Every muscle in my body is stiff.  I’m fighting for my life.  My abdominal muscles are so tight, and the muscles in my throat so taut, I’m barely breathing.  The problem is, I’m sitting on my couch talking to my boyfriend.

From the outside, I look like I’m calmly staring into space.  It took me mere weeks to perfect this pose, as my two to as-many-as-fifty panic attacks a day gave me plenty of opportunities to practice it.

I’m always tired, and I don’t know why.  Sam would laugh at me, bellowing my inner voice when he cries out, “You don’t know why?!”

I laugh, but I know he’s right.  I know exactly why.

I’m not a workaholic so much as an obsessive thinker.  My thoughts are constantly going round about.  My shoulder muscles have knots over knots; I work them out all day with unconscious flinches.  Everything is too loud, too bright, too lengthy.  I crave the sunlight and the summer.  I crave an hour of any sound unlike low humming.  I’m being driven crazy by this overstimulating world.

But its the stimulation coming from the inside that feels most frightening to my system.

I remembered this afternoon how his face looked, really looked.  Andy at the dorms had acne, and his shoulders were always hunched against the world.  His hands were always in his pockets.  He was always talking to the ground and looking at you through his hair.  I mistook psychopathy for shyness.

With these thoughts came actual images of him.  I instantly winced away.  I couldn’t keep the pose any longer.  The fear and disgust and pain and shame that accompany my flashbacks are always too much, but this was especially difficult to endure, as I usually don’t think about his face.  It never occurred to me before, but I don’t often picture Andy’s face.  I picture his tattoo, his arms, his back, his—I can’t say it today.  I’m sorry.  The idea—

I—I still can’t enjoy a man.  I have to wonder if I ever could.  Time is erasing my ability to remember what I was before him.  He’s left so little of me for the buzzards, I fear what time will do to me.

Is this what trauma does?!  It steals your memories and replaces them with nightmares?  It steals your life?  I am dead.  They all killed me, raped me, killed me.  I can’t think of a good thing.  There’s nothing good inside me.  There’s—

I want to crawl beneath my bed.  I want to hide from this.  Every cell in my body is screaming, “Please, don’t hurt me,” and I can’t do anything to reassure it.  I just have to live through this, as my mind makes room for more horror.

I don’t picture his face.  I watch my own, and I witness the suffering.  I’m an outsider in the bed with him and that poor version of myself.  I can picture me.  But then I can see what I saw that day from underneath him.  And then I’m afraid.  And then I’m that poor girl I was looking at, screaming and fighting a man twice her mass.  ”Oh, no.  I don’t want this,” I scream inside my head then, into my now boyfriend’s chest.  ”Stop.  Please.  Oh, god, please don’t.”  I can feel his—

I wish I could enjoy my orgasms more fully.

I wish I could stop thinking about these things.  I feel like a drama queen who needs to stop whining.  If everyone is traumatized, I’m just writing about everyday things, right?  I’m just normal.  Everyone’s scared.

It’s just—as much as I am?  Is it normal to be in this much pain?