Tides of Time: On PTSD, Memory Loss, & Being Here Now

This is an essay crafted from gaps in my memory, about gaps in my memory.

This piece was written for and originally published in On Loan from the Cosmos, a now-closed literary journal.

I selected this for reprint in my Substack because it deals precisely with the issue of memory fragments and trauma, how we piece our stories back together with whatever small pieces we can find.

Tides of Time

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

― John Banville, The Sea

The memory tells me I was taken out of school, driven away from my mother and my home, and made to live with my father for just a month. This is when you’re 14, the memory says. It’s teasing me but it never gives me everything. 

The memory tells me that I’m taken from my father’s, too, and placed back into the care of my mother. Why?

Was it a month? Or was it summer? I always wonder. The edges of the memories are blurred, stretching on as both the sea and the sky. At what point does this blue become that blue? 

I close my eyes and dig for more. Again, the ever-present wall. The classic locked-room metaphor, the secrets I am keeping from myself. 

Another memory: I’m reading a local real estate magazine and circling the houses we could live in. I show them to my mother, who weeps. Looking back, I didn’t realize what it meant to use food stamps or what it would be like to take care of two kids on a mall salary while battling drug addiction.

Around the time of this memory, we are evicted. I stop going to school, and then I’m put into foster care. I repeat 10th grade in another city, in another school. And yet, there could be months or weeks between these events. My mind is a theory of multiple universes.

~

This Spring, a person from 15 years ago sent me a message saying he’d found a ‘book’ about vampires I hand wrote into a cheap lined journal. He said, “I searched for your name, found you on Twitter. It really feels like you should have it after all this time.”

He sent it to me in the mail a few days later. Before me was this artifact of the past, a self that I cannot easily conjure today. 

The beat-up little book — spine taped together, covered in band stickers — was a cosmic bridge between present and past. A latitude. A longitude.

Thank you, I wrote back to him. You cannot begin to understand how much this changes everything. 

 Of course, I couldn’t remember his name, his face, or a single detail about him. 

~

I want to be a luminous thing, but I’m a gaping hole where a girl used to be. I think it sometimes makes me dark. 

There is a sea separating me from the rest of myself, and it may take a lifetime to cross it, if I ever cross it at all. I am continental. The sea separates me from the rest of the memories and people and events and places that actually existed but that, through trauma-based memory loss and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) I either distort memories, remember them in fragments, see them in dreams, or combine them with false memories. Some things are hybrid. Some things I forget entirely.

Someone will say something — “Do you remember so and so?” — and I’ll come up blank. A silence of brain matter. 

I am chasing a ghost of myself, and she is eternally turning a corner several paces ahead of me, her essence trailing behind in a blur. Who is she? What is she truly like? 

~

In bed, before I sleep I perform a ritual. The ritual is me trying to remember everything that my mind has deleted. I go onto Google Maps, plug in old addresses and stare at the doors and windows, hoping for some skeleton key to work. I used to think that it was an act of healing, a piecing-together, me trying to solve the mystery of self. 

But the truth is, it’s become a sort of self-punishment. When I draw blanks, I mentally flog myself for not being able to remember every detail, every transition, every crack. For not seeing where the sky meets the sea.

In the ritual, I try to conjure being 14: I see my piano teacher, but his name doesn’t exist. I see myself playing the first few bars of Moonlight Sonata, but my body knows nothing about music. I see me reading books near a big tree out in the yard, but I can’t tell you which yard. Which house.

There is a home economics classroom. In it, I’m slicing yellow apples — why yellow, brain? — near big windows, but what’s beyond the glass is gone. I see plates of yuca, an open CD player, a mattress on the floor. I feel a blinding hot summer without an air conditioner. This is a latitude, but still no longitude. In some small dark place, some shadow box, some inlet in my head, my mother cries in perpetuity, but I can’t find it. And so I can never make it stop. 

Everything has a shape, but the things exist without texture. I try to peel me away in layers. I feel I must be carbon-dated to be truly understood. I am a chronic mystery.

