Trauma Season

Everyone around me says I change too much; my names listed out like letters of love, folded up into origami birds in an attempt to create something beautiful out of the old versions of me. I don’t know if it works but I am always forced to manipulate myself into something else, either by the hardened influence of the world or by my own scraping emotions, trying to get the remaining innocence out of the jar. It works under the belief system of the lie I told -- the lie in which I tell everyone around me that I am going to stop changing, that I know this is a coping mechanism and yes, I also know that my mind has calcified and fractured into little splinters that break off like the very concept of being a child, so it’s not really my fault but I should’ve known better anyway. Everyone tells you that it’s not your fault until it happens when you’re old enough to know what’s going on and then - well, all kindness drains away and regurgitates into something brittle and nightmarish that would crumble if you touched it, something that knows you will not touch it because you will never touch anything ever again, so it’s your fault. It’s my fault, I should have stopped her.

The worst aspect of my isolated personality is how adept I am at blaming myself. It is a skill, a talented bestowed by the creator. My father hurt my mother irreparably and it was my fault, my family dissipated into the air unloved and it was my fault. Still, somehow,  none of that compares to the ache I feel when I remember that I let her hurt you. Yes, this is a letter now, this is another name to drown. I let it happen. Now my childhood trauma bleeds and trickles out of the wound and every time I try to take the knife out I am pierced again. It’s so tiring. I don’t know how we deal with it.

I don’t know how you deal with it, my love, but that’s in the sequel, that part lies in the story I haven’t written yet where we are both healing. I realized recently that I don’t know how to recognize happiness. I certainly have never met Healing, but I imagine that Healing is represented by a bright man like an ancient deity — a man that I trust with the needle and the thread of time. I think that I will meet Healing on the same day that I take the women that hurt you and tie them together, forever sinking down to eternal torment in the river. I don’t believe in Hell but I know bad people when I see them, some psychic gift-curse wrapped up in a cardiovascular box. I like to think that I don’t know how to hate — that I am some pure thing — but the truth is that I will never be able to vomit my guilt out of me, I will never be able to eat again without feeling her words enter me too, violent like a crest of trauma. I wear this crest proudly -- victim, because I don’t know what it’s like to be anything else. I’m sorry.