I recently had a childhood trauma resurface—at work and right in the middle of my workday. Seriously embarrassing. It was unbelievable, and unlike any resurfaced trauma I have ever processed. This one hit like a freight train, and I was all tears and hyperventilation right in my workspace, and there was nothing I could do about it in the moment but accept the help and guidance of the amazing, compassionate people I work with.
For me, resurfaced traumas like this emerge as independent personas, and I find it useful to treat and talk about them as independent personas. He brought no concrete memories with him, nor was I able to directly feel his emotions, but my body was re-experiencing his trauma down to the last membrane and I could ascertain much of what he was feeling from this. These insights are outside the scope of this post, but not something I’m opposed to sharing down the road after further processing. However, this poem isn’t even about him or his trauma—at least not directly:
The Runaway
… for Aaron Stevens …
… with undying gratitude …
You headed east from sea salt mists
deep into sprawling desert—our
memories safely packed away, our
future left entirely at your discretion.
Death was imminent either way—
and if there was a modicum of hope,
it lay in the uncertain grips of cold,
hunger, and other fears with names.
You would walk the crucible alone,
and carry nameless pain and loss
to the song lines where stars fell
every night from an angel’s wing.
You took the job of survival at any
cost—or death with at the very least
a degree of dignity. We had lost all
hope, and you carried hopelessness.
You gave us to midsummer deserts,
and they cradled us and sent us back.
You gave us to the mountains, and
they became lifelong companions.
You gave us to the rivers, and their
great spirits carried our deepest,
darkest torments into the dreaming.
At every turn you found allies—
Intangible allies that took the ear
at night and offered solace in
the yipping calls of unseen coyotes,
in the distant sound of thunder.
Tangible allies that for no reason at
all handed you cash and prayed so
hard they almost cried, or brought you
a plate sent back to the graveyard cook.
You searched not only soup kitchens
for a half-moldy morsel, but libraries
for old dusty words—You even tried
to nourish a soul crushed lifeless
beneath the systemic heel of ruin
and apathy. You tended fields salted
with violation and shame that could
never bear fruit, or even weeds.
You took this impossible job, and
carried hopelessness down highways
fraught with uncertainty to half-built
lean-tos and long abandoned homes.
You fell asleep to wind and woke
beneath shrouds of snow. You found
safety in the silence of ponderosa
nights and a slow stream’s murmur.
You drifted like autumn leaves, like
fallen cherry blossoms, like dust
kicked up in the evening winds—And
nearly every single night you pled our
case to the stars not knowing who or
what could hear or cared to hear—But
clearly someone heard, for each night
was followed by scents of new potential.
Knowing nothing, you struck out into
the wild, the world, the unknown—
for nothing more than a mote, a lottery’s
chance to survive the unsurvivable.
You carried us all, the weight of dreams
so broken they only cut to the bone
and injured all the more. You carried
a life discarded like trash, crumpled
and torn into pieces, used like old rags,
dented and rusting like a burnt out
windowless, tireless, engineless jalopy
in tall grass, crazed like a dry riverbed.
I look back now and see your tireless
will, your drive to become something
more than the nothing you were made,
and you carried us with you—
You carried all that would one day take
the form of man, human, dignity molded
from refuse never even meant for
compost, never more than toxic waste.
Thank you for your rage, my friend—
for your unwavering unwillingness
to lay down and dim, for your beautiful,
fragmented brokenness that scraped
with bleeding, calloused hands all the
dismembered, rotting pieces of self back
into being, so that something more could
become and one day find a way to thrive.
Aaron Stevens is the name I went by as a runaway. At 15 I ran away from the Los Angeles Juvenile Courts—possibly the worst, most abusive and apathetic parent a child can have. And this was just the last of the three abusive parents of my childhood. As a ward of the court I was physically, mentally, and emotionally abused, neglected, medicated into a stupor, strapped to beds for days such that I couldn’t even scratch an itch, never mind the indignity of how one would have to relieve themselves in that situation, and by all indications worse—we’ll not get into worse right now.
I had a moment of clarity as a 15 year old and realized that I was going to die as a ward of the court, that there was no way to survive. I was a cash-cow that was going to be herded into the adult system, and if I resisted I would have been medicated all the more and eventually would have died from liver or kidney failure. I could see it all, and I realized that the only chance I had at survival was to run away and stay away.
But, the complete disaster I was by the age of 15 could not have survived on his own—this required something new. At the time I didn’t realize it, but when I ran away, I took on a new persona, and that persona either immediately or gradually became its own entity, a distinct and independent persona within my psyche. When I went back to using my given name as an adult, he didn’t quite go away. He stayed and took on the role of guarding past traumas from resurfacing, and potentially upending the life I’ve—we’ve—managed to build. But some triggers would cause him to nearly upend the life we’ve built all on his own in the effort to keep things suppressed, and this sudden realization led to the release of the trauma that put me in my awkward situation at work.
It seemed like it was time to thank Aaron for all he did, and now I’m working on consciously finding a new role for him—getting us back into shape, maybe. He has a lot of energy and drive. I think this can be put to good, more productive use.
