remi+joel | i can see inside your mind
Joel was knew what PTSD looked like, and what it felt like. He had cradled his thirty year old brother during the fourth of July for the past three years. The sounds of the fireworks blasting reduced him to a sobbing mess, unable to get a word or even a sentence out without blubbering. His grandfather had PTSD. He would be recalling events that occurred during a police raid gone wrong and suddenly he would turn to stone, emotionless and still. When Joel was younger, he had made the mistake of trying to touch his grandfather and ask him what was wrong. The result was a hard punch in the gut and his grandfather screaming in his face, “You won’t take me down you assholes!”
It wasn’t his idea. In fact, it was his mother’s and his boss that came up with the idea of Joel going to some support group for PTSD. Joel wasn’t diagnosed, and he didn’t think he had PTSD. He hadn’t been to war and he hadn’t shot a gun or even been in a real fight, but he had seen death. He knew the face of loss. It was in blank stares in the emergency room, in the still tone of a heart rate gone flat. It was the death of a child that hit him especially hard, and caused his mother and his boss to tell him to go to the support group. Joel had been sitting at the table for their weekly family dinner and had to excuse himself when his little nephew walked in. His mother found him locked up in the bedroom, sitting on the floor in tears because his nephew looked so much like that immobile child. His mother told his boss, and his boss ordered to go to at least ten sessions. So that’s where he was.
Joel sat in a ring of people, feeling like he didn’t belong as they one-by-one told stories of war glory and defeat. All he had was the story of a family vacation gone wrong. Of a drunk driver swerving into the side of their family van, pinning their ten year old son in the backseat. They had to use a saw to cut away the metal before they could even move the boy onto the stretcher, and he never once cried, though his eyes were always open. “Damn,” he muttered under his breath, moving to stand and head over to the refreshment table after the group leader said they could take a break. He poured himself some coffee and eyed the exit sign, brightly lit and neon red.
@remidevaux