I’ve changed in the past few months. I’m not sure why.
I think it has something to do with my mother developing MS. Something about the distant realness of another person’s death, and forced processing of my own.
Time is flowing differently for me than it used to.
It used to be that I experienced time all at once. The “Now” wasn’t just the present, it was the past, it was everything that had ever happened to me. Childhood cancer was especially part of my Now.
The future was my Now too. Every day of work, every move, every love and heart break, I’ve experienced all of it a thousand times. Every cough, every pulled muscle, stomach cramp, heart palpitation, sometimes happening years and decades into the future, sometimes days, often hours or minutes. The Now was merely my own world line.
I’ve seen a thousand of my own deaths play out. I’ve died more times, I think, than most people twice my age have thought about death. And all of those futures really happened, or will happen, or are happening. I’ve died of everything there is to die of, everywhere there is to die, all the time, forever.
Something has changed the past few months. I don’t understand it. I’ve been somehow cut off from the future. The visions that I used to have, of moving, of new friends, of future nieces or nephews, of my mother’s death, of even my own death, they’re far more distant than they used to be. They feel imagined, not real.
Maybe I never really understood what it meant to imagine anything. Maybe the way everyone else has been imagining things has been to cut out paper characters in their mind and mime walking by rocking them back and forth and make them speak by doing funny voices for them.
Those people used to be real for me. Some of them, the ones who weren’t projections of myself onto The People Outside Us, were so real I didn’t recognise them as me.
LuAnn, you Brandi Carlile-sounding ass motherfucker, who were you?
Am I real, finally? Am I human? Or have I wandered into a world of fake paper cutouts, have I become a paper cutout myself?
I’m confused, because this world is so different from the one I’m from, where I saw all the future and all the past all at once, I have to wonder whether this is the Real world at all, or if I’m actually in a dream state.
There’s a book by Porpentine called Psycho Nymph Exile that talks about PTSD. She calls it “Despair Syndrome with Temporal Purge”.
There’s a lot about trans girls in Psycho Nymph Exile, and a lot about abuse. The mechanisms of trauma are usually the same though, even if the flavours are vastly different.
“Despair Syndrome with Temporal Purge” is a backronym of an anagram, but it’s no less fitting a term than “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”. I guess there’s a timeless quality to trauma. A way in which the present is stretched into eternity, and the infinite is compacted into a circle, an endless loop that you can travel around and around forever but never escape.
Surviving death that young, I thought I had been permitted some secret knowledge, had been initiated with some rite reserved usually for the wizened. These past few months, I’ve been thinking that maybe I was just traumatised, and being traumatised destroyed my ability to process time in a normative way.
My friends, whom I’d just gotten used to, have stopped coming around. It’s quieter than it’s been for as long as I can remember, going back at least a decade and a half. The quiet is nice in its own way, I guess, though I do find it a little unsettling.
I think we define ourselves in part in relation to others, by drawing boundaries between Me and You, even if we permit those boundaries to be permeable or ambiguous. I’m not sure how to define myself, if all these parts have well and truly chosen to integrate.
It feels empty in this mind, with too much space. When I speak I hear nothing but echoes.
L-Punk 