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decadentbirdtyrant · 3 years

Text

Memories

TW: Mental Illness, PTSD, death, addiction, alcoholism, mentions of uncomfortable topics, bipolar disorder

This one was specifically hard to write, and it deals with very heavy topics

You struggle with memories. Sometimes it’s hard to pick out the good ones, and sometimes it’s all you can dwell on. There are times that you fantasize about the past. Those thoughts have the hazy golden glow of a sunset in summer. You remember yourself much more vibrantly, much more happy. The old you who used to be so witty and funny. The old you who didn’t feel the need to be quiet. You miss him. The old you was a much better person and a much better friend. It’s times like these that you dwell on the past. When the future feels so bleak and hopeless that's when the happy memories come out to haunt you.

Those happy memories only come out when you are feeling down to make you feel even worse. The bad memories are always there. At the forefront of your brain. Whether you are upset and feel the need to make yourself feel worse or pull examples of how shitty you’ve been or how shitty life has treated you. The worst times are when you are genuinely feeling happy, when you feel good about yourself and those bad memories come to ruin any shred of self esteem you’ve worked so hard to build.

There is rain sprinkling outside your window and it reminds you of a time long ago when your car was destroyed by hail and the windshield while still intact was cracked to hell. You still drove it like that for months. You didn’t have a job and had no money other than the little you could get from your dad. Mom never gave you any money. On the rainy days it was miserable at best in that car. The driver side window was gone and the rain freely came in splashing you in the face sometimes at such a high velocity that it would sting on impact. Though this is not a bad memory. Back then you had a friend, or rather a best friend. Something you are seriously lacking in anymore. You were inseparable. Saw each other everyday and told each other everything. They sat in the passenger seat on every adventure and were there the day that the cracks in the wind shield got so deep that the rain started to seep through and drip down onto the dash. They were the first person you drove to when your dad bought you a new car because yours was now considered too dangerous to drive. It’s them that you find yourself missing when those memories of the good times haunt you. But, with every incline comes a decline. Those good memories will often be shadowed with doubt, anger, and sadness. This one is no different. Once you start to think about them you are forced to think about the decline of your friendship and the resulting argument that ended it all. That leads down further rabbit holes of the arguments that ended other significant friendships in your life. Each one branching to the next slowly weaving a pattern to now. Where you sit at home alone, you have no one to message. No one to hang out with on your days off. You have pushed everyone away and for what? A sense of comfort in the fact no one can be close enough to hurt you?

There is this song, a popular song that used to play on the radio when you were freshly graduated from high school. Every time you hear that song it takes you back to a much freer time. You can almost close your eyes and remember the smell of the outdoors while you sped past small forested areas, cow pastures, and fields of corn and soy. The highway swaying up and down and curving around hills following the land instead of bulldozing through it. Next to you a friend you have had since you were an infant. You had gotten so much closer in your senior year and you spent so much time with her you practically lived at her house. She was singing along to the song on the radio just like you were. You can feel the wind whipping through your hair sending it flying in loops every so often smacking you in the face. It’s why you always wore sunglasses to drive back then. That brings up the scent of Sonic, getting food from there and taking it to the lakes where you planned on spending all day swimming and just hanging out. These memories don’t devolve into worse ones, these ones just sting because they are so unattainable now. The freedom of the summer right after graduating high school is one that you can never get back, one you can never relive. It always lives there in your mind and you can visit it again but not without the sadness of knowing that you’ll never feel that free again.

Finally there are the bad memories. They can be very simple. Remembering something dumb you did as a kid or a conversational faux pas. It’s the more complicated and traumatic ones that hit the hardest. They are the ones you don’t want to relive but your mind reminds you of them as what can only be a sick joke. They are the ones that no matter your mood, no matter the place, something small, hardly even connected can cause them to come back.

Every time you are driving down a gravel road your hands clenched tight around the steering wheel, knuckles white from the force of your grip. Your heart beats hammering in your chest as you try to breathe calmly and slowly but every muscle in your body is tense and you’re beginning to sweat. With every turn or S curve you go through it’s like little snippets play in your head. The turns your stomach made as the vehicle started to spin out of control and the dread when every time you tried to fix it you just ended up over correcting and sending the vehicle barreling a different direction. The point where it tipped is where things get foggy. It was like it was moving in slow motion and that's how your brain makes you relive it. Feeling to slow shift as the wheels on the driver side lift off the ground and seeing the world start to turn outside the window until it's a blur of scenery that you can’t make heads or tails of. You don’t know if you are right side up, on your side, or upside down. At some point though it just cuts off. Maybe you closed your eyes, maybe you passed out but the next thing you can remember is being on your left side, head against the glass of the driver side window. Stunned silence until your mom says “Can anyone smell gas? We need to get out of here.” The feeling of being stuck not physically but too scared to move or really react at all. They never let you live that down. It gets brought up once every few family get togethers. That wound never heals because not only are you afraid of gravel roads and losing control of the vehicle you also get to carry the weight of what if it was worse? What if I had killed all the passengers in the car? How could I live with myself? How can I live with myself knowing that I have caused traumatic memories in my own family? That's the worst one, the one that has plagued you the longest.

There is that feeling of never being able to find a partner because you can’t stand the touch of other people. You don’t like sleeping next to someone because you’re afraid of what they will do when you’re sleeping. There is fear in the actions themselves and there is fear in constantly being alone. You don’t like to think about this one and you don’t want to write it down.

Then there is the most recent one. You’re in your mid twenties, you should be having fun and drinking. Alcohol is fine and drinking is okay but there's this little thing in the back of your mind that screams at you and if you listen too long then you see her. Not the dolled up version that laid in the casket at her funeral, not the face you saw just a month ago at Christmas, no you see her in that hospital bed. Her face and skin an ashy blue and eyes open so wide, her mouth slack as a tube hangs out of it. Her son sits next to her, his eyes red from crying. He was the one that found her and called the ambulance. Not soon enough but who could blame him. Getting so drunk to the point of blacking out and vomiting was rather common for her. Though she had tried to quit drinking so many times she just never could stay away from the bottle. This time though she was laying in the wrong position maybe had taken prescription pills with a highly adverse reaction to alcohol depending on who you ask. She drowned, choking on her own vomit. That's what you see when you think of alcohol, that's what you see when your friends make their little jokes about being ‘alcoholics.’ You just see her face.

Though those are terrible to remember and worse to relive. You think the worst things are the ones you don’t remember. You forget the good times with people who you no longer speak to. You forget the trips, you forget the gatherings, you forget the things that made life worth living back then. Just to remind yourself that anything good that happens now you’ll have forgotten in a few years from now. It’s hard now to remember the good things of the last few weeks. And when all you can remember are the bad times, the fights, the loss, the heartache. What really is there to look forward to.

You know that sounds cynical and melodramatic, you also know that it is untrue, that there are a million good times ahead of you. You also know that you’re going to struggle to see through a fog this dense. You should probably take a lesson from this, that living in the past can only work to hurt you more than the present and future will ever hope to. Life doesn't happen in the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘back when’s’ it’s happening now and it’s passing you by.

#mentalillnesswriting #ashittyday #dwellingonthepast #ventwriting

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