Mints (& miracles)

I live my life under the assumption that there will always be mints. 

Let me explain.

It’s rooted in a fear– a terrible anxiety that has debilitated my life since before I can remember: the fear of throwing up.

My fear is not the ‘cute’ kind, but the kind that might refuse baby carrots that have sat on the table for too long. If someone even uttered the word nauseous, I’d go running. 

I developed the fear as a child because the act had somehow always evaded me. I grew up in a messy household, full of bacteria and germs, and my immune system was better for it. The consequence was an irrational and unhealthy obsession that kept me from most dinner parties. 

I found ways to self-comfort and deal– namely, the heavy use of gum and mints. If I could just get my hands on the strongest hit of peppermint I could find, I’d almost always be able to convince myself that everything was going to be okay. This became a pattern of frantically turning to my right and left to ask whoever was around me for gum when I felt sick. I’d take anyone’s last piece without slightest hesitation. 

I spent the summer of 2017 living in Spain, where I would study to learn Spanish, and learn to be free. I was 21 at the time. I took Spanish lessons in the morning and it was here that I met a dainty and kind-eyed girl from Hong Kong during class. I wish so badly I could remember her name, but I can’t. She asked me to lunch one day after class and I accepted the gesture. I really wanted to meet new people and was working on saying yes to everything I could.

We walked through the streets together. I remember how gorgeous of a day it was. Nothing was on the agenda and the taperías were overflowing with friends and lovers filling the terraces. 11 AM, they smoked cigarettes and drank cañas, their faces kissed with sun and wrinkles. I thought to myself that I’d like to stay there forever.

We picked a place to eat and and sat down inside.

First trigger. I would have preferred outside. 

We ordered lots of food to share. We began talking, then drinking, eating and drinking some more. It was an afternoon that should have ended exactly as it began– perfectly. 

Until, right on time and as it always does, I felt my stomach flutter. I convinced myself I was ill and excused myself to the restroom. The feeling of nausea in my case was completely self-induced– an anxiety that would have quickly subsided had I left the restaurant. Yet, it felt so real each time, and the damages were irreversible.

As I looked in the dirty mirror, I experienced what all of us are running from every single day: true panic. It came flooding over me, alone with a stranger I didn’t know, in a place I didn’t know. Nauseous. My worst nightmare.

What was I supposed to do? Panic made me even more nauseous and I was stuck in a vicious hamster wheel of self-inducing pain and torture. I thought to myself that this is always how anxiety always works–cutting you where you’re weak, then isolating you into bathrooms so you feel like you’re all alone–grappling for wet paper towels and gasping for air over the sink.

Anxiety is always and only convincing you of one thing: to abort mission. Leave. Get out of there. You won’t make it, not through this one.

Which I did, swiftly.

I closed the bathroom door, sat down with my new friend whose name I cannot remember, and quickly told her the news that we would be leaving. I gave up. I made us leave the beautiful lunch early and told her I was sick.

I asked her for gum, which she didn’t have.

I apologized profusely and held back tears. Tears came because I knew I was letting her down and anxiety makes us desperate to be liked by those around us. But even more so, I was letting myself down. Here I was, ruining my chance at being free.

We walked to the metro and it was conveniently packed with sweaty spaniards. We managed to find the last two available seats so we sat down. I think I told my new friend sorry at every stop. She patiently and gently reminded me it was okay. Finally (and luckily for her) we arrived at her stop and she stood up to leave.

What happened next was as if the Heavens above had orchestrated it.

As my disappointed but patient friend from Hong Kong walked off of the train and on to the station landing, on walked one of the oldest men I’d ever seen.

His strong, dated cologne filled the car. Dressed in a baby-blue and white pin-striped suit from head to toe, his eyes were sunken deep into a face filled with wrinkles, yet strangely handsome. He had to be more than 6 feet tall and attention to his presence was mandatory. 

He sat down immediately and swiftly at the only seat available on the entire metro–the seat my friend had just left vacant–directly beside me.

His shoulder touched my shoulder.

He turned to me right away and smiled the kindest smile I’d ever seen.

Without asking for permission, he reached out for my hand, grabbed hold of it, and took it into his. 

He turned my palm upward so it faced the sky. With his other hand, reached for something in his pocket.

A box of mints.

He shook the mints into my hand, then some into his. 

He looked directly into my eyes as he did it, then turned forward again, as if nothing had ever happened. 

A MINT. This old man in a baby-blue suit had given me the one and only thing I needed at that moment. Up to this point, no one had ever spoken to me or acknowledged me on the metro. Until him. I had never had my breath taken away like it was in that moment. Tears immediately filled my eyes.

I wondered if he was even real. There was no logic that made him real, no understanding to explain how he had entered the train exactly as my friend had left, or how he could have possibly known the person beside him would have wanted mints from a stranger. I concluded that he was an angel; that, or a figment of my anxious imagination. The cologne seemed strong enough to rule out the latter. 

Without having to ask for it, I knew I was protected. I was guided.

And from that day on, I never left lunch over a fear like that again. 

I realized in this seemingly non-important moment for everyone else on the train, but massively influential to me–that anywhere you go in this world and whatever you’re doing, you can sigh deeply and relax your sweet belly knowing that strangers will wrap their arms around you. This works in the middle of the desert, or your local grocery store.

I now believe and remember at all moments in my life that if I fall over in the middle of the grocery store, people will be calling for help. Someone might even rub my head. That one thing that keeps you up at night, like throwing up baby carrots, might just be cured by someone you don’t even know.

Someone like my angel abuelo on the metro.

This has brought me immense peace and that is why I share it. It’s given me courage– finding out that it is other people that make me courageous. Courage is the only thing that has led me to stories of any significance. 

The persistent goodness of humanity.

This is God.

Thank you, my baby-blue angel. I’ve woken up.