A Day with PTSD

You wake up at 4AM, jolted by a sound, brain racing from the nightmare, like thread unraveling from a spinning wheel. You are semi-conscious in the dark, searching for the source. It sounded like it was coming from the kitchen. Or the garage. Or just outside the window.

Silence. Holding your breath and your phone in your hand under the covers, in case someone is close to your room. The faraway train rings close in your ears, crowding out the house’s kinks and knocks. 

You tell yourself that everything is OK and to sleep. 

Practice deep breathing, fill the belly and lungs, expand. But laying on your back feels so exposed and vulnerable, all your soft parts splayed invitingly. You curl into a ball, and it is hard to breathe deeply like that, body compacted and tightly wound. Curled into a ball, surrounded by pillows, underneath two heavy layers of blankets that hold you, hold you steady as you remember the nightmare. 

Isn’t it funny how if you’re awakened in the middle of a dream, you can remember parts of it vividly, but if you wake up naturally, you remember the feelings of it, the gist of the experience, maybe a tasty morsel that will pique your curiosity throughout the day. The abrupt interruption, that’s a ragged raw cut with a dull knife on too-soft skin. 

He has been watching you for a long time. This is what your dream revealed in it’s Hitchcockian slow pace, so clear in black and white. You had gone to sleep with new information, evidence, in fact, that he is watching, collecting, lurking in clear daylight, brazen. Which means… to have found you now and to let you know so blatantly that he is watching you again … that he has actually, probably, most likely, absolutely been watching you, following you in secret for years. 

At  6AM you jolt awake to another sound, in the basement? The garage? Is someone at the kitchen window? You realize fatigue won that 4 AM fight, the red rise of the sun peeks through the blinds, and you unfold cautiously from the ball you had been, stretching and taking those deep breaths. 

So tired.

Can’t move.

Pull the little blanket over your eyes and say to yourself, just another hour. 

At 7AM light streams in. You are petrified, skin is completely immobile and you focus to find breath and blood flow in the wooden encasement your body has become. Heavy. Too heavy to move. 

Tell yourself, “I can do this. I can do this.” And you try to imagine yourself in the world outside of your blanket cocoon. The world is moving outside. You must try. 

Play a 22 minute meditation app. 

The good news is, you’re still breathing. Maybe that should be the goal of the day. Just breathe, and be. 

You play another 22 minute meditation app. Get up to pee. 

Sit on the edge of the bed. Open email. Scroll. Open Facebook. Scroll. Open Instagram. Scroll, double tap, scroll. Well, that was normal. 

Today you should file the police report. That fucker. Every single fucking time you think you are going to get a moment of peace, his fucking mug shows up to remind you that as long as he’s alive, you will never, ever, never, for the eternity of this human time, get away from him. But in the afterlife, he’ll get his due. And god help you, this is exhausting. Tedious. Punishing.

You pull on the comfiest leggings and long sleeve shirt and plush socks. Tight clothes to hold you tight in the absence of your heavy pile of blankets. 

Kitchen. Your breathing is still shallow as you shuffle through the doorway. 

Breakfast. Leftover kabobs and rice? Yes. 

Walk to tea kettle, switch on. Reach into cabinet, pull out bird seed and start to pour it into the ball. No, this isn’t right. How did you get seeds? Wrong cabinet. Pull the drawer and grab a bag of Yogi’s Kava Stress Relief tea. That’ll do. 

Walk back to kitchen and open refrigerator. Look for yogurt. Close refrigerator and turn to countertops to see empty plate and bowl. Fruit would be good. Where is the yogurt? Open the refrigerator and get yogurt. Remember kabobs and remove three layers of other leftovers to find that container. Spend ten minutes re-organzing refrigerator. Remember that you wanted to eat. Spoon yogurt. Go back to refrigerator for fruit. Listen to the beeping microwave and wonder why it is doing that. Kabobs. 

Oh, the tea. Go back to tea kettle and pour hot water into the mug. 

