Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (26 page)

“That’s trauma,” she shrugged, and I got onto the table.

Once on the table, I couldn’t connect to my body, as I’d been training to do there for weeks and weeks before. I could either be functional or connected. One or the other. Either in touch and a disaster, or coiled and ready and deadened. It was the key aim of my ninja schooling to integrate these things, but at that point, I could not be both.

“How was therapy?” Nico would ask on Skype.

“A little bit hard,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t feel pieces of my body, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. He knew. He was getting more regularly and more graphically briefed on the state of the crazy.

But he still knew only in theory. A few days after that conversation, and two months after he’d left California, I flew into Pointe-à-Pitre, the biggest city in Guadeloupe. Nico’s unit was deployed to the Lesser Antilles island, an “overseas department” of France, for three months to help with routine police matters and do “interventions,” they called them, SWAT raids of suspected drug dealers. He didn’t know, he couldn’t have known, what my episodes were truly like. I couldn’t explain it even to people who did speak my language, so though I’d tried to let him know as much as possible, as I so wanted him to understand me, there was no way he was prepared for experiencing them firsthand.

Within hours of my landing, I had my first one. We got in bed, and all my limbs disappeared, and I became woozy, and panting, then tearful. The next morning, I woke up from a nightmare with the kind of shaky blackness that always started a day in which I could do nothing but count the minutes until the day was over and I could go back to sleep and try to start again.

My nightmares at that time were generally about murder—about someone getting murdered, a stranger or me, sometimes kidnapped and tortured first. Lately, though, I’d been going through a spate where I was the one torturing and murdering people. In one dream I’d had before leaving for Guadeloupe, I was in a big old house with a bunch of people, and we’d collectively decided to torture this middle-aged white guy to death. We were keeping him in a box full of dirt, like a coffin. I was the one who was most enthusiastic about adding more dirt to the box every day before we all went out for egg rolls so he’d keep suffocating. I could see his face, all dirt-covered, and hear him scratching around in there desperately while I knelt over the box, topping it off with more soil.

That first night in Guadeloupe brought another installment in the series. “I had a dream that I tortured two people to death,” I told Nico when we woke up.

This time, I’d tied two people down to the floor, or someone else had. They were alive, and I was whipping a grappling hook into their faces. Its sharp metal points caught with a sure, soft thump in one face, and then I pulled it back and repeatedly cast it into the other until nothing was left but wet, hamburgery meat.

When I told Nico about this, he said simply, “Which two people?”

He was lying on his back in bed next to me, shoulders loose and wide. I pictured his perfect little organs in his torso, open to attack. He saw the envy in my face when I looked over and whispered, “I can’t do that.” In my terrible sleep, I’d bolted my arms across my chest. My hands remained locked onto my sides, reinforcing my skeleton.

When Nico rolled over on top of me, I didn’t loosen my grip. He took my right wrist and pulled my arm back to my side, and panic rushed through my rib cage.

Danger
, my body screamed, and my eyes welled up.
Dangerdangerdanger.

Protect the midline. The skin that holds everything precious inside there is too delicate to do it alone.

My mind, knowing there was no danger here, repeated this knowledge as a mantra, chastising my body as usual. That internal disconnect, or the additional alarm when Nico took my other wrist and pressed that arm gently to my side, too, proved too much. I dissociated.

My mind refused to agree with my body on where I was.

I tried to force it to.

You are in a bed in Guadeloupe
.

No. I’m not.

That looks like it’s true, but I can’t actually feel it.

My arms became numb below the elbows.

A therapist would probably not recommend Nico’s forcibly if very lovingly undoing a trauma patient’s contraction. When I contracted like this on the table, Denise often had me contract
more
, contract all the way, hold every muscle in my body tight with teeth gritted and braced until I felt like I was ready to let it go. That way, I was in control. I was empowered to pick the moment that I would release and she would start pushing on me from the side, shaking it out. But Nico wasn’t a therapist. He was a guy who woke up next to a girl he loved whose nervous system didn’t work normally and did the best he could.

