When it comes time to react, I wonder if I'll ever be able to beat my trauma. It has the upper hand. Sometimes it has all the hands, and then there's no way for me to untangle myself from it. I'm just in it; in it and spinning out of control. I need a thought to move forward, but it has all my thoughts.

Calm down, I say to the unanswered text. Calm down. In response, it thrashes and clings tighter, grabs a vein of shame and twists hard. Breathe, I say to it, to me. Breathe. I breathe. Breathe more. It's hard to breathe because I'm burning. I'm burning all up and all over. Eventually I give up breathing and give all my energy to burning.

I don't even remember the trauma showing up. A stupid remark to a coworker. An awkward night with a friend I'm also in love with. A phone number from that cute guy. They are silly life things, simple life things, or even difficult life things, but they are only life things, so I don't notice what the trauma has been inventing and expecting and seen coming for a long time. By the time I react, by the time I realize I've already reacted, the trauma is tearing down the walls of reality and pasting up its fears, replaying its pain and muttering to itself, unable to hear me, crafting its masterpiece over and over. A savant of self-hatred, of disappointments, of loss, how can I beat it? It burns everything it touches, and I can't tell what's real through the rippling waves of heat, and what's a mirage.

Think, I say to the flames. Stop and think. My mind is so much ash and I cannot sift it. There's a klaxon wailing to signal the time is at hand. The trauma has my hands, my breath, my mind, and leaves me only with my eyes to see.

There is nothing wrong. I find the edge of my burning world and look. On the other side of a frosted glass, untouched by fire, I see it. That there is a tomorrow. That there is no judgment. That there is nothing to fear. There is just the world. It doesn't have to hurt. On the other side of the glass. Everything I ever wanted. But I can only burn.

Each time it's a little bit different, but it still feels exactly the same. I'm going to cry and be sick and live in despair for weeks on end and then... it will all go away. My doctor calls it social anxiety. I call it the spins, for two reasons: one, it's a hellish, disorienting, nauseating experience that you can't seem to escape, no matter in which direction you stagger. Two, it always, ALWAYS comes back around.

It might be a friend, a love, a coworker, or maybe one of my siblings that triggers it. An off the cuff remark I made that I'm convinced is now the seed of their growing hatred for me. A weakness I exposed that will turn my loved ones into ravenous, wild dogs ready to rip out my throat. After all my meditation, all my piles of pills, and I still only creep forward. The rotations slow down, but they never stop.

Despite the love of my family, the support of my friends, the knowledge of my strength, there's only one thing I know I can count on for the rest of my life.

The spins will always come back around.

When Cara opened her bedroom door, the box on the floor said it all. She moved on instinct to pick it up, but then she remembered there was no need. Her eyes filled and the water spilled over. She didn’t have to clean it up, so she dropped to the floor to cry.

Cara had been back at school for only two weeks. The semester was halfway done, but she couldn’t feel the end of it. Time was a desert.

Her teachers had lived enough of their lives to recognize the hollow mask of grief she couldn’t take off. They sympathized when she didn’t raise her hand in class. They accepted her homework late.

Very few of Cara’s friends could understand. They were her age, but they didn’t know what she knew. Some of them disappeared from her life, as if her loss would come after them too. Some of them stayed with her, bewildered, but fiercely at her side. Their desire to comfort her was genuine, but their empathy could only be theoretical. Cara pitied them for not understanding. Cara envied them for not understanding.

At 16, her routine had already worn down her life in a certain places and, because she’d mostly lost the ability to think, she followed where her actions had long been carved out.

Get off the bus. Walk in the door. Drop her backpack. Go in the kitchen. Make a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of chocolate milk. Make a second peanut butter sandwich, but do not eat it. Wait 30 minutes for her brother to come home. When he is safely in the door and has his sandwich and plain milk, go to her bedroom. Open the door. Check her room. There’s a pizza box on the floor from last night. Clean it up before Dad comes home.

Clean up before Dad comes home.

Clean up.

