Soul Shattered Phoenix

* Starting again *

I

Where do I even begin?

Refuge life is a whole new world to me.

I crash landed with a bang as always, I don’t think life has ever been any different. I was unphased and immune to critical gaze from a very young age. It doesn’t not hurt, it just hurts far less than any other pain I am experiencing at the time so you really just learn to embrace it as part of the entire trauma experience. If those looking had experienced half the pian I have experienced in my life they would have shot themselves in the head a long time ago….keep gawking, I’ll get over it eventually.

29.04.2025

It took seven months to get here. To safety.

I think……..?

Gwenne had been holding my hand from a distance over text and phone the past few days as I was bouncing around the hotels that my local council had housed me in. I knew she was waiting for me at the end of the taxi ride. A torturous, never-ending taxi ride with the most querulous driver there ever was. I suppose it was inevitable that Amanda at the council cocked up this booking too. Not only had she wasted the council far too much money on non disabled, non refundable rooms and wasted taxi journeys. She had forgotten to pay for the fifteen minute stop she had arranged for me to collect my bags and use the rest room before the final leg of my journey, and now Raoul was steaming and becoming less agreeable by the minute.

In the week leading up to this eventuality, Amanda at the council had had me racing round the town in the blistering heat in my decrepit wheelchair essentially doing all the legwork for her. This was not my nice, suitable for all terrain chair. This was a replacement from someone who had used it and broken it, but it was not sufficient for self propelling. Never mind the severe motor tics I was suffering and had warned Amanda that the tics quite often triggered seizures. I’m still learning all of this. During my stay at the hospital, the first instance, it was suggested I may have Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) , and by the end of my second leg it was very clear that that was what had hit me, pretty severely. But it made sense, after all I have been through this year alone, let alone anything prior. Carting all my luggage around a rather precipitous landscape at Amanda’s beck and call all week had me exhausted. The hard work, a lot of biting my tongue and a bucketful of patience had finally paid off, I had secured temporary accommodation.

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So here I was, minutes away from my secret meeting point, Gwenne waiting well past her shift end to meet me. Reassuring me the whole way that she would have words with the ‘dick’ of a driver that was ferrying me there rather aggressively. “Deep breaths, deep breaths” I whispered to myself as I watched the minutes slowly tick by on my barely living, beaten phone handset that was smudged with sweat and smeared with dirt from my blackened and blistered hands. Perhaps a few snot laden tears had also been lazily wiped with a filthy cuff, leaving snail trail-like streaks slightly crusted around the edges of the screen.

I took a few long slow drags on my keychain breathing whistle to try and ground myself a little. My legs were jelly in epitomising and conflicting ways. No will in the world could have settled or eased them. I’m sure I could feel the lactic acid from their stiffened and cramped position being pumped throughout my entire body, amplifying the adrenaline already cascading through my veins, as they trembled rapidly, distorting the vision of my dimmed phone screen even further. “Don’t dare die on me” I prayed as we came off the dual carriageway. It’s starting to look hopeful. I knew which car I was looking out for, Gwenne had described it to me, she was waiting just as she said, window down, a smile and a wave as the taxi pulled into the adjacent space.

Finally. I could breathe.

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Room 9

“Can I have a hug?”

“Of course darling, come here” she carefully gave me a gentle embrace after I had clambered out of the hot sweaty taxi that had housed my fraught stressed and snivelling body the past hour. The taxi driver was still on the phone to his manager about the underpayment from the council and desperately trying to negotiate his payments by attempting to flag Gwenne’s attention, but she was having none of it.

“Let me sort him out, just get yourself in the car darling, you’ve made it, you are safe now, you don’t need to be worrying about idiots like this guy, I’m so sorry it’s been so shitty getting here. What’s his problem anyway, he’s squabbling over a few pounds getting a homeless woman in a wheelchair to a refuge. Honestly, there are assholes everywhere, I’m just sorry it had to happen to you today.”

Gwenne made me feel instantly at ease. You know when you can instantly tell when you can feel at ease around a person, and when you can’t? There was no doubts with Gwenne, I already had a feeling I would feel this way when meeting her because we had been in contact the past few days, and really she had been the only hope I had left at this point. But I instantly knew in that moment. I was safe.