What he did next actually was something my therapist did—he stroked my arms, toward my hands, toward the place that’d turned from weight-carrying blood and muscle to nothing but static. Eventually I relaxed. Then I sobbed profusely. When I started, Nico said matter-of-factly, “Yes,” as though it was a thing that had been certain and necessary. Holding me, he encouraged me to stick with it, let it through. This was something therapists did, too.
Stay with the sensations,
Denise always said.
If you can
.

But the last thing I wanted was for my boyfriend to become my professional caretaker.

This trip was three weeks long. There was no sucking it up and hemming it in for that duration. It was too long to remain in a jet-lagged, sex-dizzy, touristic-drinking haze. Also, from now on, as far as Nico was concerned, the stakes were higher. Before, he’d been my fabulous if improbable hot young French boyfriend, who was to some extent a fantasy. Now he was moving into my house. It was likely this was lighting up a bunch of issues. Divorce. Fear. Potential for failure. Vulnerability, uncertainty, unreliability. The timing wasn’t ideal, but I didn’t want to lose him. If I did and ever managed to find another person I loved that much, I would have to confront the issues then, anyway.

We were just going to have to work together.

*   *   *

It quickly became clear that the only thing worse than dealing with myself during an episode was dealing with someone else trying to deal with me at the same time.

The next time, it started with a salad.

“How much onion do you want me to use?” Nico asked me a few days later, standing in the kitchen of the island cottage we’d rented. It was perched on a hill in a neighborhood of concrete homes, a carriage house at the end of someone’s long driveway. I’d just stepped out of the little tiled shower and into the kitchen, which was open to the living room, which opened via a wall of glass doors to the outside. There, beyond the property’s bushy greenery, bursting with flowers and palms, an ocean undulated in the distance, too far away to hear.

My body turned to static. I fucking hated dissociating, being lost in the clear light of a place I belonged, lost when I wasn’t lost at all. Physically, this particular dissociation covered a lot of area: everything between my pelvic bones and my chin. Just,
gone
, dissipated instantly into a billion particles that I couldn’t feel anymore as a part of me but could sense floating around, agitated, nearby. When the room started to move fast away from me, past me, I walked from the kitchen counter and into a dark corner of the bedroom.

“Baby?” Nico asked after me.

But I was very busy arguing with myself, one voice inside me saying that if I talked to Nico I’d be swept up in that disappearing, fast-moving room he was part of out there, and another voice saying that made no sense. I grasped for my tools, like trying to focus on something real. Like that I had fingers and they were holding on to a real mug I’d taken out of the kitchen.

“Baby,” Nico said. He was standing in the doorway.

When I looked up at him, saying nothing, he started toward me as nonthreateningly as possible, crouching down to make himself small, reaching out to me on his knees. He touched my face, which softened with his warmth. He said he needed his
petite femme
to help him make dinner. He held me in his bare arms, and I was a real person in
there
this time, feeling my skin on his skin. And then I could suddenly feel what had set me off and sent most of my body away to escape it.

It was sadness. Regular old sadness. I started sobbing.

“
Mon bébé
,” Nico whispered. “
Je t’aime tellement. Je suis là
.”

My baby. I love you so much. I’m here.

Later he would admit that this was terrifying for him, walking in and looking in my eyes to find them completely unmoored. But he held on and incanted his support like a lullaby anyway.

Je suis là
, he repeated.
Je suis là
,
je suis là
,
je suis là
.

That was how it went.

Except for when it didn’t.

When I started crying another time, he told me to try to smile, and I told him that really wasn’t helpful, and he got mad that I called him unhelpful, and I got mad that I now had to manage someone else’s drama along with my own, and he ended up yelling, “Why we are even together if this is how is our fucking time together?” Sometimes when I interrupted a make-out session to announce I was too crazy to have sex because my reaction to arousal that day was shame and disgust that made me fantasize about lopping his hands off with a machete so he’d stop touching me, he didn’t pet my face and say “OK, my love.” Sometimes it turned into an argument about not enough respect for each other’s needs. Or his complaining that our relationship wasn’t as passionate as it should be.

