This is what I call a Flashback

 

                                      Me, visiting my house after Katrina

For me, this summer—2012, seven years after Katrina, is a summer of healing. For the next few weeks I’m going to post some of the Katrina-related writing I’ve done over the years in order to symbolically purge this material from my mind, much as I’m also purging my remaining anger and fear through meditation and therapy.

This particular piece was my attempt to describe my Flashbacks, an aspect of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, terrible experiences that felt like bad acid trips in which something terrifying was chasing me. When I was finally—6 years after the disaster, able to turn around and look my pursuer in the eye, I saw it was a wave of murky-colored debris named “Everything is Destroyed Already.”

Once I was able to look at and name the thing, my flashbacks began to subside.

This is what I call a Flashback
by Donna Maria Bonner

The thing chasing me is called Everything is Destroyed Already.

For the longest time I didn’t know its name. I simply knew it hovered over me, ready to choke me, drown out my cries.

Never to be heard. Never to be answered…just like the others who died in my city, in my neighborhood…within miles of where I floated safely.

I crouch on the ground; I make myself small, as the thing forms over me, right behind me.

I see the ground shattering like glass under me, the bottom ready to fall out, because everything is destroyed already.

There is nothing for me to do but cover myself, roll into a ball, hide in my apartment, because the thing is breaking over me like a wave that will obliterate all trace of me, because everything is destroyed already.

Destruction transcends time.

The stakes are so high because I don’t want the pain to start again.

I feel no control outside the sphere of my body.

The only control I can imagine is to become a part of the destruction, to hurt others so my pain will be shared and I will not have to face this alone.

Everything is destroyed already is what I was thinking standing on the roof of my friend’s French Quarter building, looking out at my flooded city in the direction of my flooded neighborhood and home.

Everything is destroyed already is what I was thinking as I watched the same six Coast Guard helicopters desperately race from wet land to dry, helping those they could escape the post-apocalyptic landscape of my lovely New Orleans at her nadir.

“Thank God,” I thought, “My mother isn’t alive to see this.”

Everything is destroyed already is what I was thinking when I saw the body of the boy—a teenager still, stuffed into a grocery cart on Esplanade Avenue, one of the lovelier, oak lined promenades in the city, a gunshot wound sullying his chest, a look of surprise stamped on his face. 

Who shot him? Who cares?

We didn’t have time to stop or look closely at his truth.

And what good would stopping have done anyway, because, for him, everything was destroyed already.

This is what I feel like when I use the word “Flashback.”

Believe it or not, before Katrina, I used to be a nice girl. I used to never be afraid.