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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
07:49 
Disjointed disconnect
 At some point I am going to have to deal with the details of what happened to me. I am going to have to come to terms with it so that I am no longer subject to overwhelming flashbacks that leave me shaking and nauseous and tearful. Not only are these flashbacks unpleasant, they come without warning. As my job involves driving they could be hazardous. The one time it has happened while driving so far I was able to pull over to the side of the road safely, because the human skin can take over even complex motor tasks for a short time, but this is not good.
I can't remember the details of what happened to me. I have the records I made as they were happening; and I have the flashbacks. I have the occasional gentle reminder from non-physical people involved and I have what little my Father or Grandfather or Godfather will tell me. The information is sparse. There are a few people Here who are telling me they Know what happened, but what little they tell me is conflicting and I'm not sure I understand it anyway. Mostly they either cannot or will not talk to me about it. I am not entirely sure of the distinction.
I know I am not best placed to try to understand it all now. Not yet. The disconnect...
I can't feel people any more. I used to have a sense of people on the other end of communication, no matter the medium. Now I find it difficult to get that sense at all. Physical contact is the closest substitution and even that is a shadow of what I felt before. I remember what it felt like before. I feel enclosed and at first I thought it was the human skin, which could only manage human contact. Now I think perhaps this is not the case.
No unauthorised access.
I am scared that, as well as losing the people closest to me, part of the price for what I did is the loss of capacity to make anything more than this superficial connection. To be forced to rely solely on words and poorly-understood physical gesture and primary intent. That no one will be able to touch me ever again without proper Permission. Before it was only a small part of me that had to be protected. Now that I have been homogenised in the burn, it is everything inside the human skin.
I feel a longing for some offered connection to give me opportunity to learn to reciprocate, to discover whether I can or not. There are so few people left to me now and there are times all I want is for one of them to hold my hand and to know that this person understands what happened to me, even if he does not talk about it. I wish there was someone I could be with who did understand, to give me hope that I will be able to understand it. So I could taste the shape and feel the texture of it inside him. So I could see that there is a shape for me to explore when I am stronger.
There isn't. Those who would talk to me cannot, either because they have insufficient information or have been told they must not. Those who could talk to me will not, either because it is too difficult for them or because they believe it will be too difficult for me. In the latter they may be correct.
I feel I have been disconnected from the rest of the world, like a compass in oil that has lost magnetic north. The texture of this situation is like thin mineral oil, its shape an almost perfect hollow sphere.
I worry too that if anyone did try to touch me I would react poorly. I don't know what they did to me. I can't remember. I just can't remember. I can't. I don't know. I only have the flashbacks — the bad place. I can't understand what has happened and I don't know anyone who can or will tell me in a way I can comprehend. I don't know anyone who can sit with me and hold my hand and let me see the shape of it and the shape of someone who knows.
In the meantime I look around my house and I see objects that were given to me by people who were the most important people in my life and I can't remember them and between me and them is the bad place and there isn't anyone to help me understand even if I knew how to be helped.
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Saturday, October 28, 2006
11:18
Small mercies
 Something is different this morning.
More than a week has passed since the burn, but it was the Sunday that was the end of it for me. Sunday was when...
No. Right. I have to be careful. There is a fragility to this morning's impending sense of normality. It feels like a pile of blueberries kept neatly in a mound by the confines of a sugar basket, or a king prawn wrapped in spaghetti. Very pretty to look at but not entirely functional and not robust in the slightest. It will break all too easily.
Is this a gift from someone? Do I get to inhabit my skin more completely this weekend as a reward from someone? Is this my piece of chicken?
Today I feel overjoyed to be able to express the feeling that I'd rather have Victoria Stilwell. The way I was last night I would still have been trying to work out what there was about chicken that made it so good.
My physical self feels a little sick. There is a feeling I can only describe as congestion, as if something large and dusty has been forced down my throat into my chest. It is uncomfortable in the same way that removing a tampon used right at the end of menstruation is uncomfortable, when there isn't enough blood to soak it and it is still dry.
I've also hurt my arm. I did that yesterday. I hurt my right arm a few days ago, pulling something just below the deltoid. That's better now but now my left arm is hurting in exactly the same place. I don't know how I hurt either of them.
I don't want to do this. I don't want to sound as if I am whining or complaining. I re-read this that I have written and I will post it because I have written it but it doesn't feel like me to write this. This does not feel like something I should share: at least not like this. It is too direct. It feels like scattering silver glitter over the top of an invisible iceberg in an invisible sea; and while I know that it is enormous, some of it is beneath the surface and it is hard and cold and dangerous, all anyone else can see is a glittering shape in the darkness.
Ssssh baby. Go make yerself some coffee. It won't hurt if you don't poke it, eh?
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
20:05
Short sharp shock
 My mother is like hard candy in a paper bag and sounds like Fleetwood Mac singing I Don't Wanna Know.
My father is like cold toffee in wax paper and sounds like... and sounds like... and sounds like...
