I wince,
flinch at a welcomed
touch, the space between shoulder and ear, where I hear (His voice),
where I hold
too much;
Or particular noises,
odd choices of vowels when you play with voice,
reach back an age
for just the right expression
and I rage: I chose
this in you.
In what ways are you hypervigilant?
How does trauma shape your responses to the world around you?
What do your reactions make you feel?
A deviation: the “you” isn’t the typical target, the mother who should have protected me. Today’s prompt speaks instead to my forever-husband “B” (we’ll celebrate four years in a few days, but we’ve lived decades together it seems).
As I started to untangle my past, tease it apart from the present, a dynamic I’d once noted on took a new, discomfiting shape.
There was a familiarity when I first met B, despite our disparate upbringings and lives; I was even able to identify it back then: eerie (truly) similarities in mannerisms, vocalizations, and other quirks of personal presentation, between him and the grandfather.
A persona my husband used to toy with included a hint of Depression-era gangster (Boardwalk Empire was still on, there were some similarities to the character Steve Buschemi created). A touch of largesse, grandiosity, perhaps (though in B, those traits originated elsewhere; they no longer serve him and are no longer present).
The grandfather had gleaned the same, albeit from more direct sources. I remember noting the similarity, musing on the way I’d identified the familiar, noting how the grandfather would have enjoyed B.
They aren’t anything alike, of course, not in any substantive way. And this was before I remembered it all for what was, saw it through a corrected lens.
But how do you tell the one you love, the one you desire, that you not only see traits in him that remind you of someone who abused you, but that you may have been drawn to him in part because of those traits?
How do you own a thing like that in yourself, as a survivor?
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