Haunted

I place my head in my hands and squeeze.

I can remember it all so painfully well. Like I'm being haunted.The little hands of my subconscious push the memories up, up, up until I am choking around them: little fettered ghosts dancing on my tongue.

It pushes until my eyes blur and my ears ring and I can't tell who I am anymore.

Blonde hair becomes brown, skin is absolved of ink, clothes shrink and eyes brighten.

But I remain painfully, solidly in real time while my mind is consumed by madness.

I don't want to be here. I don't want to be in this purgatory of memories, hazy from time and furled at the edges from where I have picked at it so many times.

I become tormented with the people in them— people I know I no longer know, but who seem to be able to equate me at seventeen to me at near twenty-four.

Because they can change, but I can't.

I can't feel guilt, or remorse, or shame. I couldn't possibly— which is why I've apologized to them for things I didn't actually do, and why when I hear the same tired old spindle of lies that were tagged to me in my teens I fall apart.

But they change. So I search for them everywhere I can.

I re-read messages that are bitterly adolescent and co-dependent, and type their names into every site I can think of. Their parents. Siblings. My eyes read through their profiles, while my mind produces the grainy memory of being persecuted for loving a girl and for needing help. For being young and abused and scared.

They're doing well. Present, and not lost in their own purgatory where I block the doors and drive them to the point of obsession.

I want to cry. Scream. Bang pots together, become famous, need paramedic aid because thats what they do— anything to get their attention. Prove they don't know me and they're wrong— I succeeded. I did well. I am good.

The voice that belongs to the little hands hums a disagreement.

Because I didn't use to obsess over them. I didn't care for them again until I was twenty one and spoke to them again and one of them called me special. Her first love. Someone she would care about from very far away.

Oh, the one. The one that forces me to only date carbon copies of her to this day because I am incapable of finding anyone else interesting, or its my younger self trying to finish the story that was interrupted by cruel adults and a crueler religious institution.

I say her name less as a prayer and more of a plea. To wonder why when she was between relationships she looked at my profile two years ago. To wonder if she is ever haunted, too.

And people keep telling me talking to them now can't fix what happened to me then, because they now aren't the ones that hurt the me from now. They can't undo the abuse they caused. They will forever pretend they did nothing wrong.

But I have a hole in my chest that fit the pair of them perfectly. Nothing else will fill it.

I have tried. Oh, I have tried everything I can. Self inflicted suffering and an abundance of self love and indulgence. But it only irritates the wound worse when it reopens.

So once a year, I become haunted.