On A Moment of Panic

There are certain things that we just take for granted until they’re not there anymore: breathing through your nose (until you get a cold and it’s feels like your nose hasn’t worked in a thousand years), being able to eat Hot Cheetos (until you hit 30 and then those delicious little suckers turn your insides into a volcano), or being able to open a door that just a moment ago closed with seemingly no problem. There are few things that are more terrifying than thinking you’re trapped in a bathroom with no way out.

I’ve been housesitting recently, I know, what a surprise. So, once again, I’m spending a lot of time in strangers’ bathrooms. Every bathroom has its own eccentricities, from faucets that turn the wrong way, to toilets where you gotta jiggle the handle to make it work. I’ve dealt with all these things plenty of times. What I haven’t dealt with is a Saw-style trapped designed to make you feel like this bathroom might be your final resting place.

There’s that initial moment, after you dry your hands, when you reach for the door handle and you expect it to turn and allow you to leave. This is a completely realistic expectation because, oh I don’t know, this is what’s happened every single time you’ve done this for your entire life! So, when that door doesn’t budge an inch, it takes your brain a few seconds to really comprehend what’s happening. Did I not turn the knob far enough? Did I forget to push it open? Am I in some sort of nightmare where all my teeth fall out and I get sucked into the toilet and end up in the sewers and get my ass kicked by all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!?

So, you start pushing harder…and the door doesn’t budge. All of a sudden, it starts to feel like the temperature is rising in the room…a room that you’re just now realizing isn’t very big at all, in fact it’s very small…much too small and you should leave immediately. So, you push harder and the door moves a bit but still won’t open. If your brain is like my brain (and I pray for your sake it isn’t, it’s a real zoo in here), it’s already chanting, “KICK IT OPEN! KICK IT OPEN!” The only problem is, you’re in someone else’s house and it would be really embarrassing for them to come home to a door kicked to splinters because you got a wittle bit scawed.

So you push harder, and still it only just budges, and you push harder and it just slightly jiggles and you’re feeling trapped, but not only by the door but by your implied promise not to kick down any doors in this house and you give it one last shove that is as close to the edge of, “fuck it, I’m the Kool-Aid Man” as you can…and the door pops open and the dog you’re watching is sitting on the other side of the door looking at you like you’re crazy.

So, what about you? Any similar feelings of true momentary panic?