Veronica Noir Smash submits her updated story about PTSD and Panic. Originally read/performed at the March spoken word event.
Not so long ago, my life used to be sorrow… vast & wide, a chasm of
lonely rocky purgatory that I was flung into the moment my Viking was flung
from his steed into his own unknown abyss of darkness. I spent months in
a despair, climbing onto various ledges and facades, just to have fickle wild
forces push me off. Endlessly freefalling down, allowing myself to be
swept away by forceful rivers of potent tears at the bottom, & so unused to
human contact, I forgot how to think & communicate and I alienated everyone
as I was alienated from the world I once knew. I stopped fighting and
exploring for egress because I forgot how, or why. When I traveled I
ambled in circles, without direction or purpose, tacitly accepting my lost fate
& a purpose forgotten. I was beaten against the rapids, bruised and
bloody, so stoic I stopped feeling. When I was too tired to struggle
& direct myself, I would nearly perish on the craggy outcroppings that
changed positions with the seasons. I began to float on my back as the
only means of survival, searching the sky for meaning when I could see
it. Given this slight shift in perspective, while lithely floating down
sorrow’s eroding river, in a moment, a flash of more brilliant sunshine than
seen previously before, I must have realized that, yes, I could devise a way
out, at the point where the chasm was widest. I began constructing step,
by heavy, hard, cold step out of refurbished and corrected logic. I
toiled. I floundered, discouraged. I looked to the sky once more
& redoubled my efforts towards the clouds only to languish, beset by
apathy. I debated whether or not to give up. I hadn’t seen
the world outside of the canyon for what felt like a lifetime…had it been a
lifetime? I was a different person than before, & the only things I
knew were either in the past, or newly pertained to that barren stone
depression that cut through my world, dividing it into then, and now.
What’s even out there? What’s the point of facing more pain on the other
side if the world was just the same cruel place that jettisoned me here?
Was it? Why should I? Wait, sunshine…I remembered the feelings he
gave me, the new lush green warm world he opened up for me…I had hope I could
possibly find that landscape again, or even make a new meadow in which to
cherish those memories.
