With dirt still under my nails from flower planting, I drenched the new perennials with the hose. Reeling it up, I laughed at my puppy playing with the receding coil and thought, “Anthony wouldn’t let him get away with that.” The hose caught on the boxwood bush, then the drain spout. I tossed the tangled length of hose to straighten it for easier roll-up. A chill ran through me. The sound of the sprinkler head falling onto the sidewalk rang up years’ old memories.

You never forget.

Time passes. You move thousands of miles away. You grow up. And one night it all crashes upon you. That visceral memory is stored inside and can pop up at any moment. My gut twists here, in this falling spring light, and I fall through the portal of then and now. I am five again.

Five, and helpless, and the sound slapping against my ears is the same chord, same intonation, of my sister’s cerebral blood slapping the pavement. Slapping, slapping, slapping, with clots falling, a different tone, slapping, and then sliding off the concrete driveway and exiting into the darkening night. I am five. I am small, and I am helpless.

You never forget. You can go through seminars, counseling, prayer ministry, fasting, all the things. But you inhabit a body. And that body remembers. Your spirit may be whole but the body is not yet redeemed. And so our central nervous system stores data constantly, bleep bleep blip, little micro chips of moments. The silk of sunshine. Your first smell of roses. Weighted cat upon your feet. Your first kiss, first time you slept with a man. And trauma, the decibels of death. It’s all stored together, mumbo jumbo. Much like tilling a garden and turning up old rocks and glass, so is your stored memories.

I’m 24. That was at 5. I don’t know when I’ll be better. I’ve been working on healing for a long time. I don’t know if I’ll ever be “over it.” Maybe trauma is something that’s carried, and now and then the briefcase lock comes undone and all the contents spill out.

How embarrassing to be standing in public and your suitcase falls open. Like seriously, could you not even close the lock? How awkward to fall apart, all alone, watering your flowerbeds. I used to resent people who went numb, used to think that was no way to live. Now I understand. It’s easiest to pretend you don’t carry a suitcase, so when it spills, it’s not something you have to address. You just keep going like you never saw it.

I’ve stared down a lot of depression this winter. And in an unexpected way, I felt like I was shown the reason for my exhausting sadness. I stumbled across an educational video of adult responses to childhood trauma. I felt like I tend to have at least 8 of the 11 responses, and Anthony agreed. I was going through some unfair things at college that were triggering some of the same feelings I felt as a helpless five year old on that night of loss. I felt targeted, small, and defenseless. Every professor and dean I spoke with refused to listen to reason and engaged in gas-lighting behaviors. My confusion turned to anger that my controlling professor would target me and then deny her actions. The slow-burning anger turned into sadness and I could barely drag myself through my days. I was so exhausted, there were times I couldn’t drag myself out of bed for classes because I could not go see that professor again. At the root of it all was the lie “I am helpless, no one defends me.”

You grow up. But your nerves cut teeth on uncertainty and change, and they are still humming to themselves to calm down. Along comes a similar plot twist and they are positively screaming again. And after the screaming nerves comes the exhaustion, fatigue, the burn-out, the “I can’t do life anymore.” War Veterans and post-PTSD depression rates are absolutely wild; your body can tolerate bursts of hyper-vigilance but not sustained seasons of it. Your nerves will fry like eggs in oil, tssssst, tsssth.

How do you carry within you all the feels, the memories, the personas? How am I both professional and competent and small and unseen? How am I both five and twenty-four, both broken and whole? How do I reconcile the worlds that co-exist and crash, create and collide, within this one finite being?

What is it to live, and be whole, and yet never forget?