She is going out to rip up the dance floor. She is going to crush a skyscraper beneath her heels. She knows your name, but she isn't here for you. She isn't here for anyone. She isn't there for them either.

I admire her for her cruelty. I am a devout follower of her vengeance. I am in thrall to her reckless tyranny. I am a prisoner of her laughter.

She is my alter-ego and the altar of my ego. Her stock keeps going up. She is going to pulverize the moon in her fist and then snort up the dust. Her glances cause forest fires. One day she will be so great, it will destroy her.

On that day, I will go out and I will rip up the dance floor.

The dust bunnies jumped as I opened the door and we stared at each other for a solid minute, unable to move until the moment that I screamed.

"WHAT THE F-?"

All at once, they scattered, hopping at incredible speeds. I whipped my head around trying to see where they were going, but there were dozens of them, little bunches of gray fluff with carpet fiber ears and mote eyes, kicking up tiny dust tracks. By the time I grabbed a broom from the hallway, all of them had vanished.

I went and sat down just outside the door to let my heart palpitations subside. Everyone else had left the house about an hour ago to get lunch, but I wanted a moment alone in grandma's house. She was gone, but while her things were here, we could still call it hers.

Going to the attic had been a snap decision. My brother and I had agreed to leave it for last, thinking it would be the hardest to clean, but I wanted to scope it out, just in case it was empty. Nope. Definitely not.

I entertained some possibilities for what I saw: stroke, cleaning product fumes, or late onset schizophrenia, but strokes don't make people hallucinate dirt rabbits, every window in the house was open, and schizophrenics actually believe their hallucinations. I was pretty sure I was wigging out. It didn't take me long to realize that I had to go back. If the room looked undisturbed, I'd call a psychiatrist. If the floor was still covered in puffy little dust tracks... insanity would be preferable. I stood up, gripped my broom like a lance, and opened the door.

Inside were miniscule dots in animal track formation all over the floor and a settling cloud of dust barely an inch high. I got light-headed and leaned on the broom.

"Ok," I said out loud. "Ok." I tried to take a deep breath, but I sneezed instead. I thought I saw something move, but when I looked, it disappeared and I was staring at a space beneath an old, battered chest of drawers. Who knows how it got there, but Grandma had lived here a long time. Someone probably brought it up before I was even born.

I took a few hesistant steps towards the dresser.

"Calm down. They're just bunnies and made of dust, so I'm fine," I said, and then laughed at the absurdity of that statement. As I moved closer, I could sense other little movements, peeking from behind boxes and through the floorboards, but the dresser seemed significant. I felt like they were trying to distract me, so I grabbed the brass knobs of the top drawer and pulled.

Nothing. I took a deep breath and pulled the second. Again, nothing. As I was pulling the third, I heard an unbelievably tiny sound. I believe it's called a wheek. It just was one teeny chirp, but then more followed. They were trying to distract me alright, and it kind of pissed me off. My grandma just died, you insensitive little things! With a feeling of defiance, I wrenched open the third drawer.

Inside was a note written on thin, brown paper. It was written in a hand I didn't recognize, but at the top was the title: Spell of Vanishing (Bunnies).

"Ha!" I snatched it out and smiled. Yes, I was crazy, yes, my grandmother was apparently a witch, and no, I had no idea how to do magic, but I had a solution.

"You're dead, bunnies!" I'd meant it to sound awesome, but really I had just threatened a bunch of bunnies. I heard one sad little wheek come up from the floor. It hung in the air, tinny and forlorn.

I paused. My grandma had had this spell for years from the look of the paper, and had never used it, and if the amount of stuff in her house was any indication, she didn't simply get rid of things because they were inconvenient.

The room was silent for a solid minute before I finally caved.

"Ugh, fine." I said. "Just be quiet and stay out of sight, please. We'll figure something out."

We were all on the train together when I saw it happen. The woman looked so defeated, I thought she was going to slump over in her seat and never move again. There was a tattered, plastic grocery bag in her hand, her fingers barely holding onto it, and a dirty purple diaper bag at her feet. The subway car was almost empty, so the few of us inside were sitting down, helplessly rocking from side to side in our seats. We were all close to slumping over, I guess, but not the kid.

