Describing the Sound of Glass Breaking?

The coffee is good this morning, a thought that barely registers in his mind. The coffee is good most mornings.

It is part of his ritual, his entreaty to the powers that be to let him have a peaceful day. He begins the casting of it with the smell of the beans. He knows they spend too much money on coffee beans.

You can get a satisfying cup of coffee out of the cheap stuff, but it just isn’t the same for the ritual. Old testament god liked the best of the herd, the ripest of the crop, and so does the PTSD monster.

He smells the beans, a deep satisfying inhale of the roasted contents of the container. One deep drawing in of the mingled smells of dark acidic beans, acrid dirt, sweet cocoa and tart smoke is all that is required. It makes him smile and shiver just a tad with joy.

The beans are measured by hand in to the grinder. He has been thinking of getting a hand crank grinder, but for now, a loud whirring sound, high pitched coalesces with the snap and crack of the beans.

He fills the kettle with water next. It will take a few minutes to not boil, so he has time to do other things.

The coffee press is stainless steel. He must clean out the detritus of yesterday. He runs it under hot water, diligently scrapping out the remnants of previous offerings. He is careful to not fully clean it. He wants the oils to remain, the pot to be seasoned. He isn’t sure if it does anything, but it seems intuitive.

He pours the beans in to the pot and waits for the kettle. He is going to watch it boil, ignoring the old wive’s tale about the watched pot. As he stares at the water waiting, he forms ideas for the day and processes his feelings.

Most days this is ok, and today is no different. It is going to be a good day. The plans are mundane in nature, but that is ok. There is something extra comforting in the mundane right now.

He waits for the water to bubble just a little. He doesn’t want a full boil, that would scorch the beans and give a bitterness to the results. He waits for a few bubbles to burst on the surface, and when they do, he is satisfied.

He takes the water over to the French Press and slowly pours it on top of the beans. He pours in circles hoping to not traumatize one section of beans by continually pouring hot water on it. When the amount is just right he grabs a table knife and stirs the mixture as he glances at the clock. He wants six minutes to pass. No more and no less.

A part of him knows this is silly and obsessive. He knows the timing doesn’t have to be so precise. He does it for the monster, not himself.

He tries to banish the monster with his positive thoughts as he waits the six minutes. He knows it is lurking at the edges of reality, preparing to pounce. The ritual allows him to focus his thoughts.

They stray this particular morning to a friend in need. He resolves to do something nice. They stray again, floating around in his mind until they form a coherent image from the wispy clouds.

An old friend. He dreamt of that person for the first time in a year the night before. Nothing tragic, just a small pang of lost friendship. He can handle this, and the monster has no sway over these thoughts. The monster has never been to the island these people live on in his mind. There are breakers and lighthouses and a benevolent Kraken circling that island. It is safe territory.

The six minutes end and he pours the coffee. He has a visual mark in the mugs to know exactly how much to fill them. He has a special syrup he measures in to the mugs. Hand made ceramic ones. He stirs them with a stainless steel cocktail swizzle that has seen more of the world than he has, owing to the fact it had to fly all the way from China.

The coffee is good this morning.

The day has promise.

Then it happens. An accident. Nobody’s fault. His wife drops a wine glass she was using for water. It shatters on the ground, like it does in any home. The sound echoes for a moment. She gives out a quick cry.

He has a moment to wonder if she knows what is happening before it starts.

He sees the twinkling glass on the floor before the sound has finished the long journey from his ear drum to his temporal lobe to his frontal cortex. There it is split in to several signals. One is sent to his hippocampus for processing and storing. It processes what he thinks about the sound from memory, and how he feels about it. It also forms a signal of this memory.

The problem comes when his brain starts to process the memory. It wants to categorize it. It flips through the files quickly and finds other similar occurrences. That is when the process becomes disaster.

He doesn’t want to close his eyes, and he must look away immediately. He rushes to get rid of the sight. It is too late for the sound. He feels a brief moment of fear for what he doesn’t want to have happen.

He blinks on his way to get the vacuum. This is something billions of people have done, and to almost zero incidents of harm. They blink, just for a second on their way to get a cleaning device. For him, it is doom.

He sees it. He cannot deny it. He cannot run from it.

His cousin falls to the table, bleeding, a glass falls to the floor and shatters.

The blink is over and the ghost is gone. He can still breathe. It is ok.

He gets the vacuum and brings it to the kitchen. His wife is there. She is apologetic, frantically so. He wonders again if she knows what is happening or if this is part of her baggage. He tells her everything is fine and she need not worry. It was just an accident.

