I am stuck in EMDR. The image I am trying to work through is one where I am small, somewhere between ages 4 and 7. I am hiding in my bedroom closet in the house on Salem Street.
The room does not have a door. When I think of it now, it feels three feet by four feet, but I am not sure. The room is warm, warmer than anywhere else in the house. As you step through the doorway into the space, it is dark. I cannot remember if there was a light somewhere in the space, but my instincts tell me no. My body remembers it feeling dark.
On your left is the chimney. When I touch the warmth of each chalky brick, I can feel the pores of the clay and the dust nestled into the cracks. Clusters of every discarded skin cell living in this house since 1906 rest along the small ridges eroded away with time. The bricks are warm not because of a fireplace, but an electric heater on the first floor in the living room.
This house was built for the managers at the Diamond Match Factory. It is one of several with the same floor plan and layout, one of Chico’s original home developments. In 1901, the company that made the Diamond Matches we all still have in our camping boxes and junk drawers bought land and decided to develop its West Coast offices in Chico. Remnants of its mark on the town stand haunted and barricaded at the end of 16th Street. We used to ride bikes over there to try to look in but could never really see what it was.
I remember they opened the property once. I remember walking into the skeleton of what was left of the main factory. I remember feeling very small compared to the deep hole in the ground. I remember the smell of bricks, enhanced by complete exposure to rain and extraordinary heat for so many years.
The homes built to support the large workforce surround the entire property. As you walk along, you see large porches, robust gardens, inconsistent sidewalks, chalk drawings on driveways and walkways. Many of the trees are more than 100 years old. Portions of the neighborhood are underneath the most beautiful green canopy from elms, walnut trees, and sycamores protecting inhabitants from the direct blister of summer.
As Fall comes, those same leaves turn bright yellow, orange, and red. The neighborhood becomes an autumnal wonderland, streets covered, lawns haphazardly raked by hand. Dogs bark at you from the yards that still have dog doors. Cats dart from alley to alley. Winter is milder by comparison to most places. The sun radiates from farther away between branches now empty of their adornments. In winter, we hunt for signs of the nests obscured earlier in the year, finding the source of the squawks from the scrub jays or whittle-work of the woodpecker on the telephone pole next to our palm tree.
All of this memory is in my body. I can still smell the tang of the inedible oranges on our tree and my brain still recalls the tilt of the first floor as the foundation lost its footing. The entire neighborhood and its history floods my body as I remember what it feels like to be small in the spaces that formed me.
As I remember the feeling of the bricks on the chimney, I look at the shelves in front of me along the four-foot wall. The shelves are full of board games precariously balanced and the many books I read and reread throughout my childhood. The carpet is the same as the rest of the house, a forest green, dark, and pleasant to walk on. I cannot remember if the shelves were an L-shape or not, but there are shelves between the chimney and the four-foot shelves with more books on them.
While seated in my therapist’s office, one black paddle alternating vibrations in each hand, my eyes close as I imagine looking down beneath the shelves next to the chimney. I see me there. A small me. I can see her glasses, her bowl-cut bangs. I can see her arms wrapped around her knees, her hands relieved to feel the softness of cotton leggings after the unpleasant texture of the sandy clay brick I always touched because of how pleasurable its heat was.
I flip between images I have from that age. I am either wearing my first pair of glasses with a rhinestone butterfly or the next pair, which had multicolored, thin, green and pink metal rims. My teeth are missing or they are not. Whatever age I am, I am hiding where anyone, if they are looking, could see me at first glance. And no one is coming.
I do not know why I am there. But I do remember testing to see how long I could hide before someone would come. I do not know why I was doing that, but I was. I did it a lot.
When I try to lead Little Me out of the closet to find help, I do not know where help is. I can imagine leaving the room. I search every room of upstairs, starting with the bathroom, the spare room, Hailey’s room. I listen at the top of the stairs to hear if anyone is down there, but it is quiet. I can hear the neighbors outside, but when I look, no one I know is there. The sun is shining. I go back to the closet. I feel the bricks.
When I think about it, my entire torso floods and breath becomes intentional. The first time I looked at Little Me in this closet and then attempted to be her, to feel what she was feeling, I had a panic attack. I immediately experienced the exact same feeling I had when I tried to touch the grief when Jeffrey died. The feeling is colossal. It is terrifying.
And I am stuck here in the work. I feel very scared I will not be able to solve it, to touch it, to integrate it into me. I imagine taking her out of the room, to the beach. I imagine a cool gray day. I listen to the waves, I show Little Me stones and show her how to skip them. I try to give Little Me permission to scream because she wants to, but she cannot. She is afraid she cannot scream correctly. She is scared it won’t have a container, that no one can help hold her afterwards. She is afraid to touch the feeling tied to screaming. She needs someone to help her feel it. And no one is there.
The experience is otherworldly. It is dry drowning and being washed away by the sea simultaneously, gasping for air and not finding your feet. I feel like I lose reality. So I do not try to feel what she feels because it is too scary. I cycle around the reality that this feeling, the feeling without words, is more ancient than I know. It is nonverbal. It has been there since before language. I do not know what to do with the acid in my stomach. I want someone to help me, but I am hiding and no one is coming and I do not know how to ask for help.
In present day, I want to save Little Me and something is not letting me. This feeling is one I kept away from awareness to survive my life. I turned off knowing about it in my brain. But my body? My body has replicated it in almost every relationship I ever had. I stay with the addict, the abuser, or the one who does not know themselves because I am waiting for them to find me, to choose me. But they cannot choose me. They have a lot of other things going on. They are not ready. They still have to learn how to take care of themselves before they can choose me. And now I know all of this, I see it so clearly, and I want to help my body heal it. I deserve to have a relationship that does not feel like the reverberations of dire loneliness, the echo of grief that has existed my entire life.
But I am stuck in EMDR. The feeling is so big, and the bricks are so warm.