Fire
I don’t know what happened to me; who I was before, who I am now, who I will be in the future. My heart and mind seem somehow dulled, as though all my memories and feelings are closeted up somewhere and I lost the key with which to unlock their door. Occasionally the memories come back to me in sharp, short fragments - and when they do, they burn ... they burn.
The doctors say it’s trauma. They say it as though they know what my mind looks like, as though they understand, as though it’s something they can define, though they can’t see the broken parts of me that will never work again and the once forgotten scenes and sounds that repeat themselves over and over in my head as I lie awake at night. These are hidden from view. No matter how hard they try, they will never reach my heart; I have too many secrets concealed there. Secrets about the kind of things that happen at night time when no one is looking; secrets about how it feels to press your back into a corner and make yourself small, choking on thick grey smoke until you don’t care if you die because your body is begging for an escape, for relief; secrets about waiting for a rescuer who never comes and crying soundlessly without tears. I tell them I don’t remember anything while looking directly into their eyes so that I frighten them. I, still so young, frighten the doctors. It gives me a gratifying sense of empowerment to know that I can strike fear into someone so far above me and make them puzzle over what I am thinking. They’ll never know. They suspect that I remember, but they just don’t know. It infuriates them, with all their wisdom and years of study, to be unable to uncover a child’s little tucked away thoughts.
When they found me first, one of them sat me down in the room with dark floorboards and cracks in the walls and asked me if I remembered what had happened. I stared at him that same way until he told me, himself. He said in the gentlest way possible that my family was gone, that I had been discovered in the rubble, the aftermath of a destructive housefire. It was a miracle, he said. A miracle. He asked me if I felt sorrow over the death of my family and, my eyes still locked with his, I replied,
“Maybe.”
Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. I think these days I’m inclined to say I do not, because in the disconnected shards of memory that return to me every now and then I feel the way my father used to beat me, see the disapproval with which my mother looked at me, hear the cruel words my brother said in my presence and know again the forlornness of lying alone, crying and shivering in the darkness of a cold bedroom. I think perhaps if I was truly sorry about it I would tell them who set fire to the house. But that's my secret.
I have heard the word sociopath before. Once I found it in the solid black dictionary they keep in the doctor’s office, the one full of yellow pages and long fancy words no one can pronounce. Sociopath. Sometimes I fancy that I am exactly that, and I have begun to believe that the doctors agree with me. I never wish to be anything different, somehow. Maybe, maybe, that is where my identity is to be found - maybe one day when I look in the mirror I will know with certainty why the doctor is afraid of my frozen blue eyes - maybe I will eventually realise that it is not an illness but a power - maybe it’s better to have no sorrow. But still I wonder; if I have no empathy, no care, if my love is numbed and my heart cold ... why does it burn?