Memory without A Name

“What has been wordless now is coming into words.” – Annie Rogers

What opens up in the gaps inside of us, if such things can be accessed like a clear and knowable thing, and for many trauma-stories, seldom are the odds that it can be, is less as important, sometimes, than the fact that we feel something emerge, something that we hadn’t known was waiting for us to feel its presence. Often we are moved by sensation, a thing without a clear language of its own. Something surprises us, impacts us, reroutes where we were a moment ago, and suddenly, as if pressed into by very real hands, we are moved into a memory without a shape, without a name.

What happened in that place? That place we cannot name or know? Who lived there? How old were they, how young, how broken, how scared?

In reading Annie Rogers account of her own horrific childhood abuse, and of something very specific and powerful that Annie’s loving therapist says to her late one night on the phone, I fell apart. A great sadness rose up in me from some long unaccessed place. I wept as if I were hit in the stomach. I doubled over. Not a sadness brought on by a touching scene from a film or a lyric that tugs at one’s heart, this came from someplace else. I am not familiar with this place. I do not know its language, its landscape. Or maybe I am half familiar with it, have lived in and out of its haunting for most of my life.

Something happened, but what? I may never know. But suddenly I could feel the space from which such not-knowing arose. It was in my body. I touched my feet to the floor, as Annie does when she can feel the words “my life” in her own mouth and in the gentle breathing of her therapist who matches her own, like a heartbeat, in unison over the phone.

Annie awakes from a dream in which her father does the unspeakable, literally, for Annie, it has never been spoken. She has the urge to take her stuffed rabbit and gut it in the kitchen with a knife that she realizes she left in the care of her therapist, the knife. A box of her “things and missing things“. Annie calls her therapist at 3 in the morning to tell him of her father and the dream.

“I’ve had a nightmare,” she tells him. “I’m not sure what are waking dreams and what are dreams. Just now, I wanted to rip my rabbit into pieces. Then I realized you have my only knife in that box in your closet.”

“Yes, I have your knife, and all the other things in that box, and the missing things too. But, Annie, you could tear your rabbit apart in many other ways, and you have called me instead. So you must know that she is already in pieces.”

“The Little pieces” Annie asks?

“The little pieces remember,” her therapist reminds her.

“I’m confused,” Annie replies. “I can’t tell in what dreams I’m sleeping and in what dreams I’m awake. I can’t tell what is real.”

“Annie, you are trying to make some funny distinctions here. Everything you dream is real. What is confusing you?”

“I don’t know, something about words.”

“What was most real in your life, Annie, perhaps most real of all, was the injunction not to use words, not to speak. If to speak is to risk irrevocably hurting someone, hurting someone so much that they will be lost to you forever, then you had better not use words. Annie, it is so much worse for a little child, well, really for anyone, to feel helpless terror than to feel that he or she is at fault, somehow wrong. Especially if that child feels helpless terror with someone she loves and has to go on loving, it is so much easier to bear a terrible guilt than to feel helpless terror.”

“I have to cut myself other times, my stomach and my arms and legs, but I didn’t tonight. I was in the rabbit. I was the rabbit.”

“Yes, when you were very young, Annie, you were the rabbit. You were in pieces and the rabbit wasn’t in pieces. And, when you were very young, you couldn’t figure out which father was which. You must have felt that your life depended on figuring that out.”

“My life,” Annie says.

“And in all your short, little life with your father, he did not really recognize you, Annie. He did not really see you, or he could never have hurt you as he did. And then he left you.”

This connects with Annie’s abandonment by her last therapist which had left her reeling. One trauma overlaps into another. One waking dream finds another waking dream. One terror, another.

Why was I so undone by this exchange? I might never know. I might always know. But I dropped my feet onto the floor, feet that I cannot really feel, feet attached to a body that I have great difficulty connecting with, a body that is like a stranger to me, impossible to feel as ones own. I try so very hard to make contact in my sorrow. I wipe my tears onto my bare arm, and suddenly I could feel two parts of me touching. Most of the time my body is numb and completely undifferentiated, as if I have no parts to me at all.

Suddenly I had limbs which could wipe away tears instead of hands. Suddenly I had several selves feeling something unnameable rise up through the gap inside of me. My narratives are cut, perhaps irretrievably. Will I ever manage to mend them together again? Will I ever know? What happened? Can I bear not knowing? Can I bear knowing? What matters most is that something has risen in between what may or may not have happened and made contact. Every dream is real, I tell myself. Every terror.
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“What you fear most has already happened.” Its reminder is lodged somewhere beneath my breast bone. I felt what I felt splinter up from the darkness inside my body. I reached out to turn off my lamp so that I could cry in darkness. But I stopped my hand with my other hand (who’s hand was this) “you’ve had enough darkness. This time, dear one, won’t you cry in the light.” And I do. I cry into the light. I wrap my arms around myself and I weep and I weep and I don’t why or for what exactly anymore. What had been wordless is now coming up in tears. The light is on my skin, and for once, I am not reaching for the dark.