LOST (and not yet found)

Something a little different this week. Inspired by Holly’s Caravan Collective prompt I thought I’d share my interpretation of ‘lost and found’.

It is my way of wrangling my experience in words the best I can.

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There are moments when I am lost to myself.

It starts with a rising tide of dread somewhere near my diaphragm. Like a hole opening up inside me. Blackness leaking out, creeping, consuming everything in its path.

Then there will be a phrase, a snippet of a lyric or a conversation floating from the depths of my mind. It’ll stick and repeat, like a cd skipping.

Replaying,

replaying,

replaying.

My mind will search for reason; try to place the words within a now forgotten context. Memory ephemeral and unreal – fails.

And then catches. Like a key in a lock, it sticks, something turns over and the door opens. Shadows coalesce.

I call it ‘the dream déjà vu thing.’ The best description I have. The feeling of already having experienced this – whatever this is – but in a dream. Knowing the memory is fake, the words untrue, the images staged, only a figment of my own imagination. Or are they? I don’t know.

But the feeling is real. The dread. The terror.

I feel sick. My stomach flips.

And then I am gone. Jettisoned out of the now.

I continue to move, like a wind up toy using the last of its momentum. Body going through the motions, mechanical, soulless.

I am made a marionette. Standing over myself I grasp for the strings. Frozen outside of myself as my mind is thrown back into the remembered dream. Eyes seeing, mind blind.

I am here and I am gone.

I am lost to myself. Stuck in a surreal hell-scape of fear. Fighting the memory, the feeling. Not wanting to know. Unable to make any of it make any sense. I’m afraid that remembering will sever me from myself completely. That the strings will be cut. What if there is no way back from knowing?

The ‘episode’ itself is brief. A minute, two. Impossible to know. Time ticks on, while I am outside of it.

And then I am back. The hot sting of water on skin. Shampoo running into my eye. Michael moving around blurred by condensation on the shower door. I am myself again.

But there is the metal after taste of blood on my tongue. Stomach void and roiling. White noise raging in my head. I am ill fitting within myself; I do not reach all the way to my fingers and toes. Like an after image of myself. Out of focus, out of sync.

And there is the presence of dread.

I am afraid.

It can take ten minutes, an hour, or a whole day for the feeling to pass. To feel that I’ve settled in myself.

Or it can manifest as the low rumble of thunder far away, threatening rain – even if none is to come. It can make my days sepia toned and strange. Worse I think. To move through my world like this.

Jarring to say the least. Disruptive.

Terrifying.

To be lost.

Dissociation, my therapist calls it. A capital T Trauma response. The unseen scar left on my psyche.

Less frequent now. I fear their return.

I am trying -

trying to find my way back,

trying to make a home in myself,

trying to calm the skittish animal of my mind,

trying to find peace in the pieces of me still hurting,

still hurt.

I am lost,

but will be found.

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Thank you all for being here.