appetite. I start thinking and am almost shocked to recognize that I haven’t eaten all day and I haven’t been hungry once. Not one time have I felt hungry with all the mental rings I’ve jumped through; screw it I just want to go home. I enter my apartment and go straight into my room and fall on the bed. As I roll over I pray for a better tomorrow.
6
Past Returns
My eyes open and I find myself less than two feet from the ceiling. I lean up quickly and notice I’m in my old bed in Florida where I grew up and I’m on the top bunk of my brother and I’s old bunk beds. I sit there and begin to shake in fear. My eyes widen and intensify with panic as my hands begin to sweat. I hear sounds coming from under my bunk and I’m almost too petrified to look. I slowly lean over the rail and see my little brother jumping out of bed and running out of the room. He looks like he’s seven but he should be twenty-six now. I shake my head and slide my hand onto my forehead and start massaging my temples.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask myself while I hold back the tears forming in my eyes.
I close my eyes again and take a deep breath, I look up and my room is exactly how I remembered it when I was a kid. If my brother is seven then I’d be ten.
The red toy chest on the far wall under the football curtains are the same as they were when I was little. The floor is still covered with the brown shag carpeting. I haven’t lived here in fourteen-years, not since my parents were still married. Speaking of my parents, I hear them talking in the living room. I slowly get out of bed and peer out the door. I feel the shag carpet rise between my toes. I ease my way out and move down the hallway slowly, I slowly peer around the wall into this surreal twilight zone. As I enter the living room, my family is waiting for me. I stand in front of them shocked and speechless. My Mom and Dad are sitting next to each other, which is very unusual. My sister is on the love seat sitting across from me. This can’t be; everyone is looking at me like I’m being sent to Iraq again. They look at me like I’ve been there this whole time. As if I’ve never groan up. I’m only ten years old? I’m so confused. They see me as their son who hasn’t been to college; who doesn’t have a kid, or a wife. They just see me as their son, like my whole life is still in front of me. They all get up and put their arms around me and squeeze tightly as they proceed to tell me they love and miss me. This is not my family, my family doesn’t do this. This never happened even when I was ten, I disliked my brother growing up. We were rivals until we grew up and we never hugged one another.
“Mom? Dad? What’s going on?” I ask while they are holding me but they don’t pay my words any attention.
“Aww…I miss you baby please come back?” My Mom whispers to me as she buries her face into my shoulder.
“What are you talking about I’m right here. My question is how can this be?” I respond.
This can’t be real! This isn’t how my family is. This is more like how I wanted my family to be. We all loved each other but we’ve never been this affectionate. I get emotional and lost in the moment, I squeeze my arms around them and start to cry; I’m pulled out of my comfort zone and we all proceed to weep together.
“Mom, Dad, I don’t know what’s going on and I’m scared…” I force out while I shake and cry.
Then my eyes quickly open and I grab my chest. I roll out of bed and fall to the floor. I hit the floor hard but give the pain it causes no attention; I pull my knees toward my chest. My torso and body constrict and then tighten like a vice grip has been wrapped around me. It gets harder and harder to breathe and then the pain starts to subside as I roll over and my eyes water and my chest burns. My body starts shaking and the lights around me pulsates with every beat of my heart. The voices in my head come back and begin to torture me again. The noises split my head! That seems to be their sole purpose; I can almost feel the blood push into my skull as my body switches between hot and cold flashes. My hand feels really tight like its being squeezed by a giant. I can’t close it, its cramped open. I feel as if the bones are being crushed within it by some outside force. Right when the pain becomes unbearable it loosens its grasp on me and I just lay on the floor shaking from whatever madness my body has inherited. I think of my wife Marie and my baby girl. I just want to see them; I just want to have them hold me. I want to hear my wife’s sweet voice and see my daughter’s beautiful little smile. Tears roll out of my eyes and I sob to myself. I try to compose myself and focus but I shake even more when I notice I’m back in my apartment in Texas. That dream felt so real but also emotionally brutal.
