Read Online Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland - Free Book Online
Authors: Mac McClelland
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afraid of him: You don’t have to be afraid of someone to lose the fight.
When one of the guys got handsy, I bolted. When I found Ruben, he refused to leave the girl next door’s house. I had his car keys, because I’d driven us there (his license had been suspended for DUIs—and he was actively drinking on the way over); he told me to just go to sleep in his car with the doors locked. Instead, I stole it. Driving lost around the rural darkness in the middle of the night, black roads, black sky, black Oklahoma nothingness on all sides, my phone’s mapping function useless in an area that apparently wasn’t on a map, I started worrying that I would run out of gas. Gradually, I became scared that I would be stranded, murdered and/or eaten by coyotes, and never found. It wasn’t entirely rational, but rationality didn’t lessen my fear—and also, the whole point of the story I was working on was that tribal and county police agreeing to share jurisdiction over the checkerboard of tribal and non-tribal land I was currently wandering amounted to neither type of police taking much responsibility. And that federal prosecutors, who had to handle serious crimes on reservations, turned down 65 percent of those cases referred to them. One of the men I’d just run away from had had a murder charge fall through the cracks.
“Do you know what time it is?” the clerk at the motel I finally found at dawn sneered when I told her I wanted to check in, as if I were some all-night floozy.
“Yes,” I sneered back. “I do.”
It wasn’t like I’d simply shrugged this whole thing off. The next day, when Ruben was calling and calling my cell to ask where his car was, I finally answered to holler at him for reneging on his promise to watch out for me. He was unmoved. I later appealed to his mother, who had chastised him the moment I arrived about taking care around the parts—and people—we were planning to visit. (“Mom!” he’d yelled at her, protesting like a little kid. “This isn’t the first white person I’ve had around the reservation! And there’s never been any casualties!”) “I didn’t want to turn my back on those guys, much less when asleep,” I said to her, looking for solidarity, when I saw her at his house that next day. “Nooooooo,” she said. “I wouldn’t.” When I found out that some of them, as a group, had once beaten a guy to death with their bare hands at a party just for fun, I kept shaking my head at the potential closeness of the call.
But I didn’t go all crying and crazy. Because of my work with Meredith, I did notice that I’d been affected. Meredith was a somatic practitioner, which meant that she focused on the physical when trying to heal her clients mentally, addressing what was happening with their bodies as well as their emotions. The method was concerned with wholeness. I hadn’t chosen it purposefully at first; I’d simply asked my friend Alex whom she saw that she loved so much, and made an appointment. Somatics has the Greek word for “body” as its origin, and a unified body and mind as its defining goal. In my world, which prized thinking above all else, even this stripped-down and sensible-sounding objective smacked of mysticism, and though I went to yoga sometimes, I was from Cleveland, for God’s sake. I rolled my eyes right into my cerebral and practical head the first several times Meredith had talked about how stress and emotional suffering shaped a body into contortions and contractions that could have long-term ramifications if the “energy” wasn’t released. Though this hadn’t necessarily been what I was looking for, I’d stuck with Meredith, seeing her for some time, and ended up learning a lot: that, for example, I hunkered down and carried my stress in my chest. So after I got to the hotel I’d fled to on that warm Oklahoma morning, I was keenly aware that, despite the triple-locked door and the sturdy walls of the room and the exhausting
When one of the guys got handsy, I bolted. When I found Ruben, he refused to leave the girl next door’s house. I had his car keys, because I’d driven us there (his license had been suspended for DUIs—and he was actively drinking on the way over); he told me to just go to sleep in his car with the doors locked. Instead, I stole it. Driving lost around the rural darkness in the middle of the night, black roads, black sky, black Oklahoma nothingness on all sides, my phone’s mapping function useless in an area that apparently wasn’t on a map, I started worrying that I would run out of gas. Gradually, I became scared that I would be stranded, murdered and/or eaten by coyotes, and never found. It wasn’t entirely rational, but rationality didn’t lessen my fear—and also, the whole point of the story I was working on was that tribal and county police agreeing to share jurisdiction over the checkerboard of tribal and non-tribal land I was currently wandering amounted to neither type of police taking much responsibility. And that federal prosecutors, who had to handle serious crimes on reservations, turned down 65 percent of those cases referred to them. One of the men I’d just run away from had had a murder charge fall through the cracks.
“Do you know what time it is?” the clerk at the motel I finally found at dawn sneered when I told her I wanted to check in, as if I were some all-night floozy.
“Yes,” I sneered back. “I do.”
It wasn’t like I’d simply shrugged this whole thing off. The next day, when Ruben was calling and calling my cell to ask where his car was, I finally answered to holler at him for reneging on his promise to watch out for me. He was unmoved. I later appealed to his mother, who had chastised him the moment I arrived about taking care around the parts—and people—we were planning to visit. (“Mom!” he’d yelled at her, protesting like a little kid. “This isn’t the first white person I’ve had around the reservation! And there’s never been any casualties!”) “I didn’t want to turn my back on those guys, much less when asleep,” I said to her, looking for solidarity, when I saw her at his house that next day. “Nooooooo,” she said. “I wouldn’t.” When I found out that some of them, as a group, had once beaten a guy to death with their bare hands at a party just for fun, I kept shaking my head at the potential closeness of the call.
But I didn’t go all crying and crazy. Because of my work with Meredith, I did notice that I’d been affected. Meredith was a somatic practitioner, which meant that she focused on the physical when trying to heal her clients mentally, addressing what was happening with their bodies as well as their emotions. The method was concerned with wholeness. I hadn’t chosen it purposefully at first; I’d simply asked my friend Alex whom she saw that she loved so much, and made an appointment. Somatics has the Greek word for “body” as its origin, and a unified body and mind as its defining goal. In my world, which prized thinking above all else, even this stripped-down and sensible-sounding objective smacked of mysticism, and though I went to yoga sometimes, I was from Cleveland, for God’s sake. I rolled my eyes right into my cerebral and practical head the first several times Meredith had talked about how stress and emotional suffering shaped a body into contortions and contractions that could have long-term ramifications if the “energy” wasn’t released. Though this hadn’t necessarily been what I was looking for, I’d stuck with Meredith, seeing her for some time, and ended up learning a lot: that, for example, I hunkered down and carried my stress in my chest. So after I got to the hotel I’d fled to on that warm Oklahoma morning, I was keenly aware that, despite the triple-locked door and the sturdy walls of the room and the exhausting
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