It wasn't the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated {in myself, anyway} with having narrowly missed death.

It wasn't the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated {in myself, anyway} with having narrowly missed death.

(0 Reviews)

This passage captures the raw and fragmented emotional landscape one navigates after a traumatic event. The narrator's introspection about whether the woman shares the same haunting nightmares, fears, and dissociative experiences highlights a deep loneliness and isolation that trauma often inflicts. Particularly striking is the metaphor of the body and soul being physically separated yet tethered, illustrating a profound internal division and sense of alienation from oneself. It speaks to the complex aftermath of trauma, where the self is fragmented, vulnerable, and observing from a distance, struggling to reconcile the past experience with the present reality.

The description of her laughter as reckless and propelled by giddiness linked to narrowly escaping death conveys a paradox of emotions: relief intertwined with hysteria and thrill. It portrays how close brushes with mortality can distort typical emotional responses, creating moments where joy and recklessness blend into each other. Associating these feelings with previous wild nights and friendships personalized with Boris adds texture to the narrator's psyche, suggesting that such emotional eruptions are both familiar and unsettling.

Overall, the extract reflects on the incomprehensible and often unspoken burdens carried by survivors of trauma - the invisible scars, the recurring fears, and the fractured inner self. It offers a poignant look at human resilience, vulnerability, and the complex ways people come to terms with near-death experiences and their psychological aftermaths.

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May 24, 2025

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