you’re gonna be ok

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That’s what they said it was. And I can’t argue that. It was very much that, and then some. 

I had never had my mind drift away that far. Like trying to lasso the moon, the rope fell to my feet over and over. I was lost to me. All the cold space between my head and heart. I didn’t know how to unite them again. 

It was a low humming sound. I won’t forget it. An internal tremor that wouldn’t read on any graph. Nothing computed or registered. Like I never existed. It felt like I flatlined but I knew my heart was still beating in there. Only because I could hear the blood flushing in my ears. Each beat rowing me further out into endless nothingness.

I was freezing and I felt as if I was the only human left. It was terrifyingly quiet but for that low-grade rumble. It may have been chattering teeth making me tremble. Or maybe it was a fever trying to signal to all that I was not well. I just know I was not there in my body. Maybe I had caught a ride with the moon after all. Where was I if I wasn’t in my body? 

I’m not sure how I made it through that coal black night. I don’t recall sleeping or being awake. I don’t recall much after that but for haunted images in my mind of at least a dozen ways to die. Or was I dead already? I didn’t know. I just know it hurt real bad then suddenly I felt nothing. Total numbness. Touching my own face and it feeling like someone else’s, being on the outside, looking in and wondering who that is. Psychosis. Dissociation. Terms I knew little of until I visited them.

All I wanted to do was sleep. Forever, maybe. But even a few hours of deep sedation would have brought some relief. But I didn’t find that. I don’t want to talk about the next five days after that. I don’t. It’s almost like it never happened. No pictures, no witnesses, no log in my journal. Just severe measures to keep me alive. To keep me, period. And though I thought I was surely going to die of a broken heart, I didn’t. I lived. I reluctantly lived. 

And I’m still living—today, tomorrow, and the next day. All Lord willing. The traumas of living in this fallen world can nearly bleed one dry, but mercy, and every grace, and crazy goodness…

And days yet journaled. 

And stories yet finished.

And joys yet tasted. 

And realities yet realized. 

I’m here. 

I’m present. 

I’ll never be the same, but that doesn’t mean for the worse. Just different. I’m gonna be OK.