mist of a gurgling waterfall.
Except there’s no waterfall and Charlie is flesh and blood, leading him to the porcelain sink where cold, tap water plunks out. Dario splashes his face. The temperature shock settles him the slightest bit.
Charlie’s right hand lands on his upper back where he rubs slow, gentle circles. His left hand gathers Dario’s hair back, so it doesn’t get wet. Dario appreciates that because every other time he has been hit with a panic attack over the past year, he has muscled through it by himself.
Talking to his mom tonight made him realize that maybe there are people out there who understand and want to help. He just needs to give them the chance to.
“Should I call someone?” Charlie asks. “Like a doctor?”
Dario closes his eyes, steadying himself with the edge of the sink. He takes several breaths. “No, grazie. It is a panic attack. It will pass. Eventually. I get them often…”
“I didn’t realize,” Charlie says.
“I have something called agoraphobia,” Dario stutters, the word still feeling foreign in his mouth the way “grazie” felt foreign to Charlie on the first day they met.
“Isn’t that a fear of spiders?” Charlie asks.
“It’s a fear of open places. When I go to places I’ve never been or crowded places, I get intense anxiety and panic attacks. It’s debilitating.” He thinks momentarily about what they left outside this bathroom. The crushing crowds. The swell of noises. The speeding trains. As much as he wishes he could spend forever in this bathroom with Charlie Moore, he’ll have to face his triggers again and soon. The acrid smell of this room is starting to wither in his nose.
“What about Isola Polvese and the factory?” Charlie asks.
“Those are places I go often. They are in my comfort circle. I haven’t been past the factory in over a year,” he says. A swarm of shame engulfs him. His hands shake harder.
“Is it rude of me to ask what caused it?” Charlie’s eyes are beseeching and sweet. “I’m just trying to understand.”
“I am still trying to understand it myself.” Dario sighs, wishing explaining himself could be as easy as running a boardmeeting or wooing distributors. But he’s learned the hard way that he can’t treat his mental health like a business. If he could, he would’ve sold off his agoraphobia a long time ago, even if it came at a loss to his bottom line. The human brain is far more complicated than candy.
“Take your time,” Charlie says, meaning it. Obviously unperturbed.
“You see, it’s like this. My brain plays tricks on me. It tells me I’m not safe even when there’s not a specific threat. My anxiety started when I was young and my father died. He was there one morning and gone by the time I got home from school, and suddenly the world was terrifying. I worked through that,” Dario says, tracing back his struggles on a timeline of his life as if it were an exhibit in the Amorina museum. “Once everything happened with Preston, the panic attacks started up again. They got sharper and more frequent, until I broke down very publicly at my nonno’s funeral and have avoided crowds since.”
“So that’s why you didn’t want to go to Isola Maggiore?” Charlie says.
Dario nods. “My grandfather’s funeral was held at the Church of Buon Gesù on the island. You may have seen it while you were there. It’s a tall, orange-and-green historic building with these fading frescoes on the inside walls. It’s exactly where I’d have expected my grandfather to want to have his last service. But it’s also tiny. It was originally an oratory, so it was not meant to house hundreds upon hundreds of family members, friends and candy lovers. As soon as I saw the number of people in and outside the building, I froze and shut down,” he says, reliving that awful day over again. “I haven’t been back since.” He stops for a long breath. “Scusi, I’m ashamed to talk about this.”
“Why are you ashamed?” Charlie asks.