He shakes these thought aside as the guilt over the thoughts rises like bile in his throat. Is her reaction his fault? Is she afraid he will be angry? He tries to reassure both of them that everything is fine, but he can’t look in her direction. The glass is there.

He blinks and sees the bad man clutch his throat where the knife is lodged. His eyes are bugging out of his fucking head like in a cartoon. The bad man falls next to his cousin.

When he opens his eyes after the blink, a thought bounces; that’s what he should have been doing that day, watching cartoons. He was just a child.

He banishes all thought. He must clear his mind immediately. He must fill it with nonsense and poppycock. He must find some shit that doesn’t remind him of anything.

The vacuum is loud. The sound is aggravating. His heart is racing, pounding at his temples.

He begins to drum on the counter. Please shut up. The vacuum ignores his admonition.

He blinks.

He sees a screen door in his mind. He remembers the time he put his hand through a screen door. He remembers the sound of the glass breaking.

He hadn’t meant to. He was rushing to get somewhere important. She needed him to do this for her, and he would do anything for her.

He had thrust his arm out to open the door, but missed the frame and caught the window.

His eyes open again, and he thinks, was the breaking glass of a windshield the last sound she had ever heard?

His mind is out of control at this point. His thought careen from one piece of broken glass to another. Some include blood, some include tears, some aren’t even memories at all, and are just glasses breaking in his head. Tall glasses, short glasses, fancy glasses, cheap glasses. Windows, doors, finally just large sheets of glass, like the ones only carried by workers in a comedy.

His entire body is tense. The muscles are contracted and he is holding himself back, from what? He doesn’t know. He looks at the counter and is convinced for a nano second that he would feel better if he could rip the counter top off. Some sort of primal rage thing.

That’s when he knows they are not alone. That is when he can smell the breath of the monster. It smells metallic. It comes out in quick shallow snorts. It is warm, no hot. It is smokey.

He knows the monster is in him, he knows this is a metaphor. He knows this is just what he tells himself when his guilt is overwhelming.

He is desperate for a distraction.

He rushes to the internet. Surely, something funny must exist on the internet.

He finds something that is both funny and devoid of connection for him. He shares it with his wife. He is worried about sitting next to her on the couch, because he might smell like fear.

His heart is still pounding, his vision still sharp, his need to fight or run or hide still strong. He tries to quell the feeling but it isn’t there.

He becomes convinced she doesn’t notice. He notices he is shaking and he can hear the tone in his voice, but she does not. He must get away from her before she notices and makes a thing out of it. He wants the feeling to pass and knows if they talk about it, it will not. It will linger for days.

He retreats to find something else to do. She has already moved on with her day. She wants to get the mundane done and out of the way so that they have time for fun later.

She asks him about cleaning the dishes and he breaks.

He doesn’t break because of the cleaning. He breaks because he knows that the silence of the act will allow his brain to tiptoe through the minefield.

When this is happening he has to occupy his mind with something or else his mind will fill in the blanks and he will perseverate. He won’t sleep for days. The waking nightmares will come. The cold sweats will drench him and he will hate himself and everything that he has ever done.

He gets mad about the fact that she doesn’t see what is happening. He knows he was trying to hide it and that isn’t fair.

They begin a slow burn argument.

He picks up the vacuum to put it away and he hears a tinkling. A single piece of glass, almost triangular in shape and about the size of a silver dollar clinks to the ground.

He isn’t sure for how long he stands there drumming a beat on the counter before he picks up the piece of glass. Could have been a second, could have been an hour.

He wants to jump out of his skin now.

The adrenaline is not so good tasting. There is no outlet for it.He is shoving it down inside.

The argument continues for a minute until he yells that they have to stop. He wants her to know what is happening to him and he tries to tell her.

He wants to cry, but that particular gesture has escaped him for the last twenty years.

The fear turns to anger. There is no one to pay the bill though, and so before anything other than a yelled “Stop!” can happen it turns to guilt.

He shouldn’t feel this way. He is drumming on the counter in an anxious gesture.

Fear mingles with the guilt of not being able to handle the sound of a glass breaking. No one is hurt, either by it or him. He would run before hurting anyone else; nevertheless, he knows this is dumb and he is stronger than this.

He can’t look at her, or anything else for that matter.

He is afraid he is going to withdraw completely.

He runs upstairs to type this.

So, this is the most real and open I have been about this sort of thing. This is a PTSD triggering for me. I am open to questions and comments, so feel free to do so.