You remember stepping on a piece of glass. It seems insignificant now, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. Not even the substantially sized shards like you find by the sidewalk, mosaics of greens and browns, painting up a picture of smashed and discarded alcohol bottles all up and down the pavement. You used to pick them up, the shinier ones, admired them on your dresser until you brother teased about something called tetanus, even though you were pretty sure you could only get that from rusty nails and shit.
But, no, just the tiny little pieces, left behind from some dropped piece of dinnerware or another, the microscopic sliver that's hardly visible and doesn't get swept up by the broom. You tromp on it, barefooted, give a slight hiss, slap a band-aid on and forget about it, even if there is that little bit of an ache for a few hours after. It's not anything big or important or even deserving of sympathy, but you want to whine to somebody about how, those few seconds before you got that piece of glass out, that foot hurt.
Multiply that stupid ache you're thinking of now, though, maybe by a billion. Yeah. You figure that's how bad the shocks were.
Years later, it seemed something unimportant, but then you've got holes in your memory reminiscent of swiss cheese, you're not sure you even remembered until rumors started getting tossed about concerning your shocking past (a pun that had even you smirking a little the first time you heard it). Those years in particular are ones that escape you more than a lot, but you'd read in some encyclopedia that memory loss was a common side effect of the therapy. Plus, you know, years of various mind altering substances couldn't have helped. Made sense why you fumbled so much with even basic human speech these days.
But back then, back being that teen, then you were pretty sure you remembered pieces and snatches of it, spent a lot of your time trying to figure the difference between what was real and what you'd just dreamed up. Random things you recall, like strapped-down limbs and jarring pain for a few fleeting seconds, so intense you were sure you'd pulverize your spine, twisting from it. Random bits and pieces, one snapshot your own brother's kissing you so tenderly it's nearly bruising, the next his arms are a comforting sort of shield around you while your parents scream each other hoarse in the kitchen.
And they tell you it's not natural, you think to yourself, but at least that was what a hundred different shrinks would tell you later, some bullshit about how it was dirty and wrong and you were only mentally ill, you couldn't have known. As if you'd smile and nod and agree. Oh, yes, you're right, I am some manner of utterly fucked up, I entirely understand and shall quit my dirty, sinning ways.
You wish you could remember more sometimes. Wish you had some kind of clichИ saying, where you could begrudgingly note, years later, that there were some mental pictures even the electroshock couldn't erase, if only so you could make some of any of this mean anything more than a few fucking eraser smudges over age thirteen. But the most you got out of those treatments were days of confusion afterwards, a plastic hospital bracelet you'd forgotten in a shoe box, and some random mental screen capture seared onto your mind of your brother slipping beside you into bed the night before you were carted off, easing a hand underneath your boxers and mumbling something about how everything was gonna be okay.
Post-traumatic stress, was the new shiny phrase for it, they'd tell you years later. Just figured it out, from the Vietnam soldiers. Deep-seeded mental responses to years of sexual abuse, and it left you wondering how much more of a freak that made you when you'd never seen anything wrong with what you two had been doing.
How about years of skull-fucking a kid with electricity, huh? you'd wanted to ask. Six-hundred milliamps of it, three seconds each, four days a week - think equivalent to a kid continuously sticking a butter knife into an outlet could have fucked me up? Would have asked too, but then that would have meant you'd have to pretend to give a damn, and nobody wanted to disappoint their fans. And it's not even like you would have remembered numbers, if you hadn't peeked at your file while the psych went off to take a piss in the middle of your meeting.
Spaces, empty spaces, you don't know what the hell to do with them.
Sometimes you just make shit up. Stuff you know isn't true the second it's out of your mouth, but you lie and say it anyway. Stuff everybody knows is total bullshit, but when you say it enough times, even you start to halfway believe that you didn't make any changes on that cut. It's just confusing, because you were so sure you were getting it at least mostly right, but then he's giving you that look. Eyes that can stare into your motherfucking soul, find something wrong and wave it around in front of you without even bothering to drop the masquerade. Maybe you're just jealous because you can't multi-task like that when you're drunk.
Your brain's not a sponge wrung out enough to have not soaked up the fact of what you were getting into here, though, and you think that's kind of what pisses you off the most. Falling in love with the gods should have stayed to the gods, and who the hell were you to commit that much blasphemy? You weren't a god. Curt Wild was a god, but you were just the defective parading around in his wig. It's like the build-up for the first MTV Video Music Awards to be something totally fucking awesome and then you watch the real thing and realize it's a load of drugged-out bullshit, Madonna rolling around on a stage. What the hell.
Your neck just hurts, all those years of craning your head upwards to watch all that fiction come to life.
Would've been awesome to stand eye to eye with somebody for once.