After the storm

This week's Wicked Wednesday has proven to be a challenge. I don't do eye-contact. With anyone other than my children, even eye to face contact is only the product of lots of thought and self conditioning. And only because neuro-typical people expect it. It probably doesn't occur to none autistics, that in some people's universes, you are the weird ones!

Several otherwise strong ideas came and bit the dust. My characters do make eye contact sometimes. Usually if they need something to cling to while being ravished! There was the temptation to go the Dirty Dancing route as eye contact in a dance is something I could lean on. 

This is the opposite. I'd started writing...just the first impressions of anger...at the weekend, because I'd thought to write through an anger attack,- a meltdown,- to see if it helped. To verbalise all of the fragmentary parts and physicality of it all, because when it is gone, it is gone and explaining it to someone else, whether counselor or loved one, is difficult. 

We stay strong and I don't know how we do it. I asked my husband who he would like to be in my writing,- he said Omega Delta- the difference in the end. And that is what he is. The difference between me being a refugee between war zones in my own head and a functioning parent in difficult circumstances. 

Never able to eye-fuck like Baby and Johnny, for me it is something I don't miss and I have to trust when he says it isn't important in our communication. So this story, born of a mix of real stress and fiction is probably quite personal because, in this case, I can't put myself in another person and imagine what the character is getting from the experience. 

I’m angry.

Violently, chemically, unsettled. Blood poisoned with epinephrine is overwhelming my reactions. Restless muscles. Aching joints.

And through this flood, my otherwise overwhelmed voice of quiet searches for clues and triggers, because nothing has happened. Nothing.

Nothing that would cause this much anger in a … in a …

I want to say “real person”. “Rational person.” Hateful phrases that feed the anger and completely negate everything I know about myself. Make me less.  

The quiet voice speaks. At least I’m not… I stop myself because for some people experiencing this without a trigger would be normal too. And is not their fault either.

There is so much going on. Grief. Trauma. Stress. Autism. I let the quiet voice pick it all apart and put the pieces back in their rightful places, but it doesn’t actually fix anything. Doesn’t reduce the physical reactions. Dim the swirling trip of off-kilter brightness that throws my balance and burns my throat with bile. Staunch the grey black wave of sadness that washes cold through the ashes of anger, tightening my skin into goose-flesh and shivering through tense muscles.

Everything about me is screaming to be left alone. If my voice had not deserted me I would be screaming in truth. Every sound is pain, the muted colours and light of my room still pursue me with violence. I cannot bear to see, let alone look for you. Too exhausted, I crawl to my bed.

Found, you do not come to me with a gentleness I can fight. Straddling my body, you lay as much of your weight as I can take down the length of me, legs trapping mine, chest cupped by the small of my back. Your head on my shoulders.

The exhaustion wars with anger and even in my wrung-out state, I want to fight more. Want to buck your weight clear, be alone in body as I am in mind, trapped in this battle state. Sensing this, through my tiny impatient twitches, you smother me more, arms moving to pin, more weight pushing me under.

The quiet voice has heard you, felt you, and is clinging to your breathing pattern, deliberately regular and seemingly relaxed. Guilt is the new tsunami, welling deep and soaking through me physically and pushing hot tears into the pillow. It rips you bare when I am like this. Helpless to stop it, we both have to take the beating, each from the other. Stoic in our love: rampaging in our weakness.

We lie, while lights dim to fragmented twilight and at some point, your protective stance becomes a spooned embrace. The wildness is subdued and humanity returns with uncertain footsteps as a refugee returns to a shattered landscape, searching for familiar landmarks through the carnage. The warmth of your skin. Breath against my nape. Heartbeats.

More in tune with me than I am with myself, you sense when I am ready. Hands that calmed become fingers that explore. Entrapped becomes possessed. Body soft and pliant and available.

With vampire-soft kisses you refuel from my body. Clothes pushed aside tangle around my docile limbs.

Our coupling is just that, quiet and passionless like pale watery skies after a storm. In that peace, we can find each other. Rebuild. An apology and a promise.

Darkness blesses us with sleep and space. We drift apart seek each other out like flotsam on the tide. Our bodies turn, clothes are shed and succor taken from night lit mating. I push you to take from me as selfishly as I took from you. Balance, not guilt, driving my needs. Our animal selves lick their wounds and retreat. 

Stirring with the first light, I capture fresh images of your face. The pale grey at your temples and in the scruff of your stubble. The lines creeping, even in sleep, at the corner of your eyes. The picture I hold of you in my heart is made of such fragments as these. Your weight. Your breath. The gold and hazel flecks in your eyes shimmering as they open and focus, the pupil’s wild expansion and contraction as you come into conscious thought. Folds in your eyelids and long soft strawberry blonde lashes.

I linger too long, and as your keen eyes open, my gaze strikes away, like a stone skimming a lake. Gathering me to the crook of your neck, we hold each other and you kiss my salt-glazed face.  We are ok.

We start another day.