Once again I was curled on the giant black leather couch. I clutch a pillow to me (I always clutch a pillow to me) and my feet are curled up under me. There is sunlight coming through the window to my right, the double doors leading to the balcony reveal spots of standing rain water.

We are talking.

We always talk.

I look at him. “I wonder what point I could have been saved,” I say slowly.

“What do you mean?”

”I was always pretty disturbed. I was always different, always wrong. I wonder at what point you could’ve reached into who I was and plucked me out, a healthy person, before I went so wrong.”

“Think about it for a minute. What’s the first image that comes to mind?”

And like the swirling film montage that shows someone thinking about something, my mind pushed downward with its ankles and hurls itself up into my past. I solidly land on a little girl with light brown hair. She is looking up at someone and everything around her throbs with a white hot light. The little girl is wearing a blue shirt. There is a window to her left. She has a small white barrette clipping the sides of her hair back. She is 6 years old, I know that.

She is me.

And I am the adult me, standing in the doorway, watching her. And as I look up in my memory, with a shock so forceful I nearly throw up right there, I see a little me in another doorway, watching noncommittally.

That, too, is me.

And I had stumbled on the first time I ever disassociated.

I donÂ’t understand whatÂ’s going on and I donÂ’t know how it is I can see two of a younger me, while the older me also stands idly by, but then the mind is a strange thing. I cannot recall a single moment about this event, I have no idea whatÂ’s going on as everything is covered by a white hot blinding light. I just watched the little girl, frozen in my memory.

“Run!” I want to scream at her. “Run! Get back in yourself, don’t check out of this situation, it’ll become the one thing that damages you the most. Run! Run away! RUN!”

But I donÂ’t. And I look up at my therapist and I am shaking like a lunatic. I am nauseous and am reasonably confident IÂ’m going to throw up. I feel hot all over and my head has exploded with a migraine on the right hand side. He circles me cautiously, like a tiger that could take his head off. He tells me this is huge. He tells me that I have to come back this week, and twice next week, as we have a breakthrough towards getting me out the other side. My psyche defeats him at every turn, this time, something happened.

I walk back to the Tube and am sick.

And that night I dream of violence so pure and unadulterated I want to unhinge my cranium and scrub my brain clean.

The next night I dream of violence again, violence tinged with things that I remember. Things that I remember, but which I had forgotten about. In every dream I am the adult me dealing with younger me situations, and the violenceÂ…My God, I had forgotten about the violence.

How could I forget that?

Things are started to come back. The connect the dots game of my mind has started. I am absolutely committed to continuing this, but bedtime is an exhausting exercise in itself. I never feel rested anymore.

And the truth is, I havenÂ’t disassociated in a while. ItÂ’s been a few months and IÂ’ve been truly grounded inside of me. Sometimes, I want to escape-IÂ’d love to escape. I rail at the fates for making me be present during the worst period of my life.

Things are coming back, and they hurt a lot, but thereÂ’s a little girl frozen in time and she has all the answers.

In the meantime, some of my true behavior is popping up, and it is surprising me.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 08:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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