Après-coup

I am here. Her eyes are red.

"How were they red?" you ask.

Shattered capillaries. She's been smoking. It doesn't make her less angry, just more paranoid. But she hurts too. I can see she's been crying. She slumps, half against the wall, half on the doorway, weed smoke curling from the ashtray in her hand.

"Tell me about the quality of her sadness," you say.

I've just told her I'm leaving. I told her I don't blame her, but I need some space for a while. It's me, I told her. But the redness is spreading to her cheeks, like something inside her is burning.

"That sounds like anger, not sadness," you say.

She's angry because she's sad.

"Does that excuse her anger?" you ask.

The room shimmers, dizziness passes through my brain.

No, I mean. No. Of course not. But... I feel sorry too.

"'Too'? What else do you feel?"

Afraid.

Now the room rattles. The ashtray wobbles in her bony fingers.

She looks over at me with those red eyes and says:

"Don't lie. You always fucking lie to me."

She hurls the ashtray across the room, showering me in burnt stems then she lunges–

The link dies.

I'm back in the consulting room.

"You're here," you say. "She's not. You're safe."

Electrodes tug at my forehead. I must have shifted during the trip. My present-awareness slowly returns. I reach for the water on the side table and sip.

The room is sterile and functional. Cool white walls without character or emotion. Nothing which might color the trip. But the after-emotion lingers. The tremble of adrenalin.

"How did that feel?"

I look up at your face on the video screen, try to see your eyes, but your plastic glasses only reflect your own screen, and within that screen is an oblong of your window, and within that is a passing bird. Images within images.

What is real?

"I... I still felt her."

"Did you feel yourself?"

"I think a little more than before... I felt calm. I felt in control."

"You are in control. You choose where to begin, how to end it. So I want you to forget about her, just connect with yourself."

"I... will try."

"Let's go again."

*

The sidewalk is unforgiving beneath my tattered sneakers. The smog-clogged air just a little more pervasive. I always feel this way after a session. But more so today. Today felt like torture. Repeated, rhythmic re-exposure...

I force myself back into the present. I walk through gauzy holo-billboards, between homeless writers and a group of cyber-krishnas, and make my way into the stairwell down to the sub-metro.

I drop into the last seat on the train. As it rumbles out of New Penn station, I'm at the bottom of a bolthole made by tall strangers in long coats. Their earbuds suck their attention.

I relax in the company of strangers and cry.

*

I have lived lifetimes in my past.

Every time I go back, the timeline concertinas outward. The same few infinitesimal moments become stretched into years to allow the scrutiny of therapy.

Studies show that recall rewrites memory. Every time either reinforces or disperses it. The sessions I'm doing with my memory counsellor take me back to those painful moments, to disperse the pathways, to clutch the pulsing nexus of my pain and redistribute it.

But it only works if I go back. Again and again.

That's the process.

*

I collapse into my armchair. Broken springs dig into my thigh, but any present sensation, pain, discomfort, is good. It keeps me in the now.

I hear a stirring from the bedroom.

"Babe, is that you?"

I grunt a perfunctory acknowledgment.

"How did it go?"

I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about my sessions. I don't want to talk about the darkness that has lingered inside me for all these years. I don't want to bring that into our home.

Because it will infect us both, our life, our love. I can't let that happen.

I hear the bed creak, feet hitting the floor, seeking slippers...

With all my will, while I still have this time alone, I try to summon a smile.

There is still light left in the day. The creamy sun is filtered through haze, turning it into a dreamlike bloom. It's beautiful if you can forget it's poison.

From 30 storeys up, the din of the streets is reduced to a hum. With the right thoughts and the right headspace it becomes an ommmm – the sacred syllable, the fundamental tone of reverence, focus and unity, balancing, centering––

I hear swearing in the bedroom and the sound of an empty weed cylinder being thrown on the floor.

I brace myself for more tension, awkwardness. That's all our relationship has distilled to these days. In a minute, there'll be no denying it, no hiding the truth with closed doors and turned backs.

I inhale deeply and tell myself the words you've taught me, the mantra.

I am here.

The door handle turns.

I am here.

You appear.

I am here.

You freeze in the doorway, straggle-haired and braless, staring at me with unconcealed contempt.

Your eyes narrow, predatory.

"You look sad," you say. Your voice contains no empathy.

I try to find some words to appease you, to reroute this memory which I have relived forever, but it always go the same way. Different faces, difference places, but the trauma infects it all. It insinuates itself into the continuous present. Ten years ago, ten years in the future, it will be there, infinite and immovable.

"I'm fine," I say.

Your face turns into a sneer.

Your eyes are red with blood and anger.

I am here.

"Don't lie. You always fucking lie to me."

There is no other moment but this.

My life is defined by something that does not exist in time, but is endless and infinite, a dark sentience which took possession of me long ago and scraped itself into the deepest ravine of my mind.

Again and always and forever.

The ashtray shivers in your hand.

The infection already got you. It already got everybody.

And the words are not a mantra. They are a curse.

It is not me. It is my trauma.

And my trauma says, I am here.

Author's Note

In psychoanalysis, "après-coup" (French for "afterwards" or "deferred action") refers to the concept of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of meaning to earlier events, particularly trauma or repressed memories, as introduced by Sigmund Freud.