Recovering from amnesia, Session 9 with Dr. Blogmund Freudenstein (there is no 1-8)

About 5 years ago, while at a concert in Knoxville, an artist who shall remain anonymous was performing. She played a song that I must have heard a hundred times before... and half way through that song... this time... I had the most surreal experience... somehow, I suddenly just knew that the song was about me... but I didn't know how or why I knew that... or how that was even possible... it felt not very much unlike a fleeting realization during an acid trip... I touched the very tip of it and then it was gone... but I knew it was real... I knew it was a love song she had written to me... and the only other thing that I knew was that things had ended badly, though I didn't know any details of how or why... I only knew that she hated me...

Amnesia isn't at all like forgetting what you went into the kitchen to get. Your house never had a kitchen the entire time you've lived there... then one day... there's a kitchen in your house, and you can't remember it ever not being there... but there's no sense in going into it because it has no cabinets, stove, or refrigerator.. it never did...

When extreme depression and extreme emotional or physical trauma are combined, the brain actually severs neural connections... it severs an entire portion of your mind... broken in multiple places... fractured in the middle... any path of impulses that lead to thoughts of the traumatic event get shattered like glass until the trauma is gone... with the surgical precision of a madman with a rusty chainsaw, my brain had eradicated any thought or memory of her and anything that she had ever touched.

Those thoughts of love songs and some nebulous, intangible history between me and a beautiful rock star, no matter how true they may turn out to be, were easily swept under a rug where other impossible fairytales and contradictory logic go... the rug of cognitive dissonance. And so another 4 years passed until hearing another song, from a completely unrelated artist, reminded me of a song I had written... I had written a song?... clearly I had, I knew it was mine... and more of it kept coming to me line by line. I stayed up until almost daybreak... until I had the whole song back... but knowing a song and knowing how to write a song... are two vastly different things.

Another year had passed when grief came to touch me in ways I hadn't been touched in 9 years... not since Gabby died... for a month, I did all that I could as one of my cats fought a losing battle against cancer... and in the thick of it, I found myself writing poetry about wanting to give her one last sunny day... the weather actually did allow that, but it almost didn't... but in writing this poem, I had the strangest compulsion that I had to tell someone specific... someone who I had always shown my latest poetry first... and I suddenly knew that it was all too real... I still had no clue why I never knew this... but looking back at it, I couldn't recall a time that the kitchen wasn't there... I hadn't yet realized that I was recovering from amnesia... or that I even had an amnesia to recover from.

I tried reaching out to her through her band email... I wanted to let her know that I had started writing poetry again, and that I always valued her critique the most... and that I hoped she could get past whatever bitterness she might have for me and talk to me as an old friend... after all, it had been thirteen years since I had spoken to her... and I still had no clue exactly how things had ended except that I knew now that I had had to leave her because my life was in such a bad place that I couldn't endure her talking about her success at the time... but it was only supposed to be a break until my life was back together... not a breakup.

Well... this effort to reconnect did not go over well at all... perhaps it was the fact that I wasn't single at the time... I had been in a relationship for the past 8 years, actually... perhaps it was the fact that I hadn't heard any of the messages she had written for me in her songs over the years... the songs about me that continued all the way up until she retired... and why should I have, I had no clue these songs were about me... I had no clue I had ever even met this person... perhaps (and I'm speaking of things I didn't realize until months later) it might have been because when she tried to patch things up with me years ago, and I had no clue who she was... I thought she might be a delusional psycho-stalker that had latched onto me for some unknown reason... and I may have gotten an order of protection issued against her... that very well may have had something to do with it... but honestly, I think that all of these things played a role in her developing an immediate and intense hatred for me... maybe she had thought she was over the pain of some of these things when she wrote songs about how much she missed me... only until met face to face with me returning from the grave.

Well, at the time, I was still extremely confused... she had never replied directly to me, but she did release a band announcement that was absolutely peppered with slyly crafted stabs at me... expertly hidden daggers that nobody else would see... and I didn't understand why I deserved such hostility... so I wrote some songs with all of that hurt... but I looked to her music and found that she had still missed me... that 9 years after we had broken up, she release some of her most passionate songs about me... but painfully, that she was giving up... that she was letting go and moving on... but here I am 4 years later finally breaking the curse... all of the feelings from this lit a fire in my brain that started bringing back more and more of my lost memories, and I realized that I was recovering from amnesia.

By happy coincidence, I found in an article on IFLScience that there's a certain psychedelic substance that has recently gained scientific proof to aid in regaining memories lost to depression... which I thought would include the type of amnesia I had been suffering... so I started micro-dosing once a week only to discover that it dramatically improved my recovery rate... this... was not a good thing... it turns out, that this isn't the first medicine to facilitate memory recovery... it turns out, that there's a reason modern psychiatric practice doesn't employ these medicines... it turns out that this causes the patient (me) to have to face traumatic experiences at a much faster rate than is healthy.

I dug to the bottom of this hole and I found the trauma... and at the very core of it are scars that have her handiwork all over them (there's more details about this in the preface and lyrics to the songs "Happy?" and "The Indictment"... but there is still something even more traumatic that I haven't yet written about)... but the worst part of it is that she never did anything so awful apart from the context of the hell I was living through... she just wouldn't listen... at a time when I desperately needed her to... she simply couldn't hear me... there could be any number of reasons why... but at that point in my life, I absolutely needed her to be a comfort to me, and she was being a hellish torment without even realizing that she was doing anything wrong.

I've got such a mess of emotions right now... I'm so furious with her that she couldn't have just listened and heard me when I needed her to... I'm so sorry for her... for all of the pain that I've caused her... I'm so frustrated that I can't just speak with her... and to make all of that even more confusing, I had never stopped being in love with her... amnesia isn't like that... the part of my mind that knew and loved her was sealed away in a prison, but it never stopped loving her... the storms that she and I had been assailed by are as though the gods themselves had conspired unanimously to destroy us... and they won.

A lot of my songs about her are written at very different points along this journey... and just a mere 9 months ago, all memory of her was still swept under a rug or locked in a cell... do any of my songs accurately describe how I felt when I wrote them... of course they did... do they speak honestly about how things happened... to the best I could make them... do they accurately describe how I feel now... probably not... the feelings are all still jumbled together in a huge tangled mess that I'm struggling to untangle... but I think at the end of the day, when they're all untangled and sorted... that Black Roses is the only one they will untangle to... and I might regret some of the others... except that they sound really good.

And... since I'm too poor to pay for a shrink, I think this has been a very good session with Dr. Blogmund Freudenstein.

PS - if you ever have the choice between recovering from an amnesia or not... choose not... this has been life shattering.

EDIT - Scratch that Black Roses bullshit... my feelings are all over the place, and I have no fucking clue what it will all untangle to... it would probably be best if I could just forget her all over again... because sometimes, I think I hate her so much more than I ever loved her... and I have never once heard her apologize for a single goddamn thing beyond her own loss... all of which amounts to her complaining that she had to sleep in the bed that she shat on... so if she can't give me the apology I deserve, then she can fuck off to the farthest corner of hell where I won't even want to see her face when I get there... ya see... my feelings about her are all over the place and change drastically from one day to the next... and all of that is just a product of the damage she wrought.