Page 39 of Codename: Dustoff
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
The last thing I remembered happening was Emmett and I arguing in the parking lot about going to Jones’ wedding. We were talking about my friends from the 10th, and my conscious flooded with a rapid flash of all of their faces in my head. I never got to say goodbye to any of them. Never got to tell them what happened. How I held Garcia and told him help was coming. Promised to deliver messages to his wife and kids, begged him to hold on. How happy we had all been just seconds before it happened. That Dan was singing stupid Christmasy songs to Ivan in the backseat, making up his own words to “Favorite Things.”
I never heard from any of them other than Jones. Not Ridge, or Wolf, or even Diesel, who had always been like a big brother to me. I knew why. I was a reminder. I was a billboard to the fragility of life and how we could do everything right, think we’d traveled the same road a hundred times without incident, and something completely out of our control changes the trajectory of our life’s journey forever. Talking to me while still in a battle zone, meant coming face to face with the reminder that it could have been them.
“Silver lining to these blackouts, we can at least find a kernel of a pattern, right?” My neurologist, whose name I learned was Dr. Feinberg, detailed what we knew. “It seems that when your body takes in too much stimuli at once, whether positive or negative, your system overloads. This is a good thing, though the blackouts are really scary, I know. It means that your nervous system is trying to remap itself. A lot of these roads within your body called neural pathways, are on express trains from your brain to the part of your body where the stimulus originated. When it finds a roadblock, it joins up with another train, and hitches a ride and the two of them try to find a road. If those two get blocked the hitch with another and so on, which means you have a freight train of sensation ping ponging throughout your body trying to find an outlet for all of that stimulus.
“Now let’s say that freight train of stimulus finds a new bridge—a rebuilt neural pathway—and takes that bridge which was just built and is still very sensitive, and crosses it at full speed, with a hundred cars attached to it. That’s what creates the blackout.”
I nodded as if I heard him, but really, my mind was still on the conversation I had with Emmett the day before.
“It’s no one’s fault, Emmet,” I’d told him. “I shouldn’t have attended a civilian support group. There’s just too much baggage that you don’t understand.”
I was barely able to look him in his eyes. He looked shattered. But it didn’t make sense to continue to try to push forward with someone who could make such a one-sided decision about something so huge and think I’d be happy with that surprise.
“You’re resisting Amelia,”he’d told me.
“No Emmett, you’re trying to force me into your coping strategy. Not everyone can just shrug their shoulders and roll with the punches. Not everyone’s life is as simple as a small mountain town and a local Tavern. Afghanistan changed me, Emmett and not in a good way. But it’s not fair to you for me to make you adapt to the chaos.And that’s what you’d do. Because it’s who you are. You’d figure out how to make it okay, and suddenly your life would be chaos too.”
“This whole thing, your speech, pushing me away, tapping out when you get scared—it’s all resistance, Amelia. You are falling right into your old coping method. Pam, your team, Jones, they’re all going to be so disappointed that when the going got tough, you turned tail and ran.”
“Earth to Amelia,” Pam patted my hand, “Did you hear what Dr. Xiao asked you?”
I shook my head, really to try to force myself back into the present, but Dr. Xiao took it as a shake in the negative to hearing her question and repeated it.
“When you and Emmett engaged in intercourse, you said that there were moments of pleasure right? That you were enjoying yourself? No pain? No flashback?”
My face tickled, and for a moment I worried that I had somehow triggered some kind of event that would have me blacking out again. But, when a wet droplet plopped onto my hand, where it rested in my lap I realized I was crying. And not just a single tear, but the realization of the one droplet, brought on a waterfall of them.
“It was magic, Dr. Xiao. I felt sensation everywhere. In the best way.”
Before I could describe my entire sexual experience with the flowery phrasing of a romance novel, she cut in with a follow up question, “With the exception of the sex organs, correct? Lack of sensation in the clitoris. What about the g-spot?”
“I honestly don’t remember. I wasn’t thinking in a clinical way. I was in the moment, grateful to have been able to stay present and enjoy being with him.”
I couldn’t say his name. Thinking about it hurt. That just Saturday everything was great, and today I sat in a doctor’s office, dissecting my sex life, that I would no longer have because I pushed him away.
“I think that maybe try again on a night where you haven’t had any alcohol. That constricts blood vessels and may be the cause of some of the problem. Grab a couple toys from your preferred shop, whether that’s online or in person, and just explore. Don’t make the orgasm the destination. As you establish a connection, and that connection deepens, I suspect that eventually as you heal physically, and psychologically allow yourself the freedom of exploration, you’ll find a fully satisfying sexual experience.”
Once again, she handed me a pamphlet. This one was for couples and promised to aid in asking for what we needed to find sexual fulfillment. Unfortunately, given I just told Emmett that we should go our separate ways, it would be a while before I’d be fulfilled in any way.