You hear a car engine rev outside, pop! (the exhaust?) Logic isn’t fast enough to stop it and your insides jump to the full blown-out capacity of pushing your skin to a stretching point. Stomach lurches up to your throat. Nothing comes out. You don’t barf. Or pee your pants. You are an example of calm and cool breakfast making person. With a few deep breaths, tears leak, landing on your cheeks and run toward your nose. 

“I just can’t today. I can’t,” you tell yourself. And you cancel the things you were going to do in the outside world. 

You cannot go out by yourself. 

Would you call someone to ask them for help? No, that is absurdly ridiculous. 

What to say… “I’m afraid of the world and need someone to be with me.” Nuts. They already think you’re nuts for avoiding highways, and grocery stores, and restaurants where the world is too loud and too lit and too crowded and too chaotic and too much. (Oh, but thankfully they are the best nature trail, cool escape, hiking buddies!) So you stay in your lane. Stay home.  

Your body moves through the rooms and toward the back door, the feeling of it moving through translucent, invisible molasses. There is sticky resistance at every step so you go slowly, slowly across the slick hardwood floors to the forest green carpet. You bump past the coffee table, which you were sure you’d given wide berth. It is amazing that you are still upright, your entire system is in conflict between wanting to go on and wanting to shut down entirely. 

Step onto the deck and into the sun. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. But don’t close your eyes. 

Walk to the edge and look out into the neighborhood, but stay home, within the lines. Watch the birds on the tree by the fountain. See the fox scat next to the pine. Someone said it was hit by a car this week. You love that fox, how it settled into a burrowing spot by the tree, under the lilac brush in the corner. 

Thank the sun for coming up and warming the day. Walk your molasses walk back to the kitchen. Take the plates to the table and eat. Sip the cooled tea. What if the police are jerks when you call? Make sure you have all the evidence and PO number and notes ready. 

Scroll Facebook, and Instagram, and email. Do this every ten minutes or so, as if something you’ll see there will change your life. (Do this all day long, unconsciously, robotically.)

Text a couple friends. Tell them you’re having a rough day. Text your dad and tell him some of this, but not everything because he’s on vacation and what can he do anyway, or anyone else for that matter. Make you feel like getting up and out of the house should be the easiest thing in the world. And you can’t, you can’t even because the overwhelm, out there. It isn’t about the sounds. Not at all. It is about feeling numb, feeling unsafe, feeling alone in this prison of your mind that cannot turn the nightmares that are your reality off. And you decided that instead of shaming yourself for not being  ___ enough, that on days like this, the goal would be to keep breathing, keep being. Anything else you do is a bonus. 

Friends text you with pet sitting offers, invitations to meet, their divorce updates. Respond in text — they have no clue about you and you can hide everything behind typed text and emojis. 

Look at your to do list for the twentieth time and choose something important, but not too difficult. Call about health insurance issue. You are on hold for more than 30 minutes and when they answer no one can help because you need one of two specialists who handles your type of case because you and your daughters are in a protected location program with the state attorney general’s office. OK, maybe this was difficult. 

Worry. A dirty laundry list of worries stinking up the place. Notice the light and shadows make lines on the wall, lines moving as the day passes by. You don’t need a watch, you know the patterns. 

There are two places you go in the house. The kitchen and the black chair in the living room. Huddle, stay focused, get something done. 

You have the police number programmed in your phone. The non-emergency number. You look at the evidence again. You know one thing for sure and that is that if you do nothing, you’ll regret it down the road when that fucker gets bolder. 

You remember his glassy, empty stare, the shadow seeped into his face that had burned off the mask of the man you thought you knew. His bedeviled body, bottomless pit pupils, and the yelling and the arms flailing and fists landing, his strength overpowering you and you tried but couldn’t squeak out a word, because his entire presence whaled and whalloped and would stop at nothing. In that moment his entire purpose was to destroy. Destroy you. 

You won’t even play the cancer card in this hand. You think you’ve shelved that in a safe place while you ignore the pain from the burns and cell destruction under smoothed out scars. Remember that time your own body tried to kill you? Yeah, yeah, but you are not giving up. You are breathing. 

