Prologue

I’m afraid to drive alone in the night. The thought kept swirling inside as I sat down on the wooden pavilion’s floor—legs bent, feet obediently elongated like a ballerina’s, back held straight in the posture of someone pretending to know how to hold themselves together. 

I’m afraid I won’t know the way. I’m afraid I’ll get lost. I’m afraid I won’t remember how to drive—how to get my feet to apply the necessary pressure on the accelerator to cause the machine to move, to take me to the apartment safely. 

I was so afraid, I became convinced the young couple lying beside me would soon feel my heart too—feel it bouncing wildly inside my chest, eventually ripping through my ribs, through my façade of composure and skin. Soon, they’d interrupt their cuddling session, stop sliding up and down each other conspiratorially, just to put my heart back inside me. 

Just to be clear: I was usually not the kind of woman who’s afraid to drive alone, not at night, much less during the day. Or rather, I was the kind of woman who, precisely because she’s afraid, would grab the wheel with both hands and chase down her own fear, determined to not let any thoughts stop her from being free, free to drive wherever she pleased. 

So, when Ana—the space holder of the ceremony and my relationship counselor—came to check on me, asking if I was okay to drive home, I said yes. Of course I did. Even if in the back of my mind I probably deemed it irresponsible for a facilitator to let participants drive off still in an altered state. I was an independent woman. Everyone else was driving themselves home. Of course I could do it too. Just like I’d driven myself to the venue that morning, in the same uninsured rental car, windows down, some boho-spiritual beat playing on the local radio, smiling to the palm-tree horizon in-between rejected happy birthday calls. Except for one:

‘Hi cupcake,’ Fred had said through the car’s speaker, then sang five seconds of Happy Birthday—so awkwardly sweet it made me laugh. He asked about the island, the weather, the apartment, as if the more questions he asked, the more of him would materialize in the seat beside me. I said everything was good, great, that I was excited for the ceremony. We hung up when his break ended, after he asked me to give Ana a hug for him.

Before my heart burst out of my chest, I stood up, gathering myself, walked past the young couple, gave a quick glance at the altar where my Kindle rested between crystals and feathers and all sorts of new-agey objects, and searched for a spot away from the group, some empty space among the twisted olive trees and lavender bushes surrounding the pavilion. 

‘Relationship problems?’ a short-haired Iranian woman in an all-black outfit said when she passed by on her way to the exit. She had barely spoken that day. The only time I recalled hearing her voice was when she sang earlier, once everyone else had run out of medicinal songs in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. She sang an Iranian ballad, so sad and mournful that I could only begin to imagine the depth of the pain she carried inside her generous body. 

‘Good luck!’ she added empathically with a smile, her first that day, and in that moment I felt strangely exposed, as though she had more access to my inner world than me. 

I kept walking until I found a good enough place to hide under a tree, then stood there and breathed and breathed again until I was no longer controlled by the damn fear. Only that it wouldn’t pass. It didn’t matter how deeply or how fast I inhaled: panic rushed through me, immune to my desire to transcend it, and wasn’t going away.

I’m afraid to drive alone in the night, I thought again, picturing myself behind the wheel, beneath the vast dark sky, lit only by my car’s headlights and stars, too high to remember the purpose of each pedal or the gearbox, the purpose of being human, the purpose of life and death. 

‘Olivia?’ someone said several times. Someone holding me in their arms. Had I fainted? Who was Olivia? Who was I?

All I could see was white light—so bright and peaceful and total. And within it, every fear was absurd. In fact, every thought was absurd. My pounding heart, the lavender bushes swaying in the nocturnal wind, even the rabbit I’d imagined crossing the road on my terrifying ride back to the apartment—they were all thoughts, and they were all illusion. The only real thing was the white light, and the peace within it, and the knowing that this moment was as everything as it was eternal. 

My intention for the ceremony came to mind: to be initiated. Initiated into a fully integrated spiritual life. Where once I’d associated spirituality to the perfect morning yoga practice, a certain kind of music, and a moral inclination to be kind, now I sensed it had more to do with control—or more precisely, with its release. It was time to stop pretending I held any power over my fate, and surrender instead to the mystery that had carried me this far. Perhaps some would call it faith. Perhaps the task was to make that word mine once more. 

And then the sound of my heartbeat again: pum, pum, pum. And the fear again—the fear of driving alone in the night, the fear of dying, alone and unrescued, beneath the vast dark sky. Only this time I knew it didn’t matter if I died. Now I knew I was free, free to live.

‘Olivia, are you okay?’ The voice again. I remembered who Olivia was. I nodded. It was Ana holding me, stroking my hair. 

‘It’s okay to be afraid. We’re all afraid sometimes,’ she said and I nodded again, unable to form sentences just yet. 

She asked what I was afraid of while I sobbed in her arms. Driving alone in the night, I mumbled with closed eyes and when the woman held me closer, saying all was going to be okay, I collapsed into her arms and cried and cried even harder like a starving baby. 

Relationship problems? The Iranian woman’s words revisited my consciousness. And through closed eyes, I saw my mother: her body wrapped in a blue gown, lying in a hospital bed, no one holding her hand. Her legs were open, and several doctors gathered around her. She was crying, crying even harder than me. She was crying me out of her, she was crying out her fear: of being alone, of dying, of living, of driving alone in the night. 

I saw all her fear passing into me as she pushed me away. The tiny creature who’d just left the perfection of the womb now carried not only her own existential terror of arriving on this planet: she also carried her progenitor’s fear! So much fear inside the tiny being. So much fear inside of me. 

Who was I beyond that fear? That was the question living through me then.

— Carlota Guedes

*What you read was an excerpt from my debut novel, Free. I'm currently open to representation from a like-minded, like-hearted literary agent.