Disclaimer: I don't own anything to do with Auggie or Covert Affairs, and I'm making no money from my fanfiction. I do appreciate the creators' willingness to let me borrow their characters, and I thank the writers of Covert Affairs for the opportunity to borrow Auggie for a bit of soul searching. I spent a few years in Iraq, and I've been thinking about elephants lately.
Un-Beta'd—all mistakes and maudlin ramblings are mine.
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I've been having flashbacks all day. That doesn't happen to me all that often anymore, and it always catches me by surprise when it starts. But when it does start, I know I'm in for a rough few days, because when it starts, it lasts—sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks—and I end up remembering, experiencing the moments before the explosion over and over and over.
My mom once asked me why I don't just try to think about something else. So I told her "Don't think about elephants." See? See? You're picturing elephants right now. You thought about elephants the instant you thought about not thinking about elephants. And now, you're thinking about thinking about elephants, which, incidentally, means you're thinking about elephants. It's a cycle. Only for me, it's a cycle that goes: BANG! Shit. Don't think about the explosion. Crap. Don't think about not thinking about explosions. Fuck. BANG! Here we go again…
Sometime before that day, I read somewhere that when a person loses a sense, the others are heightened to make up for it. That's not exactly true. The truth is I just pay more attention to things like smells, sounds, and feelings than I did before that day. Which means that my memories of the explosion (and anything before it) are predominantly visual memories, and all of the other information I was getting at the time (smell, touch, what-have-you) were sort-of filed in my brain as 'surplus to need,' unlike the way that they get prioritized in my more recent memories. Does that make sense? It's like when you go to a really boring lecture, but somewhere in the middle of the lecture, the professor farts long and loudly. You heard the lecture. You even have notes about it, and all of the information your senses gathered the whole time you were at the lecture are in your brain somewhere. But what you remember is the fart.
Visual memories are vibrant and full of color. What they lack, though, is texture. There are all sorts of nuances in everyday life which we tend to ignore. Like the boring lecture, we often only remember the farts that come our way. Your eyes gather a WHOLE LOT of data, so your brain discounts the extraneous information, and prioritizes only what's deemed of immediate importance, which means that the memory of, say, the smell of a thing is often stuck in a dark, unobtrusive corner of your brain. I think that's why, when I think back to my memories before the explosion, they seem sort of…dull…washed out…unfinished.
But a flashback isn't a memory; not really. When I flash back, I'm in that moment, not just accessing the memory of it. The brain's memory filter is switched off, and all of the information which came before and after and around the (metaphorical) fart is filled back in, all with the same level of importance. I can smell the street around me (Tikrit, to me, smells of diesel fuel, sand, and swampland). I can feel the incredible heat of the Iraqi summer. I can taste the salty sweat which trickles down from the sticky wet hair under my Kevlar helmet and into the corners of my mouth. I can see the tiny 'splashes' of the ultra-fine desert sand I stir up as I run…RUN…toward the Humvee. Most of all, and with an immediacy I can't even begin to express in writing, I can feel the panic rising in my stomach and chest, the tingling in my hands and legs as I SHOVE my body against the strain of the day's stress and the weight of my flak vest and equipment; and I can feel myself gulping for breath as I force out a scream to my teammates. BANG!
And once the flashbacks start, I experience it again…and again…and again. And sometimes, if I'm being brutally honest (and if I've had a few beers too many), I actually treasure the memory. Sometimes I treasure the moment. Because that was the last moment before.
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