Wrung Out

So here it is: Whatever I say is returned as something  I didn't even think, much less say. A whole world is endlessly constructed around me like an intricate web, or scaffolding, any refutation rejected outright. And with each piece I try to tear down reconstruction begins all over again. The same conversations are played over and over and over and any alternate version denied, and I am denied because I am told what I did what I thought and what I said. No matter what I do say I am told I said something completely different. I have been told things about the past that are complete fabrications about what the experience was, effectively dismantling the past brick by brick by brick, and when the dismantling is done the past is rebuilt and recounted in a way I don't recognize. The future I expected not long ago has been taken from me, but so has the past. And so I find small, concrete things, like a child's favorite stuffed animal and try to imbue those things with a memory I can go back to and hold on to. Literally.

It is hard enough to be the sole repository of memories, but when the one person who could and once did also remember reconstructs those memories into an unrecognizable fiction the very basis of the past becomes slippery and hard, if not impossible, to hold onto. This is an exhausting process, living with someone who has literally lost their mind. He thinks he is fine, that his thoughts are intact, that it is me who needs to be helped. Through most of it he sounds rational and calm, but the pieces don't fit, and the logic is faulty. At the end of these endless conversations in which all words enter a black box and come out as something else, and are irrefutable, I feel as if I have been wrung out, rolled over, flattened and plastered to the floor.