Flashbacks

The angle of a shadow, the brief touch against my body, the quality of light, a smell.

And all of a sudden, I want to run away, hide, lock doors, sob, throw up, lash out.

I don't remember anything, in the sense where "remember" means "know of specific events that cause me to feel like that when something happens." I hear the voices of parts, chiming in to say, "This happened to me, that happened, it was bad, it was hard." But it's so separate from my self, the me that is writing. I don't remember these things, I have no conscious knowledge. I know of some things that happened, and I can use reason and logic to determine that it's likely other things happened. But it's separate from me.

I tell myself, "You wouldn't have flashbacks if nothing happened." "You wouldn't feel like this, if there were no reason." But it's so hard to believe. My mind leaps and contorts, trying to figure out a way that I could just be imagining, could just be misinterpreting the past. Because it seems so unbelievable that it could have happened to me. It's so hard to accept that my family could contain such a large secret as that. Things that happened over and over, year after year.

There was no predicting what would make it happen. When I was little, I thought that saying my prayers every night would keep away the nightmares--the breathing, the weight, the feeling of pressure, the sense that everything was out of control.

Often, after flashbacks, my mind shows me image after image of violated locks. Locks that were broken and destroyed, over and over as I was growing up. There was no way I could consistently keep a door locked, keep a space where I was the only one on my side of a door. I can understand this, because I remember those locks, and I remember the despair I felt when they were broken. But the lingering echoes of why those locks were so very important, that's harder to accept.

But what advantage would I gain, from making this up? Nightmares? Wanting to throw up when I'm touched? Distance from my partner? Inability to just get on with my life and do the things I really want to do? I can't see any reason for making it up, but it's so hard to accept that it's real.