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Flashbacks

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Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

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It wasn't anything big, not really. It wasn't that bad. It couldn't have been that bad. After all, I'm still here...

...aren't I?

I want to think so, I really do, but half the time I'm but a ghost living a lie, wafting through the mere semblance of a life that I'm not even sure is really mine anymore. What is me and what is a pattern, what is something that I should have let go? What should never have been and what could have come to be if only, if only, I'd never slipped down and down and down that one time?

One time, one day, one lifetime, one way. There's no way to turn back the clock now. Best keep going, one step in front of the other. That's the only way for it.

But they come, the tease and the scene, the feeling that my palm is no longer pressed against the fabric of this sofa, not now, but the smooth duvet of a bed that may as well have been my coffin. I almost died on that bed - not thrice but too many times to count. I thought it was the end and I stared and I stared at the fairy lights over and over again, hoping that they would be the last thing I ever saw.

Am I back there? Is that life real? Has everything since been a dream?

My pulse races, my chest is too tight. Breathe, I must breathe. I'm not there, the image is a lie. It's a memory, yes, but it is not my present, not the time that it wants me to believe. But it's harder and harder to pull myself out against that, foreign and historic smells tickling my nose. I'm back there, I really am, I must be - or else why would my mind tell me I am?

The line between a memory and reality blurs, frenzied thoughts chasing one another's tails. That's how it goes, a flashback and a claw-back, something that sinks you back all the way, driving you down and down and down. Sometimes you wonder if there's ever any up left but there's little left to do but try to breathe.

Breathe.

And_breathe_.

Can I outlast it? Am I back by the river, sitting in the crook of the stone steps, breathing too hard and too fast to actually take any oxygen into my lungs? The water should have been soothing but it wasn't and, right now, I'm back there, the hard stone pressing up against my glutes, trying to tell me that this is hard, that everything's hard, that it's always going to be hard and I'll never,ever be able to do anything at all about how hard it is.

Drama queen, clingy, liar... Am I those words? If someone says that I am, does it make me so? They lingered, slinking in, clinging close, the true clingy even while the past hangs over me. Why would anyone say those things if they are not true? They're not words that someone says if they don't mean it but, oh, how I like to think the best of people... You'd think that would have been burned out of me by now but I can't help it and, ultimately, it is what it is.

Where am I? Open my eyes, look around. A chair and tables set under an awning, rain hammering down around though sparing me. It's amazing to be surrounded by noise and yet frenetic too, beating on my soul as I cling tight and hold fast and try to find a sense of myself, right here and right now, rain tickling at my nose in a prickle of sensation.

Real or not? My brain can't tell.

Sometimes you can live in a flashback. But you have to ultimately question whether that's any kind of living at all.

Am I alive or am I dead? Perhaps this is hell, perhaps I deserved the hell, or perhaps the flashbacks, being forced to relive it over and over again, is the real hell. It's impossible to tell and that, in itself, is hell too. Maybe this is my fate for the rattling of the skeletons in the closet, skeletons that I don't think I should hold the bones of anymore but still sit there with ghastly, gaping grins.

Step by step. Not home, not here. A bandstand, feet swinging, heart...gone? There's a hollowness there and, even as the sun sets, I know I should not be there, tears streaming down my face. Go, just go, the voices whisper. No one wants you here.

I'm back there, gasping and heaving, clutching at my chest, crying out for help that does not come. Step by step, home is far, home is close, home is where there was always an overdose. Those four walls were entrapment but the flashbacks are locked in my phone with every buzz and beep, like a notification call.

Maybe I'm alive or maybe I'm dead but I'm going to live as if I am dead. No last chances and no regrets, cutting through the noise and shining a torch on the flashbacks.

Be gone - you have no place here! Out, out, out - I've had enough of fear!

Touch everything, count the patterns: ground, ground, ground. Remember reality, there's nothing to panic here for I are quite safe in the present. Where the past lingers, it has no power bar what is allowed and the beauty in that is entirely within my control. It is learning that control that is the hard part but, please, I must take faith and have strength in knowing that this is not forever.

The flashbacks do not define me.

Slowly, slowly, now. Stand up. It's not my time and I are not there, there are no fairy lights to watch over me sleeping, sleeping and wishing to die. That time has passed and there's a world that needs me now, so stand up and take it. Maybe even go as far as to say, pushing the boat out, that I deserve it, maybe now more than ever. Waking nightmares have no place here.

The flashbacks are a symptom.

But I am not the illness.