Excavating Elsa From Her Brain Death

I’m struggling to write about my husband, because it’s not a usual situation.  I generally have excellent recall, as you can tell by my stories. This is not the case, when it comes to him. I’m afraid this is going to be hard for the current reader to understand. I either have to help you understand this or fake it. You know how I feel about fake!

You may have to figure out how this happened, because I don’t understand it myself. I might suggest it was so traumatic, I blocked it out, but that’s only a guess. I don’t actually know.  He remembers pretty much every breath I took. I only retained about five percent of our story and it was terrifying, really.  Because prior to these conversations,  I didn’t know there was a lack.  The missing chunk was enormous!

We started talking, via old school, chat.  Pluto was transiting my sun.  We talked about two things, primarily.  His career in Special Forces and our history.  Both topics, knocked me for a loop.

He outlined his career, first.  He sat there in chat and typed out, everything.  Oh my God.  It was horrific.  Graphic.  Staggering.

This was over a period of time. Weeks and weeks.  We’d get on chat and he’d tell me a story; I’d be on my end, reeling. Really and containing.  Gagging at times.

Later, he’d explain, he knew he was overwhelming me, but he did it anyway. He acknowledged it was selfish. He said he was carrying all this and I was the only person in the world he could or would talk to.  He also felt I could take it. So began the Pluto transit to my sun!

When I realized it was going to keep coming, I fell into a routine.  I’d chat with him and then go to the gym, early in the morning and get on a treadmill and cry and cry.  It was a big, nearly empty gym. My kids were young. I had to work off the emotion.  The magnitude of what he hit me with, was unfathomable. In hindsight, it remains unfathomable.

In whatever case, he wanted me to know these things or he wanted someone to know these things. I found myself in service and hey!  It fit my transits!

I eventually became conditioned and I began to enjoy our conversations more. I appreciated them all along. I’m interested in taboo topics and anomalies of all types. But I settled in after a time, as I described here: Hanging With The Black Dog.

Little did I know, what came next would eclipse all this.  You might say,  in this period, the light was turned on him.  I could adjust to that. When it was turned on me, it was like slipping on a banana peel into hell.

This was when I found out my memories had be been obliterated.  Now, they weren’t gone.  In most cases, they were easy to access once, he touched on them, but the shock of realizing someone out there knew all kinds of things about me, that I did not, was jarring and deeply disturbing.

I’m not talking about trauma here.  He was recalling fun times and our many exploits, which I could not recall on my own.

At first it was, “Remember when we rode those slow horses, P?”

“Whaaat?”

“And I was singing and you were pissed off..?

What horses?

But then, the memory would come back. Oh my God, it was awful.  This was in chat, see? He’s typing away, all this crap I did, which I deleted from my press kit, decades back. You want to talk about feeling stupid!

“We went skinny-dipping..”

“We did???” Three seconds later, I see us in the lake.

“You used the Elsa method of sit-ups… laugh while you’re doing them…”

Whaaat? My head was spinning like a projector, with the film loose!

~~~

I wrote this to a friend, in email. From 2003. I’m discussing my experience here. I’m “VM”aka VeryModern.

I think if I haven’t written something of substance *in the last 24 hours, then I don’t exist anymore. You know. Two days and I’ve dissipated. I’ve vaporized. I really think I’m an illusion, so imagine my discomfort when this guy remembers er… he remembers everything.

Were you a bloody fool when you were seventeen? I was! And he remembers. Holy shit! There’s no end to what he remembers and I’ll tell you what this is about. It’s about control! I would like to be able to control what people think of me, and how they remember me, but I’m shit out of luck, aren’t I?

So I’m a seventeen year old fool! And I sing to my boyfriend. I sing him all this embarrassing crap and then he goes around for the rest of his life remembering me singing these songs and I think, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

“You’re supposed to remember, X, Y and Z! Not G, damnit! What are you thinking, remembering that? Shit, man!!!!!”

::laughs::

So there’s an outburst like that and then it’s, “Okay, what else?” because come on. This is an exquisite pain.

“Well you had another ditty…”

“Uh oh.” I feel a wave of nausea.

“Well it’s a memory, Els.”

“I know, I know. Okay, lay it on me.” I try to brace and hope for a way to defend myself.

“You used to sing like those cats.”

“What?”

“We are Siamese if you please We are Siamese if you don’t please We are former residents of Siam There is no finer cat than I am!”

I watch this appear on the screen as he types.

The memory comes back and I feel myself dying in waves.

He keeps talking.

::VM SCREAMS to drown him out::

but this is my favorite anecdote to date…

He says he woke up late one morning and missed formation. I tell him, “Oh! Well, why don’t you just call in sick?”

“Christ! I’m AWOL.”

“A what? What do you mean?”

He says that’s when he knew I didn’t know anything about the military.

~~~

I hope this is understandable.  My Pluto transit, consisted of me sitting in front of a computer screen, with my old boyfriend, excavating my personality from the grave. I would watch the words on the screen, to see what other horrifying thing I did.

I told him it took me some seconds, to have any idea what he was talking about.  But remembering did little for me. He’d been thinking about these things, in depth for near 25 years! I’m looking at a chat window, understanding it’s real, but how?   And how can I process this?

Well I couldn’t process it in the moment, because he was typing some more crap!

I used to say, I knew myself, excellently well.  I recalled this, as his words scrolled by, and decided to never say anything so stupid again.

To be continued.

The tag on these posts is “soldier”.