When all is dark, and reality feels like little more than tendrils of smoke.

When your deepest trauma is a locked box inside the locked box.

When your deepest trauma was so severe that your psyche literally split itself off from it for decades to protect you.

When you talk around it (not about it, but around it) with your therapist in an almost vacant, detached way, because having any feelings about it was always so impossible that even now, you can’t bring yourself to have any emotional reaction at all…except when you discuss ways to revisit the experience in order to work through it.

When the idea of working through it feels so viscerally terrifying you feel like you’re going to break into pieces.

When your therapist gently says it’s time to bring your traumatized younger self some peace, and you tell her you can’t even try, because you can’t find her.

You can’t even try, because you can’t find her.

When you’re lost. To time. To history. To pain. To yourself. Lost.

Utterly lost.