~

Other girls keep their prom dresses hanging in the back of their closets. It’s so ugly, they joke. What was I thinking? I can’t help but think of the ugly dress as a marker, a stamp of existence. I want to say, you were thinking, “I was here.” It’s beautiful.

The things we keep or the things that are kept for us are our energetic stamps. They might be relics of our youth, symbols of transformation. One day they may become ancestral items, part of a lineage of story and survival. Boxes of love notes and paper fortune tellers, yearbook photos, batons and trophies — they are the mundane makings of a sacred blueprint.

Out with friends, everyone talks about their old family vacations, their mother’s doing this or that. They ask things like, Were you a theatre kid? Where did your family go on vacation? Did you have the same friends since you were a baby?

I never have an answer. Except I have a sea of answers, and none of them make any sense. Of course, no one ever asks each other how many times they changed schools, if they were bullied for being the weird foster kid, or what happened to all of their belongings. 

CPTSD comes with a superpower: The ability to be wholly extracted from any conversation, only to be thrown down a well. In this well, you experience disassociation, derealization, or depersonalization.

I stand at the shore of myself and call upon the waves. I have to watch them come in and out, cyclical, foamy, wild. I have to calm myself and think beautiful thoughts. I tell myself that other people’s happy memories and experiences ought not make me feel inadequate or othered, although the trouble with CPTSD is that it has fangs.

It takes years of effort to stay present, to not break people who are whole, to not loathe friends for coming from a house, life, or family that never vanished or erased them. It takes effort to not be the brat who sits soiled in your own shit and piss and trauma, spewing it out onto anyone around you, forcing them to own it.

~

I own almost nothing from my past. Every photo has been sitting in a green plastic tub at my mother’s house. It’s yours after I’m dead, my mother says. She’s joking, but she’s not joking. 

I suppose she’s holding onto the tub because she’s responsible for losing everything else — and I can’t bring myself to argue with her about it. In the green tub is the whole ocean, photos from my and my brother’s childhood, which exist up until a certain age. And then nothing exists at all. It’s nearly all been lost — to time, to evictions, to addiction, to foster care, to carelessness. 

Photos are the things that help map me back to me. I look at the details of furniture and rooms. I find a narrative. I find a truth I can trust when my mind fails me. 

When people say Instagram is empty, that selfies are superficial, I want to ask them if they’ve got the kind of parents who display pictures on the mantle. I want to ask them if they feel as though they’ve been erased from their own existence. 

I am going to continue taking photographs and documenting my narrative. Yes, this curation may be the work of modern devils, but so be it. The first 20 years might be gone, but the next are all mine. 

~

A friend tells me, “You should write a memoir.”

It’s a kind thought, I tell her, but I’m on an eternal precipice, constructing a memory map of myself with dead ends — and who wants a faulty narrator?

I tell her that the inside of my head feels like this: What is the word? What was I going to say? What is that thing called again? I’m a tip-of-the-tongue sort of girl. It’s almost, almost there, but it’s not. Not really. 

Remember ‘A Million Little Pieces’? I retort. I’m still trying to decide which memories are right and which are forgeries of time. And I don’t want everyone to hate me. 

It’s different, she tells me. You’re not lying. You’re looking for yourself, and you can take the reader with you.

~

When the vampire story comes in the mail, I cringe at its earnestness, but I can see me developing on the page. I can see whatever I was trying to form forming. A girl reaching out from the past, her ghost, her resurrection. She is trying to speak me into existence, and so here I am, looking at my maker. 

Her vampire story is one of love and desire, a thick blinding want so big that it transcends the terror of being at home. An addiction to blood when heroin was everywhere. An addiction to the grandiose when my bedroom was full of cockroaches. She was trying to survive. 

I’ve been writing myself whole for as long as I can remember. I’ve been writing through the blankness, writing around the void, putting everything to paper as if it were an equation. Each memory is a body part. 

Now I have a femur, now I have a colon, now I have a wrist. 

One of the ways I learned to write for healing — not for pleasure or out of artistic compulsion — comes from an experience with an expressive arts therapist I was seeing in my early 20s. I can’t remember many of the details, but she had me write down all of the memories that caused me pain. It was easier for me to shape the words onto paper than to say them aloud:

Years of poverty and addiction and abuse. 

