the past

They don't die, do they? They are slithering inside of me, they are washing into the axons, washing through the synapses, inundating the paths of my nerves until they are all I think about, the memories.

The membrane around me is thick enough, an endometrium, to make me believe in the days of light that there really is no darkness, that the past is dead and gone. It is so easy for a small being in a tiny globe of light in the darkened universe to believe that the light is all that is real, and the darkness is but a dream of less-informed men. It is easy to lie to ourselves like this. But in a lie, in a lie of light in a world of darkness, imagine what a pinhole would do to the sheltered person's morale. Imagine the darkness, amorphous, ooazing in and filling the widening cracks of the weakening sphere. What is there to believe in, then, when ones resistance has always been anchored in ones own perceptions? How do we survive when those perceptions are devoured by impenetrable darkness?

Do you know what's even more sad? I bet you didn't have to imagine that. I bet all you had to do was remember.

Today was birth day in biology. Siobhan put the scissors in the horns of the uteris and cut a slit down the pale gray. There was no obvious kitten inside, but yet another sack, sacks within sacks, zones of placenta, until finally- a cat with small paws, an open mouth, and a tiny tail, three inches long.

It was amazing, the fury I felt in that moment. This would be cessarian section of life, not death, if we weren't tearing these cats apart. These kittens missed their chance to breathe; the alveoli in their lungs collapse wetly against their sunken chests. Why would a humane society euthanize a pregnant cat? Kittens sell quickly. I know that. I go to the Humane Society every week, and the kittens are always gone in less than two.

It made me so angry, that unmistakably human inclination to squash life before it begins.

And then there was the reproductive system. In our cat there was only an emptiness, and we held injecting fluid under our probes and prodded at spayed tissue, pretending fallopian tubes into existance by yanking on the femeral area.

I feel like a kindergartner saying this. I feel young. But maybe there is something important in that hesitation of youth. And I can't handle those words. I was clinging, in biology, on the edge of PTSD, struggling to breathe to remain conscience, to escape dissociation. There is no control, really, over the dynamic spiralling of emotion, though, in a triggered mind. I fell back into the memories with nothing to hold on to, nothing to keep me down but the smell of long-dead cats and the obscenity of dissected kittens.

I've been lying to myself. It doesn't go away, does it? The past? I always think I've worked through these memories, and then I trip and fall into that same old pit. They are as fresh as ever. They sink into me like lead, too heavy for my arms (too small for adult blood pressure cuffs) to lift.

Do I square my shoulders, peek out of the imploding globe of light into the darkness? Do I accept a future perforated by these miserable days? Do I turn and run, run and run and run until the day it catches up with me again? Do I go through the unspeakable pain of facing it one more time?

But it's not one more time, is it? It's today, and then a year, and the year after that, and all the years. It's the pressure of diffusion... all that darkness is pressing, pressing, and there are only two plausible scenarios: either my ball of comfort will be completely destroyed, shattered into infinite pieces, or I will be compressed by the darkness, slowly and then faster, until I am ensconced as deeply in that lie of light, as airlessly, as those kittens in the womb.