91217: My Little Trauma Code
Don’t ignore pain from the past
“So, what’s the password to your account?”
91217. I was prepared to speak into the world that sequence of numbers as though they meant as little to me as the office as I was standing in. This was the place that rising earlier than the rest for two semesters every year, writing essays that had never grown in impact but in monotony, anxiously checking for my exam grade, had gotten me. I was supposed to be here.
Or was I?
I was born into the world twenty-six years ago. I was given the name Aaron. I had a fairly decent childhood, growing up in a household that placed the future over any juvenile love for the “immature” things of the world — games, romance, and the idea of self-expression. What mattered was doing well in school and obtaining a job. Right?
When I was younger, ignoring the odd feeling that I was wading through water, languidly pushing through the fog of time and arriving at the end of it all was easy. As I grew older, though, my thoughts strayed to the “danger-zone”: What would it be like to detach myself from the cycle? From the invisible threads spinning around us, the ones blinding and stifling us. I think I wrote about it in a journal once. I think and not know because one morning I awoke to the pages ripped out and crumpled in the trash and my mom humming the tune she usually did when she tried to conceal her frustration.
Thrummmm. Thrummmmmmm. High-pitched and spiteful.
“Sir,” the technician began, beginning to stand and look at me in confused unease. “Are you there?” I almost laughed a little chuckle.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“What’s the password?”
I was going over the details of my life, reliving it all, and yet here I was as well, speaking to someone present for the sole purpose of fixing a desktop. “None of that even matters, man. Just keep your head in the game,” I thought.
“My password is 91217. Sorry, man, I was just thinking about some things.”
“It’s good. So,” he said, crouching to type in the mundane numbers that would give him access to almost the entirety of my adult life, concentrated into a small machine that was absolutely powerless without input. And yet it was vital for my sustenance. Vital for me to even be able to live comfortably. “How did you end up here?”
“What do you mean?” In what world do you ask about someone else’s past, especially now, in the early 2020's? I had grown so accustomed to simply sauntering past everyone I saw on the street, at the store, and at work that the technician’s question seemed to defy a law of nature.
“I mean, like, why did you choose to work at an office? For your boss? Do you enjoy answering emails, or… is it just what you do? I don’t know, I just thought it would be, like, nice to know.”
He was saying all of this as he worked at the program that I had told him earlier was not functioning properly — something dealing with the memory of the device. He said it as though it was nothing significant, and maybe it was nothing important.
But, man, when was the last time I really even thought about that? The rug beneath me almost seemed to disintegrate, and I was falling through so many holes that I guessed led to the core of the Earth. Maybe that was where I needed to go because I had no legitimate answer to his question. It felt like almost a philosophical question, one that required much reflection and frowning and several “ah-ha!” moments to answer, and even then the answer would probably be insufficient.
Everything slowed as the past splashed up my mind.
Once when I was nine, I came home from school with a chocolate ice cream cone my teacher had awarded me for excellence in class. Approaching the front door to my parents’ house, inhaling the subtle, beautiful fragrance of the flowering bushes that lay immediately in front of the porch, I never gave licking the melting scoop a second thought. When I entered the house, I walked straight to the kitchen and boasted to my mom about the reward I had earned. She turned to me with a dim smile, her lips drooping and devoid of color. Her eyes appeared to be shadowy craters.
“You shouldn’t eat that, son. You’re gonna become plump and fat. Do you want that?”
“No… but Mommy I worked hard for-”
“I struggle every day. I provide for you.” She seemed to shrink back into herself, willing her bones to become like paper, flexible. “And yet, and yet, you never seem to listen.”
I felt a familiar moistness beginning to weigh on my lower eyelid. My backpack felt heavier on my shoulders. Why was she so sad? Did I make her like this?
