This is what happens in my brain when I re-experience my trauma.
My brain wants me to remember every detail.
It wants me to dance in the mud and pretend it doesn’t hurt to be there.
It wants me to see the faces again, and pretend that this time they are smiling and I am happy in that place
It wants to me feel pleasure when pain is the conditioned emotion.
It wants to me re-imagine myself out of that context but still firmly in it
It wants me to escape, peacefully, then locks me back into that room again.
It wants me to be silent and not yell for help
It wants me, ‘Trisha’ to imagine me ‘Trisha’, an absent being in that experience
Yet, it always brings me back to look at myself like I am this other person, a witness, a spectator to my trauma.
It brings me back to witness an empty shell cascading through all the sense that the universe has given me, ‘Trisha’, the human to verify its existence.
It brings me back into that room, and shuts the door even firmer, just to make sure that this time I really can’t escape.
It locks me in that room and forces me to feel myself helpless and hopeless.
It seduces me with the poison of defeat
It bursts through every vein in my body, instructing my aliveness into unchangeable stone.
It brings me back to that room to look at his face and just look at his face, and just look at his face
Only to realise that in those moments my mind was gone too.
The more I looked the more lost I felt.
The more of me submitted to accept that there was a void in existence, that there was void in my attempt and that there was a void in my love.
Because it couldn’t even help me, my love couldn’t even help me.
So I accepted I was broken.
When my brain needed me the most, I taught it to tell me that this was it.
When my brains needed me the most, I taught myself that he had all the power I worked so hard to retain.
When my brain needed me, I gave up and became a damsel in his pitch-black gaze.
I was a shadow of his conscious mind.
I was screaming for his soul to compromise and neglected my own to fit this disguise.
And it didn’t.
And so every January when I believe that my mind, body and soul work in unison to torment me, to upset me, to forsake me and the good things I’ve been doing, I believe them.
I believe that all the coping, all the smiling, all the laughing, all the crying, all the drinking and all the smoking and all the writing is not me.
I believe the disguise.
I believe so hard that I am not real, that I am void of all things fruitful and jovial.
I believe that I am an open carcass without a soul, experiencing the emptiness of time repeatedly.
Because I was there, present when he lost himself in that room.
And I was there, present when I lost mine too.
Comments