THE REMAINS

I’ve been here before. I know it. I’ve known it ever since I was a little girl. When I was around six or seven I would lie awake and watch my spirit leave my flesh. It would hover around, sometimes floating over my body, and then it would return just as quickly as it departed. It’s uncanny—but I was never scared. The visit, I welcomed. Some people have make-believe friends as children; I had a friend of another kind.

Lately, I’ve felt the split again. Somewhere in the hours between sleep and wake I feel the energy—sense it, like one senses movement out of the corner of the eye. I write about it with such ferocity because it is persistent. I’ve always known too much, been too aware, and too connected as if I am finishing the life of someone else, perhaps a life cut short. It’s a calling, something motioning me forward—I cannot explain but some nights I find myself weeping for events occurring not in this life, but possibly the one before.

Something inside of me has moved. There are things that I do without reason or thought, simulated automatic behaviors, like OCD—the remains.

I am desperately trying to figure out what occurred. Why is it that when overwhelmed or scared I find comfort in closets? Me, a woman, curled up in the closet—my only relief. Maybe somewhere before the artifice of time, a closet was my hiding space. From what or who, I do not know. But the feeling of safety has remained.

And there is my addictive personality. My addictions last for weeks and then abruptly end. Perhaps somewhere before I was starved –maybe I lost something. What I do know is that I cannot stop my compulsion to take and use without measure until it is done. The sense of urgency has remained.

And why do I, a normally self controlled woman experience intense and almost debilitating panic attacks in large crowds? It is a feeling of slipping away. The blood rushing out--my lungs collapsing as if I am returning to a tragedy. The feeling of helplessness has remained.

And then, there is the often irrepressible need to punish myself when I make mistakes. I attempt to stop my hands from clawing, punching—my teeth from biting. Who or what shamed me? What happened in the time before? Why do I feel the intense need to make things right—the need for redemption. The humiliation has remained.

All these seemingly unrelated things unsettle me. But this is the end. In this life, I will put the pieces of the story together. There will be a reckoning. I am not coming back again.