Page 66 of Undefeated

“Again, I can’t do anything for you right now. I can get you something to help you sleep, but that’s about it,” he responded.

I shook my head. Drugs were the last thing I wanted, “No, I’ll be fine. Tomorrow it is.”

He nodded his head and walked out.

I raised my legs up onto the bed and relaxed. As I looked at the ceiling, it wasn’t what I necessarily wanted to admit, but my means of recovery from this was going to be my own. There wasn’t a doctor, psychiatrist or psychologist that was going to cure me.

They, without a doubt, would all tell me the same thing.

You’ll need to just accept it. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll start doing better.

I closed my eyes and attempted to come to terms with the fact that my father was someone that I would beat the absolute hell out of if I was given a chance.

SHANE. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he was a Marine,” I answered in response to the doctor’s question regarding my father’s military background.

“Well, the human mind is a very complex device. We all deal with stress, memories, and the repression of memories differently. Our mind often, as a survival skill of sorts, places memories on a back shelf. Over time, we forget they even exist. In our conscious mind they aren’t a memory. Like a deleted movie scene, if that makes sense,” the doctor paused and tapped his pen on the desk.

“Look at it this way. You have a favorite movie. It resembles many other movies by the same director with the same cast. You watch it one time, just once. You recall a fondness for the movie a few years later, and decide to watch it again. You place the DVD in the player, but there’s something different. One short movie scene has been deleted – completely eliminated. And you rewind the movie and watch it again - but the scene is gone. You begin to wonder if it was ever there at all. You rewind the movie again, and watch it entirely. Nothing. You’re now convinced that the scene was never there at all. Over years of recollections regarding the movie, your new memory never includes the deleted scene,” he stopped tapping his pen and smiled, convinced he made his point about repressed memories.

“I suspect this,” he continued as he touched his finger to his lip, obviously thinking.

“I suspect the small chest or foot locker at your girlfriend’s house had something in it that reminded you of your fathers military foot locker. Probably an odor,” he paused again and looked at me as if waiting for an answer.

“Well, it smelled really strong when she opened it. Kind of musty,” I recalled.

“And you said earlier that you used to cover your face with your blanket as a child? When you would hide in your room?” he asked.

“Yes,” I admitted, remembering years of hiding under the blanket as a small child.

“It was your safe place?” he asked.

“Yes,” I responded, somewhat frustrated that he wanted to talk about this again.

He tapped his finger on his lip.

“You lived in Los Angeles?” he asked.

“Oceanside at the time, by the military base. Say, closer to San Diego,” I responded.

“A very warm climate none the less,” he stated.

I nodded, “Yes sir.”

“Did you have the same bedding for the summer and winter? Not that there’s much of a winter in San Diego,” he asked.

I slumped into the comfort of the couch cushion. I pulled my hood from behind my shoulders, and onto my head. I looked up at the ceiling and thought. The summers in Oceanside were very hot, and I spent a lot of time at the beach. When it was winter, it was warm, but not hot. At night, it would get cold. When it was cold, I had my blanket that had the fighter jets on it. We kept that blanket in…

“My father kept the blankets in a foot locker, in the garage. We would get them out in the fall,” I blurted out as soon as I recalled the memory of it.

“Mothballs,” he stated.

“Excuse me?” I said, confused.

I sat up from my seated position and pulled my hood from my head.

“Mothballs. It’s very common for people in warmer climates to use mothballs when storing clothes and fabrics in a chest or locker. It prevents moths from eating the fabric in the off season. Your childhood blanket that you covered your face with – the one that was your childhood protection - it probably smelled of mothballs. Yesterday, when the chest at the foot of the bed was opened, the odor of mothballs resurrected the memories that your mind had repressed for two decades. Odor is a strong trigger,” he said as he dropped the pen onto his desk.

I sat and thought about what he had said. I didn’t immediately feel better knowing why I had recalled the memories, but it was reassuring to know what had happened. Mothballs.