I just want to curl into a little ball and implode, disappear, have all my particles redistributed into something else and placed in a safer space. My brain doesn’t know we are not there, but are we really here? Where am I? Where are we? And why does it hurt so much if it’s a memory of the past.
I can’t find the towel but I need to leave this room. The knot in my throat is pulsing and growing by the second. I close the door behind me and jump into the cold shower. The hot water will just not come out but I am fighting for life even if there is no threat. It hits me like thousands of needles but I tell myself to breathe deeply and I take it because physical pain is the only thing I know how to control. It feels like it’s filling me up and the skin becomes thick and elastic, I feel like fainting.
I go somewhere else, to nowhere, I dissociate into the void for a split second and I’m back. I am still in the shower and the water is warm now and I am sobbing uncontrollably because some part of me realises what just happened. I remember him taking all of my space, infiltrating every orifice, creating a constant hammering noise in my scull, and I have nowhere to hide if not inside of my own brain. Where I have nowhere else to go, where do I go?
I step out of the shower, the feel of water on my skin is grounding; I lower myself to the ground so that I cannot go any lower and I just exist in a form of human panic. I tell myself that I am here, that I am safe, that he is not in the physical realm here with me. I move my eyes left and right quickly, a rapid eye movement to talk myself out of the memory I didn’t ask for. A dreamlike process but I am awake.
I put my clothes back on and they stick to my wet skin, that’s how I know I am on this plane of reality. I make my way to the back room and sit at the desk, quietly in case he’s listening. And I cry, I feel my lungs lacerating and I have nowhere to go and no one to talk to. So I write. I am so scared and I feel like my own body is not enough to keep this deformed flashback away.
Here I am. I am here. I am not there. He is not here. We are not here together. It’s only me. And that’s the overwhelming healing feeling of loneliness. No one is here. No one has ever been here before and no one will ever enter my universe, no one can, no one I want to allow in here. And that’s ok.
I don’t want to be told what to do and I know that everything is going to be alright. I told myself that story so many times and I made it so far, to the point that comfort from other people feels arrogant. I allowed people to destroy me, I am not going to allow anyone to rebuild me if they are picky about the pieces. I cannot exist if not in my integrity, and only I know how to put myself back into one piece because I was there. Because I am Here.
Where is Here?
portrait of myself by Pedro Terrinha