This is How It Is Not

This is how it is not.

You can forget.

Whole minutes, hours, sometimes almost the whole day, you can forget.

Things are very much as they used to be, after all.  Your quarters with the gaily colored blanket knit your mother's youngest brother knit for you when you first left home spread carefully over the bed, your office with all the books you've been meaning to read for about two years now on the shelves and the familiar copy of Iuenan's famous holo of the Salaajo dancer on the wall, the hangar with the perpetual faint tang of machine oil and freeze-burned metal, the mess with bowls of apples on every table ...

Things are so very much as they used to be, you can forget that they aren't how they used to be, won't ever be how they used to be, not ever again.

You even look the same, no suddenly grey hair or new lines showing in the mirror.  No dark shadows beneath your eyes telling the world of nightmares, because you're a professional and you're not about to ignore what you know is best practice.  Exercise, healthy food, meditation, plenty of water, sometimes pills, mild ones only, when absolutely necessary, scrupulously logged with two of your colleagues from Pilot Roth's medical staff.  Your eyes are bright, your skin clear, your clothes no tighter or looser than they were a year ago.

You look perfectly healthy, in the mirror, so perfectly healthy that you can forget that you aren't perfectly healthy, won't ever be perfectly healthy, not ever again.

This is how it is not.

You do your job as well as you used to, listen and question and follow the thread of the half-hinted revelation, offer a glass of water or a box of tissues when they're needed but not when they'd break the flow words from the patient sitting across from you. You ask how they feel about what they've told you, offer patience and kindness and at just the right moment the gentle nudge that steers them towards why they're really there. Never judging, never shocked, you're the calm face that makes it possible to put words around what's unspeakable, giving them the confidence that whatever it is that gnaws away at their heart in the darkest hours of the night, it can be faced and tamed and brought to heel. They don't know that it's a lie, and so for them it isn't one.

You lie so well that for hours at a time you can forget that you know the truth now: that some beasts can never be defeated and some dark hours never end.

This is how it is not.

You can let a door close behind you without running through a calming exercise to keep your shrieking nerves from flooding your system with enough adrenaline to drop you hard into dark so black I can't tell if my eyes are open and someone screaming and they can't, they can't, they can't do this, it's a mistake, a mistake ...

You can glance casually around a room without bracing yourself in case you see a slightly-above average height man with a stocky build and light brown hair, a man just close enough to memory for your treacherous subconscious to do the rest and put you on my back and the hangar floor is cold and the weight of him is making it hard to breathe and there's nowhere that I still belong to myself now, not a single place, not even inside myself ...

You can go out without double checking the watch with the alarm that lets you know when you have to be back to take the needle from the box and stick it into the vein in your forearm, the vein pocked and pitted now with the only external marks of the constant battle between the poison and the nanites in your blood.

This is how it is not.

You can unwrap the neat package of words you've put around what happened and how you feel about it, the shiny coating that proves to the colleagues whose patient you are just how well you're dealing with what happened, how professional you've been, how much insight you have into your own case.

You don't find yourself kneeling on the shower floor with the warm water sluicing tears and snot from your face, sobbing Mumma, mumma until your throat is so sore and swollen a wave of panic breaks over you the vitoxin, the nanites have stopped working ...

You don't wake to sodden, stinking sheets, and sneak out to haul them to the 'cycler yourself so the ensign assigned to linen duty on your floor won't know that the crew's psychologist wets her bed every night.

This is how it is not.

You can see a way for you to live through this, imagine a future, not necessarily a good one but some sort of future, at least, with you in it.

This is how it is not.

You can forget.