How long have you been sitting in the chair? Your eyes can’t focus on the computer screen and in the last ninety minutes you’ve put six things into that spreadsheet. And they’re in the wrong place. Start over. Get this done, done right, then you can call the police. Numbers swim, moving places in your memory as you go back and forth between two documents. You can’t hold more than one, maybe two pieces of data from one page to the next, as you go back to look again, to make sure you got it right. 

More tea? Yes. And a sweet. All the emergency chocolate in the house is gone. Get chili out of the fridge and put it on the stove. How did it get to be 2 PM already? You want to close your eyes and make the to do list disappear. A headache knocks the right side of your skull. It’s always there, but some thoughts make it flare. You shame yourself into doing everything today. Now. Or how will you keep up with your responsibilities this week!

Sit in the black chair. Call the sheriff’s department, leave a message with the dispatcher. A deputy calls back, but it goes straight to voice mail. You call again. The deputy calls you back and again, straight to voice mail. You call back and get connected, apologize for your mobile phone which isn’t even working consistently with wifi assist. 

It has been years and the police always ask the same question — What did he do to you to get the restraining order? They want to know if they should take you seriously: A neighborly squabble, an irritation among privileged parties, or outright potential murderer on the loose. I hate answering that question. Throat closed up, more shallow breathing, numbness in arms, legs, toes. Head swimming in time with the rush of bile. Ohmygosh you are a rockstar for being able to sit up in the chair! 

You blurt it out. You blurt out that you have the email with details to forward to them. We’ll need that he says. Then the deputy is rushing you off the phone, he’s on a location call and has to go in. He’ll call back. 

But he doesn’t. Another deputy calls, leaves a message. Says he’s taking over, call back. You do, and start all over again. Who, what, why, the bile rises, the numbness presses deeper. OK, he says, here’s your case number. We’re going to file this with the court. “Right, right,” you say, reaching your hand up to rub your neck, noticing tiny, itchy bumps have formed on the right side. Hives?  “Any advice?” you ask, being vague because your daughter has just come in the door from school. She knows, but she doesn’t need to know everything. 

You get off the phone and she sits on the couch, next to your comfy chair. “Stop being so … passive about this,” she says. “You’ve been too nice about him doing these things… I want to see you fight!”  She purses her lips and looks at me with his stern gaze. “You can be aggressive, you don’t need to protect us from what he’s doing,” she says cooly. 

“Well,” I say, “maybe someday, there’s a chance he… you… ok…” I stutter, choking on stale hope that he’d sober up, develop empathy, be safe.

You are impressed with her bravery.  You are also brave, and your job is to protect them.  

You are so tired. So tired of fighting. Making that call was the biggest stand you could make today in the molasses-thick air and the crushing headaches and the spreading numbness in your extremities. 

You phone a friend. Normal minutes pass, laughter from your outside body. In the window’s reflection you see red sky and rise to walk across the room to the sliding door, held in conversation as you move to walk down the steps and out into the expansive, vulnerable open space by the house. The furthest you’ve ventured outside the cocoon all day. The sky is on fire — orange, yellow, pink, red, black and all this reflected in the shadows in the clouds and on all the windows in the homes surrounding this space.

A tough and beautiful day; the sunset agrees.  

You cannot eat, cannot imagine dinner. You take your computer into bed, under the pile of heavy blankets, pillows piled high around your body, and watch a very safe and sweet movie with no shadows, no loud noises, no sinister characters, no threats. 

It feels like you are trying to retrain your brain with kind world propaganda. 

It works and at 9 PM you feel something in your belly… hunger. Pad to the kitchen and make grilled cheese, remember a pickle. 

Brush your teeth.

Lie on your back and listen to the meditation app. Let your neck relax and your shoulders sink.

Your hand rests warm on your heart in gratitude for making it through this day. Fall asleep with a prayer on your lips for all who suffer, that they may find healing and love and peace.