My parents overdosing in fast food restaurant bathrooms. 

My dad being arrested in front of me probably around the age of eight. 

That my few new school clothes were stolen by my mother’s boyfriend, refunded for drug money. 

That we lived in three homeless shelters, sleeping on bunk-beds and eating communal dinners. 

That I was put into foster care at 16 and I aged out of the system. 

The list of things my body experienced is big and dangerous and cruel but I wanted to color in the dark spaces, from black to blue. I still do. A lifetime of chiseling, of illumination, must lead somewhere, right? Or else the suffering has no meaning. It’s just suffering. 

Writing is the only way I can examine the liminal. On paper I am both the confessor and an omnipotent observer. I say the things and in the saying, I dilute them, stop them from having ultimate control over me. Language is the body, the albatross, and the crossbow. 

~

The disassociation I learned growing up plagues me today. When I was younger, constant disassociating from painful experiences helped me cope.

But disassociating today, being held in some disembodied state where my cells are disassembled and then put together again, is a sickness. I disassociate as I fuck, make jokes with friends, or walk through gardens. I become a wall of fuzz, moving as though I am watching myself in a dream of myself. My brain does it on its own, usually when I’m comfortable or happy.

~

“Hey Google,” I say, “Bedtime.” The sphere lights up and acknowledges my request; she plays nighttime sounds as I wash my face. 

It is the year 2020, and I am speaking to a small round robot who is no doubt siphoning my data and feeding it to some future apocalypse. But that’s better than it being 1997 living in the YMCA, or drinking small cups of Tang in the methadone clinic waiting room while we wait for mom.

“Hey Google,” I say. “Play a guided meditation for mindfulness.” 

Together with the voice pouring into my bedroom, we breathe. I feel my feet and my legs and my stomach and my shoulders and my scalp. I notice my sheets. I notice the faint scent of an old, blown-out candle. It is scented of the sea. 

You can’t change the past, the meditation’s voiceover says. Like it’s so easy. Just like that. 

But CPTSD is narcissistic and relentless and creative. I buy childhood toys on Etsy to replace what’s been lost. I message old connections and ask them, “for a project,” what they remember about me. I search for TedTalks and books to help me understand memory loss. I cry to my partner on the bathroom floor: I don’t want to let her go, or abandon her. Because she is part of me, I tell him. I admit to pulling up my old houses on Maps. I admit that I disassociate sometimes. I admit that I’m weird, but who isn’t, especially when you’re Frankenstein’s creation.

To chronicle a disappeared past is, in some ways, to erase the present. I want to be here now, to not let anything else slip through my fingers. And yet, the brutality of life hungers for absolute truth, clarity, explanation, resolution. I replay people and rooms and experiences because I want to either keep the good they gave me or say goodbye to what was taken from me too quickly. 

~

What compounds memory loss and the effects of trauma is the sense that in living a new life, I left her — myself — back there with all the pain, in all that blur. That I am here now, that I somehow became, or bloomed, or resurrected, while she is trapped in an undead limbo. 

But that invalidates her. Because we are the same. Am I really letting her go, or am I bringing her with me, to give her new body parts?

In an effort to write about the blankness, I write about somethingness. These words became a story of food stamps and moving too many times and having too few clothes. It’s a story of how people living with addiction and mental illness need community, access to resources, and compassion. It’s a story of a brain rewired. 

I view these traumas as acts of violence — against my equilibrium, my stasis, my immune system, and my sense of hope. A loss of self — a loss of memory, a loss of childhood — is a violation. But I also see them as waves that have come and gone; and there is so much water left. 

I used to believe mine was a story of absence. I used to believe that healing comes with a wholeness. The whole story. But that does not exist. It is an illusion. The real medicine is letting the wound be. 

It is not superficial or self-indulgent to want to heal your trauma; that very process changes how you show up in the world. To help others. It is not bad to be broken. It just is. 

Here’s to my whole sea and all its tides.