Resurrection

When I first arrived home in Asheville nearly a year ago - distraught, disoriented, and reeling from overwhelming long-term abuse and trauma, I couldn't even find solace in my childhood bed.

For many nights in a row I curled up under the heavy bedspread, squeezed my eyes shut, and prayed for relief from this unwanted reality. Instead of relief, nights gave me the opposite. I was dragged down into a world of the subconscious, where my experiences became fresh and intense again in my nightmares.

One recurring episode consisted of him standing in front of me. He was angry, fists clenched. Eyes narrowed. Intentions strong. But, I fought him. I fought. I fought. I won. I won!

He fell to the ground, and stayed there, lifeless. Gone.

A flood of relief: I won. It was over, breathe, breathe, breathe. Safe, safe, safe.

But then suddenly, just as I'd regained my breath, he rose up again, towering over me and locking eyes like an fearless animal, and the whole pattern began again.

I had this dream constantly, to the point where even after it stopped being a dream it stayed a mental image in my mind for months. It came to me in the most unwanted times this summer. During yoga. During vespers. Meals. Staff retreat. I could be safely nestled in the loving admiration of twenty children and a dozen loving coworkers and that image still burned in my mind.

It's a accurate metaphor for how my year has been since that heartbreaking battle at my apartment in Atlanta.

I keep thinking things are done; things are resolved. I keep thinking, perhaps naively, that I've finally won. I've been to a scarce amount of therapy, I've journaled, blogged, talked, ranted, cried, screamed, and prayed. For a year. How much longer must I keep catching my breath only to be grabbed back into the wrestling match?

I rocked quietly in the heavy wooden chair on the porch of the dining hall and confided these fears in an older figure I admire. She looked at me intently and started revealing the worn threads of her own haunting fight, one that has been going on longer than mine.

"He broke my heart," she said. "It's still broken."

It was like hearing myself speak a few years from now, and it gave me shudders of nervousness.

I don't mean to portray that I'm not okay. I am okay. I'm great. I had a wonderful summer, an amazing summer - filled with joy and achievement and fulfillment! Life has carried me forward into new things, new friends. I love life. Despite, and in spite of everything.

But always, in the shadows backstage, this battle threatens me. It scares me. While the moments in-between the sick and twisted "resurrections" grow longer, the adrenaline never lessens, the panic never dims. And furthermore, there's somehow a hopelessness that can start to set in. Weariness. I don't want to say it, but sometimes, despair.

But then, this week, during one of my first nights back home in my childhood bed after a summer away, I had a dream. A vivid, intense, saturated dream. I turned the corner of a building and there he was.

(Deep breath)

I tried to run but was brought down by the ankles to the hard concrete. And then he was punching, hitting, you know. All that. And suddenly I had a bird's eye view of myself being pummeled, and then just as suddenly, I saw a close-up image of my heart inside my body. Every time I was hit, it shuddered. It split. It caved. And then it beat.

As it beat, it stretched. Each separate piece of my broken heart stretched, as if reaching for its lost counterparts, and my split heart was literally committing mitosis before my eyes, breaking, stretching, healing; breaking, stretching, healing. Eventually, it burst out of my body and continued this overpowering sequence.

And finally, my (strange, incomprehensibly huge) heart was knit around even the outermost parts of my body, and I was completely hidden in a womb-like structure, wrapped in sinewy armor, curled up inside a giant, beating chamber. Safe.

I don't know what this means; I don't even know if it's that comforting. It's confusing. Intense. I don't understand the layers of consciousness and how they react to trauma; I'm no therapist. But I do know that this image of building an armor about myself brings a new meaning to the idea of resurrection that had haunted me previously.

And so, the war continues.