So yesterday we were sorting through a cabinet when there was a knock at our door.  Since agoraphobia pretty much = no social life, we don’t get visitors often.  Like, never.  Even Grabby knows better than to just stop by and our landlord calls first.

At first, we thought it might be our upstairs neighbor (we live on the second level of a three-family home and share a stairwell with 3^rd floor), but we weren’t about to answer it anyway (if it’s urgent, he has Ben’s cell number).  Instead, we just froze.  Stopped moving, stopped breathing.  Old habits are hard to break.

They knocked, waited, and knocked again.  With the exception of turning our phone on silent (just our luck it would ring), we stayed frozen.  We heard footsteps on the stairs and then a door.  But it wasn’t the upstairs door.  It was going outside.  We tiptoed to the window and saw the police cruiser pulling away and just about died.

Yes, I’m being dramatic, but if you know us, it’s not that dramatic.  Most of us are way terrified of cops.  Like to the point that it paralyzes us – mentally, physically, verbally.

So when we saw the car, we immediately assumed it had something to do with my dad (HIM).  All at once the room was spinning, people were yelling, crying, physically grabbing at me from the inside.  Then POOF!  It was black.  (This is what it’s like being kicked out… or maybe I should say kicked in.)

Not really sure how it all came together, but eventually, within about 5-10 minutes, Phoebe, our “let’s get down to business” gal came out to figure out what the hell was going on.  She was brave enough to open the door to the stairwell and sure enough – there was a note hanging on the door.

It had Ben’s first and last name on it, which we somehow glazed over, and instead focused on the rest of it:

Call Officer D——-

B——–, RI PD

Under that, there was a phone number.

WTF?

Immediately we remembered that Ben’s new job is like a hop, skip and a jump from the boarder of Rhode Island.  Fuck.  Rhode Island.  A Rhode Island cop.  A Rhode Island cop at our door.  FUCK.

You guessed it.  So the freaking out began.

We were all convinced that Ben was dead.  From a car crash.  A Bomb.  A shooter.  Someone gone postal.

It didn’t matter that he had already called a couple hours before saying he’d gotten to work okay.  It didn’t matter that his lunch break wasn’t even for more than an hour.  It didn’t matter than we knew he’d call if he had to leave unexpectedly.

Nope.  Ben was in Rhode Island and he was dead.

The freakage (yes, this is the technical term, I swear) continued for another 5 or so minutes until I was able to convince enough of us to call Ben.  Yeah, it would totally be a slap of reality if he wasn’t there or worse yet – if someone answered and confirmed all our worst fears, but what else were we going to do?

So we called and Ben answered.  He sounded funny and it must have been since we have never called him at work before.  He must have thought something was wrong.  Well, um, yes.

Ben has this really important report he has to do every morning and no one is allowed to disturb him (even his boss told him to shut the door to his office) so once we verified that he was safe and didn’t know what the going on either, we told him to call us back in a couple minutes.

I still can’t believe we managed to do it, but we hung up with Ben and dialed the phone number on the note.  We weren’t convinced it wasn’t related to my dad (HIM), so we decided to find out before giving Ben the number.

When a man identified himself as “Rhode Island Police Department” we almost fainted, but managed to say “An officer left a note on my door for my husband to call here.”  He asked for Ben’s name and apparently knew the situation.

When we traded our old car in for our new/used one in December, we gave them the title.  Apparently there’s been a paperwork mix-up or something because some guy in RI is trying to buy the car from some dude and he didn’t have the title.  I guess it was reported as possibly being stolen or something.  Hmm.  All we know if the dealership said it would most likely be auctioned off.  Wonder who bought it?

Sooo, that’s why RIPD showed up yesterday.  What a pain.  That little freak out cost us our whole entire day.  We were a wreck.  Yes, we were relieved to learn Ben was fine and that it was a car issue that really was no longer our issue, but we had gone through all the thoughts and emotions of Ben possibly being dead.  I won’t even get into our dreams last night.

That was probably one of the longest panic attacks we’ve ever had.  It just kept going and going like the Energizer Bunny.  Just when we started to feel our toes touch the ground, we were suddenly swooped up, spun and dropped into another episode.  Ben came home, we forced ourselves to eat enough so our meds wouldn’t make us sick, and crawled into bed by 8pm.

Bad fucking day.  But Ben is safe.  Just our poor old car is… somewhere.

(It’s okay, Taryn.  He’ll find a good home.)