Drifting Farther

Fracturing open

Leaving the whole

Suspended uneven

Less than control

Even when you think that you have it.  Even when you think that you are now, and always, master of your own mind, your own body.  Is it ever really true? 

Nervously vicious energy snakes and races through my veins.  My heart flutters, beating hard, then not at all.  The rhythm of my body is lost. Chaos reigns instead.   The coming of summer inevitably brings with it a luxury to which my mind is unaccustomed and untrained to handle: Time.  Time to think.  Time to remember.  Time to hurt.  Thus far my disintegration has been incomplete.  Nowhere near the magnificent display of ineptitude of last summer.  This is good, but it doesn’t mean that it cannot yet evolve into such.

I am in the process of cleaning out 23 years of memories and possessions from my room at my parents house.  Most discoveries there in are sweet, if a bit bittersweet.  Yesterday I came across two things that are yet completely related.  One was a picture, the other a scribbled journaling.  In the picture I was smiling, yet the journaling belied the pain.  I looked into eyes that I have long held in fear, and I felt nothing.

Nothing.

Not pain.  Not fear.  Not anger, sadness, regret.  Just. Emptiness and nothing. 

Moments later I unearthed the journaling.  The words cut to my heart, took me back.  Made me remember.  In the writing I was scathing towards myself.  Angry, disgusted, horrified.  I called myself weak, needy, and unworthy.  I couldn’t believe that I was so unfeeling as to ask my then boyfriend to pick me up from work.  The language I used to abuse myself was colorful, violent.  Apparently he had told me that he needed to start taking care of himself.  That he couldn’t keep spending so much time and energy "taking care of me".  This chiefly entailed no longer driving 1.5 minutes down the road to pick me up  when my desk shift was over at 2 in the morning. 

I had forgotten this. 

Then I read and I remembered.   I remember how much I hated myself for being so stupid, and asking such a horrible thing.  Asking him to come and pick me up.  

Then I remembered walking down that street at two in the morning every night shift after that.  I remembered being afraid.  I remembered the cars that would slow down, the drunken frat boys leaning out the window to yell things at me.   I remember hating myself all the way down the street.  For being scared, for being hurt, for not wanting to walk down the street alone.  I remember being ashamed, and embarrassed.  

My mother told me today that most of our memories are inaccurate.   That the more we think about something that happened, the less reliable it is.  It makes me wonder how accurate this memory is.