Tides of time: On PTSD, memory loss, & being here now
An essay crafted from gaps in my memory, about gaps in my memory.
Note: This piece was written in 2020, and originally published by On Loan from the Cosmos, a now-closed literary journal.
“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. You were 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? Where is the truth?
Was it a month? Or was it summer? I always wonder. The edges of the memories are blurred, stretching on as endless sea, perpetual 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, if we get evicted from the one we’re in now. I show the houses 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 move into a stranger’s home. 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.
***
A person from 15 years ago sent me a message saying he’d found a ‘book’ about vampires I’d handwritten into a cheap lined journal sometime my first 10th grade year. I searched for your name, found you on Twitter. It really feels like you should have it after all this time, he tells me. It came in the mail a few days later: An 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 tell him. You cannot begin to know what this means to me. 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. A 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 have forgotten. Sometimes, I either distort memories, remember them in fragments, see them in dreams, or combine them with false memories. Everything inside me is a hybrid thing.
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. Who is she?
***
When I can’t 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 doorways and window frames, 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. A pleasure that often feels more like a punishment. I want to dominate every detail, every transition in time, every echo, every image.
In the ritual, I 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 sun drenched 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.
***
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. The ugly dress says, I was here. A relic. Proof.
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 or a goth? Where did your family go on vacation? Which beach did you go to?
I never have an answer. Except I have a sea of answers, and none of them make any sense. With which self do I answer? And how do I fill in the blanks?
CPTSD comes with a superpower: The ability to be wholly extracted from any conversation, 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 disappear from the conversation, 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 manage 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 as if an erasure occurs.
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.
***
A friend tells me, “You should write a memoir.” Aw, thanks, 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, almost there, but it’s not. Not really.
***
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—a 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. A fantasy of the grandiose when my bedroom was full of cockroaches.
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.
I saw an expressive arts therapist once 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—a sort of doorway. Language as a body. As an albatross. As a memorial. 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, illumination. It must lead somewhere, right? Or else the suffering has no meaning. It’s just suffering.
***
The disassociation I learned growing up follows 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 only a holding pattern. I’d disassociate as I fuck, make jokes with friends, or walk through gardens. I’d become a wall of fuzz, moving as though I am watching myself in a dream of myself.
***
I buy childhood toys on Etsy to replace what’s been lost to time. A lumpy, purple elephant I once named Nut-mom. A Gund bear called Getty. Floral-patterned sheets from 1989. They come in the mail, I tear into the package, and I am left with a remaining lack—a feeling that I could order a thousand things and never truly get back to 1990, to myself, to my mother—when my heart still felt whole. Can you ever get anything back?
To chronicle a disappeared past, in some ways, is to erase the present. I want to be here now, to not let anything else slip through my fingers. And yet, I pine for a truth, an clarity, an explanation, a 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.
Time has fractured me; I am plagued with a sense that I left her — myself — back there with all the pain, in all that blur. That I am here now while she exists in a contourless, endless past feels catastrophic. A betrayal.
***
In an effort to write about the blankness, I find that I write about somethingness. It’s not just a story of food stamps and moving too many times and having too few clothes. It’s not only a story of how people living with addiction and mental illness need community, access to resources, and compassion. It’s a story of what came next. It’s that anything can come next.
I used to believe mine was a story of absence, forever at sea seeking a wholeness, a true story of self. But that wholeness is illusory. I have to find a way to let the wound be.