There’s a steep learning curve for a couple dealing with trauma. It’s hard enough for one person to withstand, and much of it is compounded with two.

Best-case scenario, when it didn’t start a fight, I found his presence comforting—but then, at the same time, I was humiliated that a nice normal person was witnessing my being a maniac, then guilty about making such a nice normal person witness that. This time in Guadeloupe, too, we didn’t just have our own relationship and my problems to contend with. This time, these long weeks, was real life. I had the undercover story I’d reported due; Nico had drug wars to perpetuate. So every day we woke up and went to work, and had to get the grocery shopping done, and figure out who would be in charge of making dinner.

“You have so many bad things inside you,” Nico said to me at some point before the trip ended. He was acknowledging it as much to himself as to me. He meant collected fear and grief, not that I was some sort of hell spawn. At night, with his back smooth against my chest, I stayed awake to be ready for something terrible to happen. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was coming.

Nico could feel my restlessness next to him, even when he was asleep. No matter how still I was, I made his slumber fidgety and choppy, too. “You know how you can feel other people’s feelings?” he asked once, casually—because though hardly everyone can, it came perfectly naturally to him. He just let them land on him, other people’s enthusiasm or nervousness. He could feel his lieutenant’s anxiety prick up his skin, or his best friend’s relationship trouble weigh down his muscles, unless he “cut the links,” as he also casually put it, when this is a legitimate somatic practice that can take years to master. Meredith had prescribed visualizing the severing of the connection between others and myself sometimes; being oversensitive, I was prone to being subsumed in other people’s intense emotions. Nico put it basically the same way Meredith did when he said, “Sometimes it’s too much, or you don’t want or need to feel that.”

“He’s an empath!” Tana said when I called her from Pointe-à-Pitre. “Like Deanna Troi.” The
Star Trek: The Next Generation
analogy was not bad. Nico could sense the shifts in my shape and mood as easily as an expert like Denise. And spending so much time in his presence, I was starting to disturb him.

“You’re so intense,” he said.

Earlier in the trip, I’d found Nico going through my closet, and when I asked him what the hell he was doing, he said, “I was smelling all your clothes.” This was a guy who sometimes said, “If you stop to love me, I will stop to live.” Who, after he hurt my feelings once, after I retreated to the shower, stepped into the stream of water alongside me without bothering to take off his pants and belt first, lest one more moment pass without my understanding how sorry he was. It was not easy to out-intense the French. But here I was, being that unstable and extreme. Being that much work.

“Don’t worry,” he said with my face in his hands and his lips against my ear after I started crying about his comment. “
T’inquiete pas
. I will not stop to try to understand.”

I didn’t know how he could possibly understand me, when I not only lost the ability to locate my own self in space and time, I also no longer knew the person I was supposed to be looking for.

11.

Would you believe me if I said that those Guadeloupe episodes were relatively mild? That by the time I left Guadeloupe, after three weeks, we still hadn’t hit the bottom of that PTSD-couple learning curve? If I said—again—that things only got worse from there?

Nico and I parted with plans to meet again in France in a couple of months, in the new year. France 2012, where I would hallucinate and rage and make Nico cry, and he would still see fit to propose to me.

In the meantime, I was back in San Francisco only briefly before it was Christmas, which I hated. Since The Fall, Christmas had involved my parents being some combination of homeless or despondent or drunk. But I always had to go back to Ohio for some reason. Two years earlier, my mother had developed an incurable degenerative cranial nerve disease that caused her so much pain she was put on a high, constant dosage of opiates, plus anticonvulsants and analgesics; I spent that Christmas at a Marriott behind a Cincinnati hospital where she was having brain surgery, then weaning her through painkiller withdrawal in our ugly room as she shivered and sweated, post-op, a dozen staples in her head, metal plate in her skull, a medication drawdown so elaborate I had to make a chart to remember which pills to give her when.