XIII – Connected Dissociations

I just woke up again here in Pinel, this “treatment center” that has become my home, but without my ever feeling at home, without the comfort of one… Not like my bed, with its broken deck that messes up my back daily, provides any rest. It’s not the place, it’s the people. It’s these autistic, narcotic, maniacal and even the depressive and suicidal people that make me feel at home. They give me the welcoming that eases the incarceration. Yes, because for as much as they say otherwise, treatment centers are euphemisms for prisons.

I woke up in Pinel rummaging around my head for the fleeting memories of the time when I awoke from my nap back in BH. If I’m not mistaken it was the noble poet Waly Sailormoon who said that memory is like an edition of an island. Mine has been edited, and it wasn’t I who edited it. There is no way to dose to what degree the meds– to what point my own psyche “protects” me from my memories, but the fact is that they are evaporating, slipping away from my mind more slyly than snakes. Flashes. Disjointed. Intense. Images and avalanches of feelings. This is how these memories, now more than disjointed, are kept protected when I attempt to access them. I edit them without the slightest objective pretention, because it is the subjective being expressed in this process of edition and suppression.

When I woke up in BH in my bedroom, after my return trip from Juiz de Fora, nothing had changed. And not my mom’s wishful thinking either. Normally, when we find ourselves faced with an unexpected problem, we just wait anxiously for it to be over with, without damages, without ruining anything. But in this case it would not just pass, and waking up only brought me back to the conflictive world that I was living. My mom having stayed up all night sitting at the foot of my bedroom door, needless to say didn’t help me as much as she might have imagined. Not even the real welcoming of my home, not the comfort of my world or of my bedroom could make go away the voices of those who accompanied me, or help calm my mind and heart.

After waking up I went back to finding my own: dad, Marquinhos, and especially Tatiana. Why did they insist on hiding from me, and just keep whispering sweet and heavy words into my ears? I knew that they were still close by… And in the game we were playing, the three and I, I was supposed to follow the clues to find them. There were other variables in this equation that were beyond my mother, beyond Léo, there was my girlfriend. Not just her, many other people came along with her, many moments, feelings, emotions. Maybe she, even more than Tatiana, could help calm my profusion of feelings.

But I would not meet with them so soon, for as much as I wanted to. I desired the world, as filthy as it may seem to be. And my own home deprived me of the world. Between one bath and another, one cigarette and another, one liter of water and another, I needed to get out. I needed to find them, but I was deprived of this right. When we escape the logical rational-mediocre, we tend to be considered a danger to ourselves and to society… Any similarity with the characterization of criminals is not a mere coincidence. Criminals of thought, of the mind, this is what my friends in Pinel and I are.

The time came when not even the showers or the cigarettes could placate my suffering any longer. I suffered internally, I didn’t want to play that game anymore, I only longed for our (re)encounter. Those voices didn’t play on my side anymore, neither did the ones who orchestrated them. They made my Self unsettled and tortured my existence. I would lie down but couldn’t stay still. I got up. I needed to get out, I needed to dissolve into the world, maybe then it would all cease. I couldn’t bear it anymore.

I feel now what I had felt when I was lying in my bed and she (re)appeared… Now it wasn’t a mirage anymore, not even a projection of my own thoughts or feelings. It was not Tatiana. It was that sweet maiden who gave me such unique moments of love, until my trip. She didn’t deserve my thoughts, my impulses… I longed for this moment and now that it has materialized, her simple image troubled me even more than those voices that disturbed me so.

Not that it was her fault, the owner of the image who pulled me away from my absent center of gravity, but the encounter was, once again bombastic. Perhaps the great human drama is to understand love. As Vinicius de Moraes put it; this is what we are made for, to love and be loved. But do you think that we are always ready for the intensity and chaos of this feeling? A friend enters my bedroom, I need to talk to him, for as much as he doesn’t respond. To just hear me is more than I need…

I should give warning that there is no linearity from here on out, because linearity of thought, the offspring of evolutionist positivism, is inadequate to lived experience. We do not walk in a straight line in direction of some objective. We navigate in meanders, in multi-temporalities, in which the links are not built by dates, but by the meanings. And this is how my thoughts formed and in this way I build my memories. Free associations, connected dissociations.