Fire in the Hole

If I close my eyes at just the right moment, as my boyfriend is opening his laptop, I can see a Fujitsu logo on the back of it, and imagine for a moment that my old laptop is still alive and well. (It's currently stored in the laptop crypt that is my wardrobe, along with 3 others.)

It had to be retired after it literally caught fire in my hostel room.

It was my fault. I dropped it too many times, and it was really just held together with spit and broken dreams by that point.

I still keep it because I want to get the hard drive out someday. It's probably super screwed by this point, and totally unusable. I left it about 4 years too late, but still I hold out hope.

That's because I live in the past a lot. I know at least 50 people queuing up to tell me I shouldn't, and I tell them I don't, I swear I don't, because they would never leave me alone otherwise.

And yet that's where I am about 50% of the time, still drowning in the murky waters of bogs I escaped from a very long time ago. And contrary to what my mom would have you believe, it's not because I "like living in the past." It's not because I "like being miserable" or because I "like pain." I don't. Nobody does.

And it's not as if I never made any effort to outpace the past. Every time I think I've made sufficient progress, a tendril snakes out and curls around my ankle, bringing my progress to an abrupt, definitive stop with a thud.

And that's because the things and systems and people I escaped from are still very much alive. I may have gotten out from under their suffocating grasp, but they still retain all of their power and privilege, and they continue to hurt other people who today occupy the position I did back then.

I returned to the past yesterday.

It's the same.

And this is where the words have to be kicked out of my brain and onto the page because they refuse to leave. The part where coherent thought turns into a screaming mess. This is where music from dances past sneaks out from shadows of memories I thought I buried and perform, once again, their choreographies of death.

In fact, it's worse, even if only because it's the same.

I find myself spinning out in the position of someone mourning a loss - the loss of someone I never knew. Someone I identify with so strongly all the same, that it feels like the loss I'm mourning is my own.

It's true. In another life, in a parallel universe oh-so-very closely touching our own, I'm already dead. In a reality separated from my own by a single choice, I ceased to exist at some point - today, perhaps. Two weeks ago. Two months ago. Two years ago. Maybe even two months from now.

The timeline doesn't matter, because the past is so unchanging that it will continue to exist in the same vicious form for years to come, just as it has been for 30 years. Just death tap dancing across decades and realities.

And this is also where I step in and cut myself off. Because things haven't stayed the same for 30 years. At least, not exactly the same. And that gives me hope that some systems can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Century of the Fruitbat.

If I close my eyes, I can see the laptop on fire. I can see it as I throw it, from my bed and onto the floor of my hostel room. It's a soft landing, onto a layer of garbage about 2 inches thick. Discarded wrappers and packets of food. Thousands of cigarette butts and almost a thousand empty cigarette packets. Stained clothes and torn clothes that gave up their ghost months ago, but still lie practically unnoticed among the mess. Broken items and half eaten plates piled up somewhere among everything else. Petrified fries from the first day I moved in, two years before that.

I don't remember how I put the fire out. Perhaps it went out on its own, in a matter of seconds. It doesn't matter, because my memories of that time are patchy, sliding in and out of blackness.

I do remember going many weeks without speaking to a single human soul who wasn't manning the cigarette shop, or the juice shop that sold Diet Coke, or the shop that sold Lays and Cornetto ice creams for credit.

I do remember spending a week in bed watching every season of Supernatural. There were 10 seasons at that point. There was no gap in between episodes.

I do remember stepping out of the fugue and into the shower once in two months, and scrubbing months of grime off with a desperate vengeance. Spending 45-60 minutes in the shower, and none of it spent staring out into space vacantly. After two months, there's just too much to do.

I remember feeling disgusted in my own skin, inside my own head. I remember constantly wanting to shove my arms into a meat grinder, imagining the pain as I walked around campus, to and from the classes I barely managed to attend, to and from the library I owed so much in late fees to.

I remember retreating into my hoodie to the point of being invisible, to the point where there are no records of me, to the point where you could make a valid argument for my non-existence.

I remember anger burning futilely somewhere at the back of my head. I remember desperately wanting to die.

I remember standing at the very top of the hostels, mildly drunk, staring down and wondering what it would feel like to step off and fly.

I could run from the past forever, and it wouldn't matter. I can't escape it until I stop and turn around. Until I swing a broadsword with all my might, and decapitate it, once and for all.

There's nothing else I can do. I didn't have to go back to the past, they said. But they were wrong. There is no other choice here.