A.C. Brooke

Year 4

I was surprised when I opened my leather journal to find the last entry was from several months ago. More than halfway through 2024 and only a few pages have been filled since last December. It’s not an accurate reflection of logging my thoughts, of course, as I’ve been typing up weekly notes–many of which are several pages long–for my therapist since last July.

Time seems to be on my mind today. I’ve been spending much more of it in the present lately, but now when my body is gripped by the past I can often discern it quite quickly. Last weekend, I was fourteen: It was October, the leaves were falling and my peers were preparing for a homecoming I wouldn’t be going to. This afternoon it was 2005. My mind seemed to be preoccupied with two separate images, like neighboring TVs: On one side, my eldest niece, the other, remnants of my own childhood; and I wracked my mind to find if there were any signs to indicate that she may be going through what I must have at her age. But that is the nature of the disorder and to be expected.

There were some things that ‘came back’ to me on my evening stroll. I use quotes because I struggle to explain their nature. It’s a feeling of familiarity, perhaps a fragment of a past reality. Today, I think it may have been…hmm. I lost my train of thought just now. How peculiar.

But tonight, I think it’s 2020. Maybe not quite–just a sliver of self, I believe. There are two nineteen year olds lingering beneath my left rib: One who believes she’s on the precipice of something great, the other a few months older paddling in the shadow of something awful.

They are both me.

It doesn’t always feel like it, as I have a habit of losing the thread of myself. There’s been times where I’ve looked over past self-portraits just to envy the person in them, as if she, too, were not still me.

I fell down a rabbit hole a few hours ago, ended up reading about a young woman who had been sexually assaulted. She took the evidence to court but the assailant got off scot free. Whenever I stop to sit with that predicament–the idea of enduring something like that and not being believed–I’m overcome with something between bewilderment and grief. And I did that today, too. How awful. I thought. How does someone survive something like that? And then I remembered–I did. I survived that, too. And it was awful. And I almost didn’t.

Later while I was readying myself for bed, it dawned on me that in two weeks it will be August. In a few more weeks, the 29th will pass, marking the fourth year of The Thing™. You would think a lapse in time would bring comfort, as if the years you stuck between yourself and your suffering would serve as a kind of safeguard. But really it just feels like time has slipped through my fingers. In that regard, I think I miss my memories more than anything. I can pluck acute things out quite well, but there is no storyline anymore. Instead, the landscape of my recollections is one of murky water, the dust clearing just enough here and there to make out something underneath. Nothing was more beautiful to me than my childhood, and I lost that. And I hate that. And it’s sad.

I am happier these days. Truly, I have grown into a beautiful person, I think. And while I don’t want to speak too soon, I claim a future for myself colored by peace and joy–those are my two sacred words now. But there are still so many tears. They come out at random. Even now as I type–a fan blowing too close to my face, a dull headache permeating my left side–I feel it. Something that, as soon as it is acknowledged, wants to crawl its way out. And it does. And I let it.

I wonder what my future holds.