Accepting the impact of childhood trauma

I am the tracing paper girl, grown into a tracing papered woman. I am an outline of skin drawn on A4, a shape resembling a human. Nobody gets to see tracing paper me.

Tracing paper girl is a thin scribble, she is a thick blotted scream, she is sad twisted upon sad, her lines are unclean. She is loud in her silence, the way she slips over my outline and merges with me. Tracing paper girl was drawn with another’s hand, she has my outline but not my insides.

Tracing paper girl, I want to draw you away, the lightness of you resting on me is too heavy; the knowledge that together, we are one picture.

Grief

Hovering above my head, is a balloon . I watch it float. The sky is linen crisp but my pegged heart hangs sodden. They say it will pass, as if your unused plate is just a cloud and not a shattered life.

Believe me, I have have taken apart my memories and tried to put me back together, tried to put you back together, but all I can build is an incomplete that is just, less. I am tired of searching for you. I want to stop searching for you.

Sometimes my imagination reaches for the string of the balloon. I tug it down and hold its full body against my skin. I am strong enough to pop through its tense membrane, to destroy it with blunt fingernails, but I need it because I need you.

You are gone. The balloon stays; a passive watcher of my time without you, a critical presence lingering when there is joy, when there is laughter, when there is new. It is then, in those moments that this sorrow; this held in, puffed up, burst full pain, is the heaviest lightness of all. You are gone.

The balloon pulls me to the ground without ever leaving the space just above my sky stretched hands. I still reach for you and I know if you could, you would reach for me to. You would take my hand and say softly, let me go. Grief is a balloon.

PTSD in a pandemic

I listen to their words; of how much you have changed their world, how hard you have been and how much you have taken. I hear their shouts of adoration for your challenges and your gifts; the new perspectives and the banana breads. And I wonder why I do not see you; why I do not feel you.

2020, you did not repel my imagination forward to the promise of new year, you did not tug my memory back to a time before it all. You were just you and I was just me; two concepts which collided, two ingredients in a mixing bowl, uncertain of what they would become because what they had been is

unspoken.

Did you know that I was spinning before we met? You slipped into the air current barely noticed. They say you are traumatic, I say so am I.

I could not gather enough foundation for you to shake. I could not grasp enough safety for you to snatch. I could not exist how I wanted long before you said that I could not. I lived in my lockdown long before I was told to lock down.

But still I listen to their words, of how everything is changed, and how I hope it is true. How I hope that my past and all that was taken will find its vaccine and the silent creep of memory will no longer feel like a virus.

Uncertainty

I wake up. Uncertainty has tugged away the covers. Cold air snuggles around my sleepy limbs and breathes my warmth into its lungs. I have nothing to do and nowhere to be, but uncertainty doesn’t care. It likes me to wait. So I wait.

“No plans today,” I would say breezily if someone were to ask “it’s going to be a chilled one.” but nobody asks and as I drag myself to the bathroom at least I am spared the sweet torture of pretending that this is OK.

It isn’t ok but perhaps I am not OK? The mirror hanging precariously over the sink is smudged with flecks of dried water like the tears which come to settle me to sleep. It is morning now though and not the time for crying. Instead, I watch myself rubbing white foam onto my teeth with a bristled stick. I spit all of the strangeness we accept down the sink and am left with all the of strangeness we cannot.

I am full of strangeness. Perhaps it would not come as a surprise to say that it is not the type which is accepted. My strangeness comes from tugging hands wanting me to be somewhere else but in their effort, holding me still. My strangeness comes from my outsides pushing in; my skin trying to hide under my skin. My strangeness comes and goes. Uncertainty stays.

Uncertainty is in my words; in the way that they wander aimlessly across the page, take unexpected turns and settle in the place that they started. It is almost as if I have never been anywhere; my story is ruined by the fact that I know I end up here. Living in the present is living in a permanent plot spoiler and so, instead, I take myself to all of the places I could go, to all of the things I could be, to all of the things that aren’t yet written into permanence. I travel to the unknowns, to the unstable, to the unclear and all that is clear is that this daytime dreaming doesn’t make me feel better. When I wake up, yet again, uncertainty has tugged away the covers.