Permission for the Wave

“It’s being tied to a chair at the bottom of an empty in-ground swimming pool. There is a giant wave looming over, waiting to crash down into the pool to crush me, consume me. It’ll break my bones and fill my lungs. I’m resisting it with all I am.”

By then, she’d known me 20 years, and my best friend had seen my rage, my joy, and all the scars and lives I’d lived up to that conversation. I could speak openly about the threat and know I would not scare her with the thoughts that we monsters sometimes have.

“It may be that it wants not to crush you,” she remarked, “but instead seeks permission to pass by you. You resist it, and it’s hovering and trying to move along. The greatest point of tension may be in the resistance you’re using to survive it.”

Are the claw marks in the concrete artifacts of the struggle to climb out, or of the fight to stay in?

I lost my friend, first to a societal border, then to the latent effects of war. Disease followed him home and eventually claimed his body. I will not relent his memory, the songs we’d drive to, or the record-holding volume of caffeine we consumed.

Waging war against Grief is like engaging a formless entity, one you aren’t certain is a friend or an enemy. One you only know by the torment: the invisible fingers slipping around your soul and, when you least expect it, feeling it clench against your beating heart. Existing is pain.

I lost a home I fought to protect. Then I grew up and I lost another. I learned that strength did not provide protection and love did not ensure stability. Sacrifice was nonreciprocal. Rage was armor, untouchable safety. I didn’t know then it was a derivative of Grief.

Some say you have to feel to heal. What if the act of feeling gives way to demyelination of those nerves? What remains after the reduction, past radiating and raw nociception? Why do you form an avulsion fracture in my heart?

I lost the light I once held to find my way home. The face and the voice were theirs, but they no longer recognized me.

I lost my true north.

How do you defeat an enemy you can’t see, don’t understand; one who has no rhythm of operation, disables and crushes you at every point, and not even exclusively to your regions of known compromise, but assailing relentlessly against your strengths, against every cell of your composition? Grief climbs inside your chest and interfaces from within, fragments of a grenade freed from the interactions governing physics and matter.

The cost of the strength to carry it all comes with fractures.

They have told me it is called Post Traumatic Stress. I wanted to push back, to tell them that couldn’t be accurate; after all, I am the strongest person I know. Then the reality of that statement found its natural conclusion: Yes. Of course. That’s where it comes from.

So long as you hover above me, I have questions for you.

I know who you are, but I don’t know who you’re supposed to be.

Something haunting like you has to exist for purposes beyond hunting.

Are you here to fight? I don’t know what to do with you.

Are you rage?

The deepest sorrow?

Are you here to take what’s left from my bones, or have you come to resurrect them?

Whom do you serve?

What more can you take from me? What can you restore?

Your presence is torment, but what is your purpose?

What is this cage? Are you destruction? The aftershock of destruction?

Are you here to expose underdeveloped humanity? Can you revive it?

Do you function in harmony with healing or antagonistically to it?

Oh, but please, give me room to breathe unless you are going to be quick about your business.

I’ll make you an offer: burn my name in your bones, take me to your grave. Maybe then I’ll matter.

If I understood you, I could align with you. Please speak to me. Don’t leave me here.

Can I risk allowing you to touch me; will I survive it? Don’t crush me. My bones can’t carry more.

I can’t see the way forward. I can’t trust my instruments to lead me through to the other side of you.

It seems unjust that Grief isn’t required to answer for her own stages.

Drowning in my own blood, I look up to see her crying tears of red. Grief won’t speak to me, but maybe her presence is my companion in this pain rather than that of torment.

I have decided I don’t need to understand you. I won’t resist you. To experience you is catastrophic enough. I don’t want to compound the effects by my own interference. If you can be hormetic, I can yield to those terms.

I choose to believe you are more than suffering, more than the slow death of my soul.

I have a theory.

I suspect you are here to cleanse something. I think you have a function beyond exploiting visceral limits. I’ve decided you are going to digest things that require metabolism for purposes not yet known to me. Raw elements broken into useful, healing properties that could never exist without the perfect destruction at those skilled, skeletal hands of yours.

Grief has declined to respond to my interrogation.

I remain.

The claw marks we leave in concrete may be futile. I’m not sure we ever learn to climb out, but maybe we can survive long enough to learn to swim. Maybe Grief will create a wave strong enough to lift us over that ledge, if we only learn to move with her and not against her.

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As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.

Betty Schram is an allied health professional, model, and actress. Fitness of mind, body, and spirit are of great value and continual endeavor. 
@bettyschramofficial (Instagram)