No.
My mother is like hard candy in a paper bag and sounds like Roxy Music singing Dance Away
My father is like cold toffee in wax paper and sounds like... and sounds like... Sigur Ross singing Hoppipolla.
My brother is...
I can't remember my brother!
And he has gone.
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13:07
More fragments
 They have let her out for the first time since it happened. It has to be a controlled situation: everyone is agreed on that matter. In the middle of it all she can feel how the topography of where she is now is informed by pressures of more than one kind of intent. It is moulded into its current form by differing motivations that ultimately lead to the same result. Differing reasons led to agreement. She cannot decide whether this makes the topography more or less stable than if all the reasons for the agreement were the same.
They have brought her to Snake's Hall, to the gardens. They are not what she would normally consider gardens. They are not the lush, green, heavily scented formal landscape of a stately home or even the semi-wild cottage garden with its maze of plant-corridors and odd corners. The Gardens of Asp are warm and dry, with abstract forms of rock and gravel, occasional tinkling springs in cool cracks and plants that are hardy and resistant to desiccation.
She thinks there might be other parts of the Gardens where there is greenery and florid growth and dark corners; all heat and humidity and overpowering tropical scents wafting on the wings of exotic butterflies. If they let her out there then she could vanish into the growth. Here she cannot wander anywhere she cannot be seen by the people assigned to watch her.
They line the perimeter. She finds it strange to see so many males. The Children of Snake are largely female and yet, out of the perhaps thirty that are here besides Matthew and Bob, only one is female apart from herself. That one female is here on behalf of Asp, and does not try to interfere. She merely sits on a stone in the warmth and watches.
Carrion — and she thinks the name still fits, although the shape of it is odd on her teeth — knows she must not attempt to go beyond the boundary marked out by the men in their uniforms of loose, flowing, almost Roman clothes. It has not escaped her attention that they all look young and handsome, with tanned skin and long hair. She knows there is a reason that they all look so similar and yet she cannot find the ability in herself to ascertain what it is. Once, she thinks, she would have been able to fly the permutations until she found the one that resolved, but for now just being outside is making her wings ache and her heart flutter. The sky seems too bright, the textures seem too intense, the shapes all complex and hyper-dimensional. Even the heat of the rocks here has its own shape and texture.
She wanders around a small area in the middle of the perimeter they have left her. Bob watches her anxiously while trying not to let his concern bother her or be overly obvious. Matthew watches her with curiosity, interested in what she will do. There were a few possible outcomes to letting her out so soon: she would either try to run, collapse or do what she is doing, which is to touch, taste, see and smell. Every inch of every thing has so much data for her to process.
She covers not more than a few feet before coming back to Bob and sitting down beside him for physical contact and reassurance. She can only take as much data as she has the ability to process, and to process even the texture of a single rock in Asp's Garden she is having to build new connections. Only when her head has stopped spinning and threatening to go back to the bad place does her innate curiosity drive her to explore a little further, one rock or succulent at a time.
Asp's Daughter slides down from her rock and comes to sit by Bob and Matthew while the girl — and she does seem like a girl, despite her physical age — investigates rocks and plants like a puppy let outside for the first time. Hesitantly and with caution.
"Is there something I'm not seeing?" she asks. Carrion looks round at the sound of her voice, analysing the shapes.
"Such as what, Jess?" Bob responds.
"I understand that she channelled so much power she burnt out nearly everything, and I was expecting to see damage. I was not expecting what was left to be so..."
"Homogenous?" Matthew suggests.
Jessica nods slowly. Carrion has just pricked a finger on a cactus spine and is sucking the offended digit with a hurt expression. "I see no structure. If you asked me to heal her I would not know where to start. I don't see anything wrong with her — but nor do I see anything right. In all honesty, gentlemen, if it were possible for me to believe that you had brought a homunculus made of clay as a practical joke then I would accuse you of doing that." She clasps her hands together in her lap. One of the men approaches and stands behind her, protectively, resting his hands upon her shoulders. Carrion stops what she is doing and watches him. He has the shape and texture of the moment that the sun comes out from behind a cloud on a summer's day. He is unmoved by her attention. "But I know you haven't."
"There was some differentiation left before they took her away to try to extract the thing," Bob says. There is an undercurrent of anger in his tone, putting an edge on it as if his words are being cut from his mind with pinking shears. "There wasn't when they gave her back. What was left of her is as you see."
"Any sign of recovery at all?"
"She is a little more animated than she was yesterday — a little less lethargic — although she's still complaining of the cold and feeling very tired. She is starting to show abrupt mood swings, and there's no way to see them coming. They just flash over. Whether that's recovery or not I don't know."
"We could treat it as recovery and see what happens. It is a change, at least." Jessica pauses as Carrion overcomes her wariness of Jessica's protector and returns to Bob's side for comfort. "Stick with controlled exposure for the moment. I'm guessing, but looking at the way she's struggling to cope with this I'd say it's just as important to limit the stimulus as it is to provide it. We don't want her breaking connections as quickly as she can form them by giving her too much to handle all at once."