7
Analysis
I force myself out of my bedroom and head towards the couch. I sit down and start thinking of everything that’s happened in the last couple of days and how I got to this point. What really annoys me is I had so many friends and people that I thought cared for me but now, I feel deserted. I feel left out in this world. I have no friends to talk to and when I do work up the courage to call them I get the overwhelming feeling not to. Like if I do, I’ll be talking to myself on the other line. They can’t help me because I can’t help myself. It’s as if everyone has forgotten me and left me too deal with this on my own, but what is this? The confusion is driving me insane.
My mind feels twisted and frayed, but is it just from the accident? I decide to go on base and talk to the Mental Health Doctor with the referral slip given to me by Dr. Masella.
I grab the keys from the wall and walk outside my apartment. The sky is as black as night and rain is pouring down. I can barely feel the rain running down my face or even landing on me. I get in the truck, crank the engine and begin to back out of the driveway; I’m almost instantly at my destination. I walk into the hospital and the building is huge on the outside but it seems somehow small and catered to me on the inside. Nothing is as it was yesterday. Everyday objects have lost their natural detail and items scattered throughout the room have lost their meanings. I have developed some kind of tunnel vision in the outside world. My mind only focuses on what I need to see, everything else doesn’t matter. People that I pass become more like moveable objects rather than other flesh and blood individuals. They may all look different but if they were all identical they would serve the same purpose, as if you’re playing a video game with a scratched disk and a glitch in the game that rendered the looks and behaviors of every character the same. What’s stranger than that is the fact that every day as I notice things changing, I care less and less. I walk up to the desk and say I need to see Capt. Daniels and that I was referred by Dr. Masella. I hand the receptionist my referral slip.
She sends me in before anyone else in the waiting room. Might as well; they look like they’re just extras in a movie rather than being there for actual help.
I walk into the office and the Captain is sitting in his plush leather chair looking up at me.
“SSgt Wilson welcome. Please sit.” He asks as he pulls out a pen and paper. “So what’s going on son?”
I shake my head in an uninviting way, “Umm…well it’s a long story but first I want to say with no disrespect to you, I don’t feel like I need to be here. At least in the sense that, I know I’m not crazy; I don’t have any mental problems in my background to put me in this chair and no one else in my family has mental issues that I know of. I’m just here because no one else seems to want to help me or know how to including myself.”
“Well I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t be here, let’s just talk and see where that leads, okay? And you must remember that not everyone that comes here are crazy or anything like that. Sometimes people just need help dealing with things in a different way which I try to provide.”
I take a deep breath and reply, “Okay, well let’s get started then.”
Capt. Daniels picks up his clip board and starts asking me basic questions about my past: where I grew up, what I liked doing as a kid, the basic psychology 101 questionnaire I guess. Then he asks me the hardest and most complex question to date:
“So what’s been bothering
you lately?”
“Well basically for the last few days my mind has been playing tricks on me.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting, how so?” He asks as his eyes widen and he starts chewing on the end of his pen.
“Ok, well I fall asleep for like a second and when I wake up, the clock shows 8:00am and…..
“Was your alarm set?” Capt. Daniels interrupts.
“No, I just wake up at 8am; I haven’t been setting the alarm.”
“Ok, go on.”
“Well, it’s hard to explain but it seems like whatever I think I need is there for me, except for friends and family, just my local environment. My days wiz by and when I feel sleepy, the day becomes dark and when I’m not, its day; my whole world is awkward and I guess unique. At least in my eyes anyway.”
“Can you give me more examples? Those are a little hard to follow.”
“Well for example normally driving to the hospital would have taken 15-20 minutes from my apartment but it seems like whatever I want is right around the corner; my mind is making things easier for me. I got in my car knowing I was coming here, then boom, I’m in the building; parked and everything. But at the same time my mind is losing details on other things as well. Like objects lose their meanings or pictures