I'm Still Here

CW: dissasociation 

I’m Still Here

Sometimes I walk down the street and I wake up into a nightmare. I’m choking and flustered,
struggling for breath, but I don’t fight it. I let myself choke and I let myself tumble into a panic, until my survival instincts take control and I’m back again. I’m walking. I’m still here.

I try to help myself; I pack memories into boxes and store them in the depths of somewhere I’m not always allowed to reach. I can laugh at jokes and make them myself, joviality fronting a boarded up window. Then I feel it again. It rises within me, from a source I can’t locate and when I try to push it, it pushes back harder. I hold myself, physically hold and hope that I, maybe once, can stop it. I claw at my skin trying to find the secret mechanism taking control of my mind and body, and I’m lost. I find nothing, nothing physical to prove its presence, nothing there to tell me I’m not going mad, nothing to convince me that what I’m remembering is true. I keep clawing, even when I don’t find anything else to pull, until I’m nothing again. Nothing is there, and nothing is what I’ve become.

I’m satisfied. I’m satisfied because if I find it, then what am I anymore? What if I find it, remove it, destroy it, and what remains is not what was there before. What if that’s what I’ve become, what I am now. Who I am now. If I find it, it’s gone. If I take it, I’m gone.

I move the markers around in my brain and try and find an alternative. I take every route possible, dead ends make up all but one. A route I’m so familiar with that I could tell you every turn it takes, every thought it passes, but still I never want to reach its end. Because I’m there, I’m always there. I am the by-product of it, and I am what’s left. And I’m back again. I’m walking. I’m still here.