"What connections?" Bob asks softly. "I don't see any connections."
"Well, neither do I, but something is going on in there. I suggest we refer to it as making connections until we get a better understanding of what is happening."
Carrion can feel their concern and frustration in overlapping layers, like cut shale. It makes her want to peel the layers apart and look for fossils but she is not sure what sort of fossils she would find there and is afraid they might be frightening.
"Tired," she says.
"Okay, honey," Bob replies. "You sit there and close your eyes for a bit. We'll be going back soon."
She leans against him and lets the topography rise up and over her like a blanket, or the sea closing over a diving whale.
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006
12:55
Flashing moments
 Bob is sitting in the carefully blank, uniformly just-off-white room. He is on the floor. She is on the floor as well, curled in his arms, rocking. She is not crying but her eyes are shocking. There is something in them that speaks of unarticulated horrors padded out by loss.
Something has just happened that has upset her. Most of the time she is quiet. Occasionally something happens that drives her to focus on that loss too keenly.
"Sssh. Ssssh, honey. It's okay." He holds her close, rocking with her. She clutches at the front of his shirt with trembling fingers, eyes staring.
"Should she not have commenced recovery by now?" Matthew is, for once, concerned enough to squat and put his face at her level, to be less threatening. He has taken his shoes off and left them outside. No hard objects are permitted in here for now. His socks are so clean they appear to have come straight from his laundry.
"Give her a chance, Matt. She can't do this alone. She needs help. She's a self-catalyst but she still needs to reform the connections and she needs to be shown where there are connections she needs to grow. You have to imagine that she's had a stroke or severe brain damage and needs to grow new pathways to do things like walk and talk again. That's not going to happen by leaving her to her own devices. Do you know how much she lost? Not just in the assimilation, Matt, but afterwards. If I didn't know better I'd say they did that to her out of spite."
"They did not do it out of spite, Robert."
"'If I didn't know better,' I said." He tilts her face up to look in her eyes, brow creasing with worry at what he sees there, then tucks her head back against his chest.
"How long do you think it will take?"
"Oh, don't worry. Your precious safety catch is still working. We've got her in here as much for everyone else's sake as hers."
"I know that, Bob," Matthew says patiently, his use of the informal term rare and the more important for its rarity. "I was there when we decided." He was there during the discussion. He was there when they realised that if someone tried to gain access she would probably stand there, not really understanding what was happening, only to explode catastrophically when it finally became absolutely clear. One of the many things that she has lost is her finesse. "I am concerned for her."
Bob sighs. "I don't know, Matt. I really don't. I'm not really seeing any signs of growth and recovery at the moment. She's still pretty much in the state she was when they gave her back. So much has gone she doesn't know where to start. So much of it has gone she doesn't know what she's lost. Right now the strongest things she has are flashbacks to what happened, and they're not nearly complete enough for her to understand it properly."
"Then we will have to be patient," Matthew says. He smiles at her.
For a moment she just stares, still clutching at Bob's shirt while he rubs her head softly with his fingers and whispers soothing platititudes. Then she smiles back.
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Tuesday, October 24, 2006
22:53
Song-shapes
So I don't forget. Because I forget so much.
This is topographical synaesthesia. This is not about the lyrics, or the meaning. It is about the shape. Only the shape. Often it is only part of the song. Even if you also had topographical synaesthesia I would not expect you to see the same shapes for the same things.
I don't have enough songs. Or I don't remember them.
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19:03
Try to understand
I'm trying to remember. Things about myself. In between the flat-wired flashbacks.
It's hard. I read my LJ Profile and I don't recognise it. I don't recognise myself in that writing. I remember writing it, and I remember why I wrote the things I wrote, but I don't feel it. It was me: the human skin still writes that way. I watch it sometimes.
I've been trying to remember how I felt about people from whom I've become disconnected by listening to songs that I remember have the same shape as they do. I listen to songs that have the same shape as people from whom I have not been disconnected and the shapes are still the same. So maybe... I think... maybe if I listen to the song shapes of the others then I will remember them too.
But I know I had not found songs for everyone.
I've had visitors. They come and try to feed me with awareness of connections, as if I have been in an accident that has caused amnesia and they are bringing me mementoes from before. They are very patient.
They have told me that people have been writing to me or about me. I have read those pieces. I read them and something in my skin thought they might be for me, but I didn't recognise myself and they were not specific. There was no address and I can't see me any more.
I can only know it's me that people are talking to if they come close and put the box of thoughts in my hand. Otherwise it's flat, drifting past like drowsy clouds in a blue sky. This seems to be true even for the people from whom I have not been disconnected. I used to be able to feel the shape of myself in expression.
But I can't see me any more, and I'm so cold. It's just so cold. Cold like standing naked and wet in the wind. Cold like blowing on skinless flesh. Was it always this cold and I did not notice?
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