The child was a comet. Her puffy jacket was unzipped and her velcro sneakers were coming loose, but she was flying. Two, maybe three years old, she was a bright pink fighter jet, a flying spaghetti monster, waving her arms and laughing, playing tag with the poles. I couldn't tell who was winning, but she was having a great time and her laugh was infectious. I caught the smiles on the other riders faces whenever she zoomed by. She ran from where her mom sat at the end of the car, to about the middle of it, and then back to do it all over again. On her way, she joked with the chairs in some baby language none of us spoke. A mostly empty subway car was apparently the happiest place on Earth, but only this kid knew it. It was wonderful to watch.

Her mother didn't seem to notice, lost in thought somewhere much less pleasant than the world where her daughter was. Exhaustion seemed to pull down everything around this woman, the bag, her limbs, the corners of her mouth. There were dark circles under the her eyes and she looked on the verge of crying as she stared out the window at nothing but blank tunnel whooshing past. I felt bad for her, but I felt worse for the little girl.

I worked with children and parents every day, and some of the parents had that same look of being in pain and far too tired to manage it. In my experience, they often took that pain out on their children. Whatever life had crushed out of them, they seemed determined that their child should be crushed in the same way. I doubt it was a conscious decision, but I winced every time I heard a parent raise their voice and turn their anger and sorrow on such a small person. "Stop being a brat!" might be their response to an earnest question or a playful push for attention. My silence in these moments shamed me, but it wasn't my business. You can't tell people how to raise their kids.

"Mama! Mama!"

The girl was careening back towards her mother, her little, brown face alive with delight. She was coming in for a landing. I felt my stomach plummet.

What would I hear this time? Brat? Sit your ass down? I couldn't bear that. I started to plead with the woman in my mind.

"Please just let this girl be happy. I can't imagine how hard it must be taking care of her, I know you must be tired. I don't know what's making you so sad, but look! She's so damn happy in an ugly, dirty subway car and that's an ability none of us here have and she may never have it again, so please let her have this. Please."

The girl ran to her mother's lap and threw her arms as far around her waist as they could go. She had knocked the bag out of the woman's hands and now the little one was looking up at her mama, head thrown all the way back in that sweet, adoring way young children both like to do and must do. I braced myself for the inevitable rebuke.

That's when it happened. Her mother smiled. It wasn't a regular smile. The way that woman looked at her little girl just then was like a miracle, a perfect moment that I felt with my whole body. The smile didn't just appear. It bloomed. It was like a rush of warm air had filled the space around them and except for the almost-fallen tears, the woman by the window was a totally different person. She was transformed.

"What is it, niña?" The mother laughed (laughed!), returning the hug. The plastic bag on the floor was ignored or forgotten while she covered her daughter's face in quick, tiny kisses. The girl giggled and tried to run away again, but her mom started tickling her.

I realized that I was staring and looked away, but I could not stop smiling and now I was the one with tears on my face. I cried from relief, from guilt, and from the incredible beauty of what I had just seen. I worried that all of these emotions had played themselves out on my face, but it was obvious the woman didn't care. She was in her own world too now, the happiest place on Earth.

The moon came down to be her lover sometimes,

Full and generous,

Sinking low over the treetops and streetlamps.

A deep, fruitful yellow.

The pale inside of a pear.

Its seduction made her shy,

A face so round and so close,

So beautiful and so brief.

Soon it would tire of her attention,

Drift away, as if avoiding her at a party.

High and white and cold,

Keeping company only with the stars.

Still beautiful, but distant.

It was all in the mind, of course.

A moon metaphor for her long drive home.

Still.

One moment it whispered tenderly,

And golden light stroked her face,

But then in an hour it was away,

Flying amongst the stars and clouds,

As if it had never danced and preened for her.

It was all in the mind, of course,

But it still hurt.

@chainedinshadow