sometimes i get flashbacks
Sometimes, I’m not the happy-go-lucky person you think I am.
Sometimes, I get flashbacks. Does anyone else ever get this? Like, I’ll be doing something mundane — driving to work, smoking a cigarette on the patio, watching commercials on TV — and then my mind will start wandering and twisting and turning. And then I’m there again. Like the time in high school where I’m eating one of my fathers leftover-chinese-food-between-Wonder-Bread sandwiches and a seagull shit on my head, in front of 10 people that didn’t like me so much. Or the time I wrote a Valentines Day Gram to Rochelle Okawa in Junior High school calling Amy Nabong a bitch, and who should be delivering those telegrams? Amy, of course. (She got her two boyfriends to push me down the stairs a couple days later. No, I don’t think the two boyfriends knew they were dating the same girl.)
Those things I can laugh about. Others, not so. Right after I graduated from college, I had a job interview over lunch at a high tech company, talking about my C and Pascal expertise and praying to god that the spaghetti with marinara sauce wouldn’t drip on my suit. “Here,” the recruiter says. “Have a carrot stick. You know, we have a decent cafeteria here.” And then, “SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” My sister takes a glass dish full of carrot sticks and throws it against the kitchen wall. My father doesn’t bat an eye. “Do you mind? We’re trying to have a normal dinner,” he says in Chinese. “You didn’t take your medication, did you?” There’s no trace of bitterness in his voice. He is stoic, without emotion, like he always is. I get up from the dinner table. “THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING,” she screams. “I’m dialing 911. So the police can take your crazy-ass away.” She punches me in the face. I put her in a choke hold. She turns her head, buries her face in my bicep and she bites down, with all her might. The teeth in the arm hurt, obviously, and then I realize that she bites in deeper, and I think, Oh my fucking God, she’s trying to bite a piece of my arm off, like my flesh was an apple or a peach or one of those carrot sticks lying on the floor with all the broken glass. I’m screaming.
The scar on my arm is still there, you know.
“Ernest,” says the recruiter. “Did you get that last question? I want to know your previous project experiences with database while you were attending college.”
They say mental illness is a genetic thing, you know? Skips between generations. Common with siblings. The flashbacks have been happening a lot more these past couple of months, and frankly, it’s starting to freak me out. I’m hoping it’s just a mental thing. No pun intended. That’s all.
