Slowtown

7

Their voices sound super weird, like my head is in a bubble. From what I can barely hear enough of to filter through as a sentence...

"You're having a panic attack."

Are they sure? That hasn't happened in forever. It used to, a lot, but eventually, my depression completely outweighed my anxiety. Kicked it right off the scale, and depression now has a foot on each pan. This isn't how it used to feel.

I open my mouth and breath in, sucking up the bubble, and the vibrations of my throat when I speak cause it to break. "How did I get here?" I ask with much less strength than I wanted.

They stop getting in my face, and she responds, "You came here yourself."

"Why?" I know she explained it, but the whole damn thing flew right over my head.

She does a short sigh, but looks very oddly relieved... and... sad. "You came here, to Slowtown, because your mind," she taps my temple, "wants to keep you safe in whichever ways it can. And, it forgot the trauma. No, I should've said it more clearly. The situation is not that you cannot remember, it's that you do not remember. The memories are still there, but your brain isn't letting you think about it. Eventually, you'll retrieve the memory, or at least most of it, when your brain believes it won't effect you. ...Hopefully." She stares at me intensely. "You see, Josh remembers every detail of what happened to him, but I've spent many years with only the events surrounding the trauma, and it's unlikely at this point that I'll ever remember fully. I realize these could be false memories, but it's all I have to go on." She catches herself rambling and redirects. "Do you get it?" She grabs my shoulders. "You're here for the same reason everyone else is. Tyler, something happened to you."

My arms and legs are frozen solid, and my core is starting to as well. Next will be my brain. I speak, and for some short seconds, I think I can see my breath, as if I'm in the winter air. "Something happened to me?" I start breathing harder because I want to see my breath crystallize again. But she's quiet now, and she probably thinks I'm having another panic attack. Maybe I am, don't wanna know.

"Tyler!"

So what the hell is this? PTSD?

Josh drops to his knees and holds my deadweight hands.

Oh God, oh my God, something happened to me, something bad, horrible. They said this place is safe, but the air is being torn by the remnants of every feeling I had to forget so I wouldn't have killed myself. Something happened to me.