A 2 Year Cry
By: Kai Cricket Moon
Tags: Trauma, Healing, Prose, Memoir, PTSD

Dear past me of 2 years ago, you are somewhere in interior BC right now, perhaps passing through Kamloops and thinking again of how ugly it is: the feeling of clogged grey-brown.

Soon you will be nearing Vancouver, with your ridiculously large zebra suitcase name Bridget, and your backpack and bags. You will stagger onto the sky-train to get to the ferry. You will ignore discomfort.

But right now, you are passing through thick smoke and feeling strained and uncomfortable. Like a turd pulsing to get out of the silver anus of a car. Your fawning response is waning and your wolf is showing to your ride-share. Not a snarling wolf, but a lone one, quiet and and longing for aspens in moonlight.

In a few hours, when you arrive in Vancouver, you will either feign or feel wonder, I cannot remember which, at all the crows vacating the city. Swarms of black peeling back to roost for the night. Your ride-share will tell you, that it happens every-night, but you will just see it the one time.

In a few more hours, you will miss the last ferry to Victoria and you will call your friend to tell them. You will have exactly $500 and no job lined up, no home. Your friend, will tell you to catch the last last ferry which goes to Nanaimo. Your friend will drive 2 hours North of Victoria in his green taxi to pick you up.

You will feel scared and beholden. You will feel burdened and tired. You will want to draw back from him and cellophane yourself off. Eventually you will tell him all of this. And he will tell you “ I want to help you. I am choosing to help you. I don’t expect anything in return.”

It will be very hard to believe him, but he is your ride and your anchor on this barely known island and so you will do your best to.

You will sleep on his futon that converts into a double bed while he trawls Victoria for fares. You will hear seagulls and foghorns and in the mornings the clopping hooves of carriage rides.

He will feed you for a week, before you launch into a whirlwind life of nomadicism. Later on passing back through Victoria you will ingest chocolate magic mushrooms he gives you and you will sit on the toilet, very concerned about your pooping. He will come through again and again. He will rescue and drive you and feed you and money you. He will praise you in honey.

And when he says “You feel like family.” You will feel angry because you don’t sense a hook in that, and for most of your life you have been wanting to hook someone, because then they might stay.

He will take you to the Fishook restaurant and you will eat Tacos. You will break up with each other twice, not in the standard way of breaking up, since you were never lovers exactly. But in a way that is exacto knife painful. You will sob and sob and sob.

This will be one of your first break-up of 10 or 12 in the next 2 years. I have stopped counting. And slowly which each unpeeling of the sticking paint of your heart, with each topple of the tower guarding it you will realize that family is what you long for. That family is what you need. And that hooks are for devouring things and things devoured don’t stay.

But before that you will be running. You will be running for exactly 5 months. You will stay in a mansion and look after an old dog with freckles on it’s toes. You will chase chickens back into a coop. You will scream in a trailer after the owner has left for the night. You will scream loud enough that the dreadlocked sheep and ancient apple trees hear you.

You will feel so scared.

It will be terrifying.

I am so sorry.

You will scream in the mansion. You will sob in a cob hut. You will put your face down in a tub every-time you can just to make wounded sound. You will try to ignore the wreckage of your nervous system, just to survive.

Dogs will hear you panic, smell it, and come to lean on your legs. Your friend will come through on the phone for you. Your mom too. And all the time you will be screaming and running and trying to deny electric feelings of enduring fear.

You will be very brave, and mostly alone. You will say “No” to staying with men named after landscapes who yell on their phones while you are in the car with them.They will say “ I didn’t want to take care of you anyways.”And you will know you made the right choice.

More and more you will get good at distinguishing between red flags and trauma. Red flags indeed red, a searing line right down the middle of you. Trauma more muddied and varied in it’s jetsam.

Eventually your luck with work exchanges and housesittings gigs, will choke and stop and all the gas that was keeping you going will fume out. Your friend will drive you to a women’s shelter. You will feel very scared and very small. But you will be determined and enduring.

You will have called ahead about a bed. You will not know that it is a bunk bed. You will not know that it will be bed number 13. You will not know the smell of your room until you enter it. The smell coming from a woman who shuffles and mumbles but never talks to you.

You will not know that you will befriend your other roomate who chats with you in accent and smiles at you. Who hugs you and who has been seperated from her family, her children, because the cops were told she was screaming that she would kill her husband.

You will not be scared of her. But you will be scared of the woman who barks at you “What are you looking at white girl?” Or the very forceful 50 year old who wants to convert everyone to her complaining and wears ball caps and has hands as rough as fence posts.

But right now in this time Over a year and a half ago in January, you are straining to get up the nerve to leave your friend’s car. This will be the final time you will be in it. You do not know that yet.

In a few days time you will break up with your friend for the first time. You will ask him for more commitment to communication and it will end. It will end in tears and holding back in a coffee shop two blocks from the shelter.

In the months later, you will get flashes and twinges as you walk past that place. Soon you will settle into a home with two roomies. And the city will become populated with memories.

But only slowly. So slowly. After all the runnings. After the carrot picking and the screaming. It will be hard to go out. Your room will feel like the only moderately safe place.

There will be a Bridge. The reason you quit running. The reason you put up with a shelter where they put out cans of salmon for you, the stray cat. The reason will be a program for humans like you. People who have suffered abuse. There will be two mornings a week, that shine and give you purpose for 6 months.

There will be meltdowns at the bus stop when the bus is late. There will be that jangly jittery I’m going to explode, I can’t take it feeling, often, often,when you go out and about. When you deliver flyers. You will pee your pants. You will feel ashamed.

You will feel deranged and desperately lonely. But the weight of your loneliness and separation won’t be realized until it starts to lift. The paint continuing to strip, the tower groaning in it’s tedious crumble.

And some days you will wake up and life will feel okay. There will be yellow in the grey and you will see green metallic the logo of your pencil clearly. You will cry in people’s arms and they will pull you close. Someone will say “Wow. Just wow!” In response to you, like you are a miracle and they are in awe.

You will start to discover peace in a city that once felt like a thousand needled eyes. You will sit on hot steps in the sun and feel relaxed. It will not be all the time. It will not be always. But you will start to relax.

A part of this will be the water, you move to. A part of it will be the second island human you move in with. The shared foods and the tough conversations. The big hairy hands holding yours and you breath shreds thorough you with panic.

It will not be perfect. We will relapse. We will lose many people. And with each shake and quake of grief we will garner a little more of ourself. More and more and feel into the truth that we have no edges and make friends with spiders. Slide our feet over the duvet just to play.

We will die. We will cry.We will remember our real name and claim it. We will wake up again and again.

So Tonight on the eve of our anniversary, I will light a candle for for us. To call us home, through the fog and the gloom of a milk clot of a life, to the breathness and the bloom of a new tune.