Soon after we moved in together she was showing me how to use the clothes dryer (it had been hers). I did know pretty well how to use a dryer, so I took the lint screen out and found it completely packed with lint. I asked - sort of without thinking, "Don't you clean the lint screen regularly?" She said "Oh, yes, of course I do!"
It was such a silly little thing, but a darkness touched my heart because I knew in that moment what she'd just said was a purposeful lie; in fact it was the first lie she had ever told me. It wouldn't be the last.
"But all of that is in the past," you might accurately say. True. But every time I do laundry, and slide out the lint screen, I am reminded of that tiny lie, four years ago, and then my skin heats up and my breath catches, because I know I will - without fail - remember all the gigantic things that have gone wrong since then.
Can the breakup of a relationship cause PTSD? Can a lint screen be a PTSD trigger?
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