I Am Here But...
by Senka Milutinović ︎︎︎You sink into the leather couch cushions. She directs a sharp and spiky sentence towards you, missing your cheek only by a few inches. The room is reminded of…
And she is so..
…rooted in the present, so upright.
you know that..
…the walls breathe until they are no longer.
this is..
…the time when you traverse through what is there.
The body stays..
but..
You find yourself elsewhere, in…
… a district small enough to suffocate in. The watchful eye of the grandmother surveillance system. The hair on your back raising as high as the ceiling. Your mother hovering over you like a bear. “This is my child!” We’re all sure he didn’t mean it, he never means it, especially not the day after. You are wide-eyed and blank and wrong.
Your current house has all but peeled from your memory, it is no longer important because it is no longer the place you are in.
Because you have never known how to bend time to your will, over the years, time started to bend you. You were there physically, but more so you were transported through and beyond time. When sunken you visited the past, when nervous you lunged into the future.
… a busy street. You observe her with darting, helpless eyes as she drops to the concrete, shredding her face on cement. You, scream. Her bike, screeches. Pink and red flesh smeared all over. You don’t know, what to do with yourself. Your hands were never strong enough, to lift an unconscious body.
You knew it, you knew it, you knew this would happen.
You would lose her to an insistent death.
The future was always at your fingertips, not as some imaginary moment, as flashes of what you must prepare for, must anticipate, must work to prevent.
… a holter. An electronic monitoring device strapped to your chest, you don’t touch the wires or ever look down. You stand slipper-less in the hallway, as small as a pudgy chestnut. The ceramic tiles are unforgivingly cold. There’s not much more you can access here, like when in games the map can’t load more terrain…
Some pasts take longer than others to get to, they buffer. But one must not leave their body for too long, or so you’ve been told by medical professionals and licensed psychotherapists.
She brings you back as she was one to, too many times. Fingertips touching surfaces you were not aware of: her skin—your skin.. the rug. You are reminded of the present tense.
She says you were not here, physically your body was present, but you were…
… out for a whole hour. Your body was there, limp loose lifeless. Your eyes pointed elsewhere. She called your name out, yet it didn’t ring through—to you.
… talking to her. Yet she knew it was not her you were really speaking with. Your eyes furious and foreign, collapsing with every cell of your body. She tried to envelop your frame, to ground you, as she was once instructed to when you travelled away from your home but left your body there. You froze in your tracks regardless. Unmoved, unmoving.
… opening and closing your mouth, unable to bark out the words that were lingering there. Your tongue was at a loss for syllables. And this lasted for the next few hours.
The DSM-V would categorize what you have as dissociative reactions: flashbacks and flashforwards. You, the individual, feel or act as if the traumatic events were recurring in the present. Past time becomes present, becomes fight, becomes future, becomes flight, becomes you, becomes freeze. The most extreme dissociative reactions may include a complete loss of awareness of your present surroundings. Time flattens out into space you can travel through while leaving your body behind, in the present.
The DSM-V has always medicalized your past, as if involuntary time travel was always a sign of the body breaking under pressure. But what they understand as fracture you feel as a time warp of the flesh.