Bottle it Up
Short vignette about Dylan's denial surrounding his childhood trauma and DID. Takes place a few months after Lyla first introduces herself to Manny, across a few different instances of time. Introspective.
Most people immediately assume Dylan Dedrick is as simple as one can get. That he is a very distinct kind of person and always has been.
And to an extent, that’s true; Dylan is boorish, rude, unmotivated, rough. But if you watched him as much as Manny did you started noticing other things. Dylan had always been filled with inconsistencies; his favourite food one day was hated another, his eyes never traveled to the same things, he rarely had the same reaction to anything. They were subtle shifts, things that didn’t draw a lot of attention, but Manny had seen Dylan forcing himself to do something he claimed to love enough times that it mattered. He never known if it was purposeful, if Dylan was hiding something, or if he just read the script people had written about him and decided to stick to it.
Now that Lyla had shown herself, things finally made sense.
“So I was looking up stuff online and like, what you have sounds a lot like DID? But a lot of the places I looked mentioned you need childhood trauma to have that.” Manny spun around in an office chair they had found in the library, where they were being decidedly not academic. “And you didn’t have anything like that happen, right?”
Dylan, who was watching Epic Fail compilations on Youtube with his own library computer, spent a few seconds without responding, supposedly immersed in what he was watching. He paused only once the clip he was on ended, and he turned to Manny with a sharp grin.
“Of course not, dude! Like, what the hell woulda happened to me?” He laughed, a little too loudly for a library, the sound filled with edges. “I spent our whole childhood fucking around with you and the guys. You never saw me covered in bruises and crap, right? You woulda known!”
Manny laughed along with him, and Dylan went back to his video. He wasn’t really paying attention anymore, though.
--
“So Lyla, I brought this up to Dylan but I saw that things like DID usually develop because of childhood trauma, but I’ve been with Dylan since we were kids and I nev-“
Lyla cut him off with a raised hand, frowning. “Wait, stop, shut up, don’t finish. I can feel him getting agitated already.”
“Oh, so…he can hear us?”
“Yeah, he’s watching from the back…” realizing this didn’t make much sense, Lyla vaguely gestured to her head. “But even if he wasn’t, he’d still know everything I know.”
“So, you share memories?”
“Basically.” Lyla adjusted herself in her chair, ignoring the trepidation crawling into Manny’s features. Whatever implications her statement had for him, she seemed unconcerned with it. “…He’s not ready to talk yet, but he is thinking about it.”
Manny startled, breaking out of his reverie. “What?”
“About…well, my theory on what that ‘trauma’ was. I see it a lot easier than he does, for a variety of reasons, but he has started seeing it. I’m pretty sure that’s what brought me out in the first place.”
Dylan was sitting in his room, remembering this conversation that had happened earlier that afternoon. Lyla had asked Manny to leave shortly after, and Dylan had spent the last hour or so transitioning back into himself, waking up to his body and his thoughts and these memories.
‘That’s what caused her to come out?’ he thought, grimacing at the floor. ‘Then if I start ignoring it again, will she stop appearing and I’ll go back to just being me?’
He felt a bolt of something from the back of his head, a form of communication that didn’t translate into words but felt like a warning, a flash of irritation. That was probably Lyla…the thought made him feel sick. He pushed it away, buried it; this wasn’t his life. He didn’t have girls living in his head, talking to him via emotions. He wasn’t crazy. He was normal.
And so was his childhood. So what if things seemed different now that he was living away from home? He was just remembering wrong, exaggerating things as he forgot their details. It felt completely normal to live there before, and it would feel normal again.
He was going to visit his brother.
--
“I can’t believe we’re visiting home again!” Manny grinned, stretching his long legs until his knees dug into the bus seat in front of him. “I’m surprised you brought it up, though; I didn’t think you’d want to go back, after all that stuff with the guys. You’re not mad about them anymore?”
“Hell no, I’m still mad. But there’s more there than just the guys. There’s home.”
“Yeah, but you never really seemed to like being home?”
Manny’s statement twisted something in his gut. Had that always been true? Dylan didn’t remember having any particular feelings about his house; there just hadn't been much to do so he always ended up hanging out with his friends. Had there been more to it than that all along?
Dylan didn’t want to believe it, but he was already starting to see his plan fail. He was remembering things; his mother’s makeup drawer, his late night motorbike escapes, his initial feelings of freedom when he finally moved out. The signs had always been there, always existed, and as he thought more about coming home he found more and more things that pointed to Lyla, or trauma, or the fact that he never should have returned in the first place.
The fact that he had needed to ask Manny to come back with him already pretty much sealed the deal. If he was really so sure being home would be fine, he wouldn’t have felt the need to have someone tag along. He’d proven himself wrong the moment he started this fucking trip.
“…You’re staying over, by the way. We can stay at your place too, it’d just be lame to come together just to separate.” Dylan hated how broken his voice sounded, not quite like himself. He wasn’t sure if it was because of Lyla or the nausea threatening to overcome him.
He didn’t look at Manny’s face. Dylan didn’t want to see what he thought, what he remembered, what dots he could connect with his untampered memories and his observations.
This was fucking bullshit.