my old friend, you are still in my thoughts

 I was thinking so much that I had to get out of bed to come and write this. It was bothering me, so I had to bother one of our fur babies who was sleeping on the computer chair.

Shortly after each individual PTSD episode, other memories seemed to come back to me. Some memories have made me realize the many close friends and family members I have lost over the years. But there is one memory that is bittersweet. I cannot recall the last time I spoke about this person, or what happened to them, in an awfully long time but here it goes.

A foggy morning in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

I was seventeen and heading to work in my parent’s car. I was at a red light when I heard my friend's name announced during the news segment on the radio. He had been killed. Murdered. At the time, social media did not exist, and the internet was born but was yet to be discovered by regular people unless those people worked with computers, so our means of information was a piece of paper with ink that made your fingers black from the ink at the press, the radio, or the news hours on television. I could not believe he had been a target of a violent attack and subsequently passed away. Regrets flooded my head at the time. I had not spoken to him since my family had moved away from my childhood home and where we both lived. I considered him a good friend. Someone who cared about me. Someone who made the effort to come by and see me when it was out of their way. Someone who was kind and happy regardless of either one of our individual home's circumstances. Our boundary was established by the school board, but it did not stop our friendship. He came from a difficult home. A single-parent home but still a loving one. I came from a lower to middle-class home. Corporal punishment was no stranger in my house.

The last time we spoke, I was at the neighbours, babysitting. He came knocking after my mother had informed him that I was next door babysitting. The children were sleeping so we sat on the front porch talking about how school was going, or how we wish we had more time to do more things, especially together, and I am sure we talked about our birthdays since we shared one. He was one of those friends you simply enjoyed hanging out with. He stole his mother's cigarettes from the pack she would leave on the kitchen or coffee table. I even remember him stealing cigarettes from his mother’s pack when she left them on the kitchen table. We thought we were cool. And in my head, we were.

 

Honestly, the flooding of memories has not all been bad. Yes, there are bad memories, and trauma, that I am hiding deep down inside. And these bad ones are the ones I do not want to deal with. And it is not just one. And I never wanted to remember them in the first place. I mean, I hid them in this iron-bust-out-proof container somewhere stashed in my head for over twenty years. Well, it was. That is until December 2020 when I had my first lengthy PTSD episode. During this episode I remember feeling fear and thinking about how much I wanted to die at that moment, I did not want to be there, back in that moment where I no longer had control of what happened to me. I wanted to run as far away as I could. I wanted nothing to do with what happened to me. I want it to go away. Far away. I want to give these memories margaritas, sombreros, and a wad of cash and fly them off to the first available vacation destination I can send them to. Five-star. First-class. One-way ticket. I have not figured out how to do that yet.