“Mommy, I’m sorry, it’s just that I worked so hard and I just wanted to make you proud-”
“Just go. Go eat your ice cream.” She mumbled something under her breath, and she sluggishly turned back to the pot on the stove, stirring what must have been the millionth fish soup she always made. I remember that I wished the fish soup could talk so it could tell me what it saw in Mommy’s eyes as she listlessly worked at cooking dinner. Maybe it could explain why she loved to leave a small plate on the counter, looking at it like she could not wait for someone to eat it, even though no one ever came.
Then, I was twelve. I lived in constant fear of not doing things correctly. I made a solemn realization about my house: we never said sorry, and we never asked about how we actually were. “How is school? How is work?” and never “How are you?”. My dad was out most of the time, working and doing the “grown-up” activities, as my mom said. My mom never seemed pleased about these “grown-up” things. The look she would give him when he would leave in the morning for his typical 12-hour voyage slowly started to cross over to me. Pursed lips. The enchanted hazel color of her eyes dissipating into a mundane brown. Shame and pain.
Seventeen. Eager to move out. An invisible spirit tugged at my mouth whenever I was outside of my house, letting my teeth see the sun, but it disappeared when I entered the gloomy shadow of the front door. At least I could compromise. Sitting on the front porch talking to a friend on the phone before my father came staggering back home one evening. His drinking had been worse, but his eyes were of a worse delirium than usual.
Just as I entered the house after talking to my friend I heard horrified gasps. I hurried to the living room. My mom was reaching for her cheek. My dad — I guessed it — had slapped her. He seemed vaguely confused, but aware of what he had done. No one said sorry. They stood there looking at each other, unsure of how to move their limbs to reach across the untraversable rift that had sprung up between them. Only the thrummmm, thrummmm of my mom’s humming, which was pleading, deep, and dark. She never even had the strength to be angry anymore.
I do not know when or how, but I blamed myself. My journals always reminded me of what I had done, what had forced everyone to that point. Sometimes I thought what I was going through was some form of trauma, but I just batted those ideas away. There was no room for trauma for someone like me.
“Nine, twelve, and seventeen,” I whispered to the technician. “I don’t know, but something with those ages, man. They’re representative of how I just grew complacent with the system, you know? Something like that.”
The technician looked back at me. For once, I noticed his caramel skin, soft, coiling curls, and rounded nose. I saw it before but never noticed. I laughed out loud. “Isn’t life something?” I asked.
“It is,” he said. He rose, glancing back at the computer, and, satisfied with his work, looked straight at me. “Sometimes I wonder — does the electricity flowing in all of our devices ever wish for more? I mean, the idea of sparks-” at this his arms rose, forming a grand gesture- “and electricity and all that inspires both respect and fear in us. Yet look at how we view that raw energy as merely a tool. If those electrons could feel, I think, they would yearn to be freed from those limiting appliances. They’d want to produce lovely, sparkling images, like the constellations above or the creatures of legend.”
“You’re starting to sound like an imaginative narrator in a fairy tale, man.”
“Shoot,” he said in a resigned, patient tone. “Maybe I am. But isn’t it crazy how society just churns out people who are simply just appliances? We have a predetermined structure, and very often, we can not even tell why or when we were molded to be fit in the eyes of others. Others, not another. It’s all so complex.” The technician shrugged. “91217 is your password, and you experienced some painful moments at the ages nine, twelve, and seventeen, correct?”
“Yes, that’s all true…” Then it hit me —
“Call that your trauma code,” the man said, before the words could escape my mouth. “Dial it in. Awareness then agency, someone told me once. Crazy how you never really ever gave that password much thought, huh?”
I stood in silence. I was a fool. A very impetuous one at that. The technician glanced down at his watch. “I better be going,” he mumbled. Then his eyes slowly drifted upward, assessing my figure and gleaming with such compassion that I grew embarrassed.
“You’re loved, so very much. Are you a manufactured appliance? Or will you control your energy for your own purposes?”
He was out the door before I could say, “I don’t know.”
But, maybe, that was the point.
This work came from within the deep reservoirs of creative power I think we all have. You have the power to help me share more work like this by clapping for the story, and any replies are appreciated. I hope we go on more journeys together! :)
