take aim

I'm going to sleep tonight on top of and under sheets, my hair rumpled and my mind all a mess wondering what the hell's happening. The inside of my arm will cover my face, I'll be aching for a cigarette with thousands of thoughts running rampant through my assassin brain and I'll wonder what the hell's happening. I'll need something and I won't know what it is, I'll reach for the womon next to me and find a man, I'll twist to find comfort and stumble upon nothing more than an endless supply of "same". I'll search for clarity while unknowingly hunting down a haze. And I'll wonder what the hell's happening.
I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I've started going back to SAC (sexual assault counseling). The day I had sex with Jack for the first time I came home, astonished at the fact I couldn't feel a thing. I told Jude what happened, went into the bathroom, turned the shower on, sank to the floor and broke apart a disposable razor. I very calmly sliced open my leg about three thousand times, staring very intently at the wall in front of me without even the slightest wince on my face. After I was done I took my shower and dried myself off before pouring half a bottle of rubbing alcohol on my leg, desperate to feel anything. The pain didn't even register. Whatever it is inside me that's permanently broken had spread like a disease, and the lead block in my chest had become infected with something that was damaging me.
So I've been going to SAC for a few weeks now. Tonight after hanging out with Aston (this is the first time we've met in person, I was very pleasantly surprised) I went and saw Cassandra for my weekly confession.
We're trying to get me to feel again. We're poking and prodding at all the dead spots inside of me and seeing what reactions they get. It's working.
We use a lot of metaphors to communicate with each other. She's one of the few people who can really understand the things I say-- she doesn't really understand me just as I don't really understand her and we both know it, but she's able to observe me and catch the little things that are key to deciphering me, and we speak in patterns that I find absolutely fascinating. Both of us are writers, so we have a tendency to speak in metaphors when we can't communicate exactly what we're trying to say; I would love to record our sessions simply as an inspiration for my own writing projects, but I know that's a bad idea as I'd rather not relive everything we talk about more than once. I will definitely be basing a character off her sometime soon.
A metaphor we use quite often to describe my dissociation is that there's a girl in a room and a girl outside the room; they're the same person, but they operate separately and in many ways they're not the same person at all. Often they're not aware of each other. One thing that came up tonight was that there's a large metal plaque bolted to the inside wall of the room where the girl sits and ponders, and engraved on this plaque are the words "Nobody cares, not a single living creature on the planet cares, so SHUT THE FUCK UP PLEASE", among other things.
"What sort of tools do you need in order to take down the plaque?"
"I wish I could say I need a hammer, a screwdriver, those sorts of things but I know I need to rip this down with my bare hands. It's going to tear part of the wall if I take it down though, leave an ugly spot until I can cover it up."
We spoke about why my plaque said these things, where they came from. Everything seems to be coming back to my mother and the extensive years of abuse I received by her hand and by others as a child. After a while of talking she asked what I was feeling; I took a moment to pause and identify what I was feeling; I'm used to having to admit that I'm feeling nothing, that I've completely shut down without noticing (though usually during our sessions I can stop and say when I begin to feel myself going under) but this was different, completely different than my usual numb. When I shut down I'm still aware of myself and my surroundings, I'm still processing everything around me and what's happening but I'm not attaching any sort of emotion to my responses-- this numb was something I'd never experienced before. My mind was a complete blank, there was literally no activity in my mind or in my chest, it was as if my brain was an endless expanse of void. The biggest red flag was the lack of music in my head: I have a song playing in my mind at all times, I'm not exaggerating at all. At any given moment at any time no matter what is going on ever under any circumstances absolutely and without exception there is a song playing in my mind. Even in my dreams there's music playing, usually without a source, like a soundtrack in a movie. This was the first time in my entire 19 years of existing on this planet in this body in this mind that there was no music playing. My brain was absolutely silent for the first time in my life. I told Cassandra what was going on and that I was concerned about the lack of music or conscious thought flowing through my mind. She asked me if there was anything trying to come out, any words or thoughts, any memories or images. I shut my eyes and opened myself wide-- I was absolutely composed for about five seconds before I had a complete meltdown.
I started uncontrollably sobbing into the pillow in my lap, the kind that takes all the breath you have in your lungs and even a little more, the kind that makes you scream even though you don't mean to, the sort that forces you to cover your head with your arms as if someone were about to beat you. At first I couldn't place why I was acting this way until the film started behind my eyelids.

I was five or six years old. My mother was in the reclining chair, her live in boyfriend on the couch. They were watching television and I was quietly playing on the floor with my toys-- I didn't have many and most I had made myself. I had a small hotwheels car I'd found outside earlier that day that I was pushing around on the floor, and it traveled up the monster's foot and onto his leg. I was sitting on his foot and driving the car up onto the couch, making it do impossible flips and flying all over the place. Without word or warning he kicked his leg up and sent me flying into the table in front of him, annoyed with me on his foot. I hit my head on the corner of the table and started to cry when I saw blood, it wasn't much but it still scared me. My mother yelled at me to be quiet and sent me to my room, locking the door behind me. My mother had put a lock on the outside of my bedroom when I was 2, it stayed there until we moved out when I was 8.

I hadn't even remembered that instance until tonight. I still don't know why it happened to come up. Cassandra had me talk it out while it was happening, asked me what I would have done if I had walked into the room and it was happening to another girl, let me talk about how I was throwing the lamp at the mother and everything in the room at the boyfriend, what I was saying to both of them, etc. I won't get into the details simply because I don't feel like writing out all the dialogue (I'd be fine with sharing but I'm tired) but... there's that.
I can smell my grandfather's cologne.