Memorize This.

Imagine a hole in your skin right above your heart. It's just a hole. It feels just like a paper cut. Sure, it hurts, but the pain is manageable. Now imagine pulling a sheet through that hole. Imagine that sheet being pulled from outside of your body, in. Through that tiny little hole.

It steals your breath. It's physically painful because it's mentally jarring. It hurts. God it hurts.

And the inside of your head is static, like you're in a dream-like state while you're awake. The feeling is different from daydreams. It's nauseating- a place your conscious mind should never visit while awake and aware of your surroundings. Distantly you can feel you're still attached to your body, still aware of your body sitting or standing in whatever fashion it was in before it all started.

And the memories don't come to you like you're watching a movie.

They come in fits and starts, flashes, barely visible before they switch to the next, of images- confusing, jumbled, out of order images like photographs scattered in messy piles.

Each individual image comes with a series of sensual feelings- maybe a smell, or the tingle of your spine, or a sound erupting in your ears, or a surge of emotion that doesn't belong in your pallette of feelings for the day.

And it comes so fast, that it leaves you dizzy, and after the initial rush is over, you have to sit for a good while before you can begin to recall the chaos that was your forgotten moment.

So you sit, ears beginning to recognize sound again, more aware of your blood coursing through your veins than you've ever been, and you realize in that moment that breathing is, has always been, painful and tiresome. For the first time in your entire life you notice the bones in your body, the web that is your veins as they pulse to the steady beat- a nerve wrecking steady beat, because shouldn't it be beating fast? shouldn't it be exploding in your chest?- of your heartbeat as it pumps your life force through your veins. And you just want to die right there. Not the conscious feeling of wanting to crawl away, to end your suffering, but a primal, instinctual, urge to cease existing at all, because somewhere along your genetic coding there's still an animal in there, and its logic, though illogical to you at the moment, is telling you it must be dying.

Because you're not calm. Your mind is racing like it's never moved before, like for the first time in your life you're using all of your brain instead of only part of it, and it's both invigorating and terrifying because you know at any moment, at any possible moment, you're going to slip your skin, to break free entirely of your body because the emotions and the thoughts dancing around your mind are coming too fast, one rush after another at a speed that you've never even begun to comprehend, to even fathom could exist.

And all the while you're sitting there, your body acting like you haven't moved at all in weeks, like nothing at all is wrong, while your brain is swelling and literally pushing against the walls of your skull, and you can feel the odd sensation of a scream start to bubble in your throat- the most solid sound you've ever felt festering somewhere down in your diaphram, struggling against your muscles as they stubbornly refuse to release it.

And you want to move, you want to yell, you want to cry or scream or thrash- anything just to gain control of your life again, because you no longer have control of it. In that moment, your mind and body are almost two separate beings, working in the opposite direction of each other, and your thoughts, your will to move, to say something, to try to make sense of anything at all is buried beneath the irrational buzzing of your mind as the images float through your frontal lobe, appearing behind your eyes and somehow covering what you're actually seeing in the physical world with your mental picture.

And then you relive it again, slower, while you pick out the details in the flashes and snippets of imagery that pilfer through your brain, and you start to make sense of it finally, and your mind is beginning to slow, to give up its frantic swimming, and you feel your muscles slowly start to tighten up, moments too late, as if your body is on time delay.

And the memory, even if it's a good one, is the scariest thing you've ever seen in your life, raising the hairs on your neck slowly, alerting the primitive part of your brain to watch out- it will eat you, and you sense a danger that you can't escape from because you still can't move and running from your insides is completely impossible.

You take your first gasp, the first breath that you felt was adequate, that didn't make you feel like you were suffocating, and on its way out, the sound escapes you- the one fluttering in your chest, struggling to be set free- and it's the most piteous noise you've ever heard in your life, a noise that you'd never thought of before, even when contemplating torture. It's pain in audio surround sound, and on its way out, you become aware of the way your chest and throat vibrate as your sound box trembles from use. And it seems as if the earth should shake with that sound- that one, small, barely audible but painfully clear sound. It seems as if the heavens should fall away, as if the tapestry of sky should peel apart and reveal God himself, because you must be dead right now, right?

And your vision becomes blurry as everything settles underneath your skin, your muscles no longer quivering even though your heart is, and you can't do anything but cry- all of your self control, all of your careful barriers against the world around you crashing down around you like a house of cards, no longer seeming as solid as they once did. Your protection of yourself no longer exists, and every emotion is a raw one, like sandpaper against the open wound that is your heart, and you sob as more of those same, piteous, sounds escape your throat. And you hate that you sound so helpless, and you hate that you're so weak, but in that moment it doesn't matter as much as it would have a few moments ago, and so you sit and you pour it out, and you let it smash through your lungs and out into the air that suddenly tastes stale on your tongue.

And you cling to whatever you can find, a blanket, a chair, a wall, as if it were the most solid thing in the world, and in that moment it is. It's the last anchor in a sea of artifice, and you and your buoy are the only things real anymore- the only things palpable, the only things touchable despite how wobbly you feel.

The earth is shaking beneath your feet, and your organs are squirming, and your blood is roaring in your ears as your heart finally catches up to your panic, and every throatfull of breath seers on its way down, burns the lining of your esophagus and leaves behind it the unmistakable feeling of snot sliding down the lining of your body. And you want to clear your throat, but nothing works right just yet, so you choke on it, and you keep choking on the most insubstantial things you'd have otherwise ignored, and that's when you vomit.

Everything spills out of you, and it doesn't matter at the moment if it's on yourself, or on your dead Grandmother's tablecloth, because it makes you feel less heavy, as if gravity were crushing you, and you heave and wail and sob and throw up until you're empty inside.

My therapist, Doctor Holland, told me a while ago to start digging into my past, to try to unlock the memories of my childhood since I was missing so many. And I did. And it was horrible.

Memories that I didn't even know I had started being triggered in my head by the dumbest things- lights, certain sounds, pictures, cardboard boxes, belt buckles...

And this is what it feels like.