I am pretty sure I’ve discovered a new fairy who has been in my life for some time now. I’m calling her The Trauma Fairy, and my belief is she goes into our minds while we sleep and erases things that are just too awful to remember. One of the more dramatic times she visited me was the night that Wendy died, and she censored things that I saw to the point that no matter how hard I try to see them, all I see is a fuzzy blackness. Everything else in the image is clear, just the horror has been marked over. Same thing with things I occasionally hear that I find distressing, or certain aspects of my childhood. Try as I might, I will remember every other detail of the conversation or memory, but not that one little upsetting peice of traumatic information.

I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer almost religiously every night, working my way through the seasons with my very patient husband. The last episode I remember seeing when the show was on TV in 2001 is the one where Buffy’s mom dies, and we passed that one a few days ago. I have no memory of watching any of the other episodes in Season 5, but after watching the season finale last night I’m starting to wonder.

I remember the finale because that is when I learned that Buffy’s middle name is the same as Wendy’s. Isn’t that a strange synchronicity? And I remember seeing the finale because I vowed that I would never, ever, EVER watch Buffy again after that show. What I’m not sure of anymore is whether I had seen any of the episodes in between Buffy’s mom’s death and the end of the season. This is where The Trauma Fairy quite possibly has come back in.

Those months from February to April/May of 2001 were among the worst of my life. Fresh hit with post-traumatic stress disorder, I was struggling to get through each day when the slightest loud noise had my heart racing and I would put my head down as if that cunt who killed Wendy was screaming at me again, “Don’t look at my face! Get your head down, bitch!”

I didn’t write much during that time, other than my university work. But in the few journals I have from 2001, my handwriting barely looks like mine, and seeing those journals now takes me right back to those horrors. I’m starting to think that The Trauma Fairy was there that entire time, cleaning things up at night while I fitfully slept and made it so that now, 8 years later, I am able to function without so many of the trauma symptoms. Buffy was so inextricably linked with good times with Wendy, however at the same time my memory of Wendy will forever be linked with her terrible murder . Watching Buffy these days seems to be bringing these wounds way back up to the surface, and I’m hyper aware of how much work The Trauma Fairy has done to clean up my mind so that today, in 2008, I can function in this world mostly normally.

I wonder if there will ever come a time where the veil The Trauma Fairy has put over certain awful experiences will ever lift, and what it would take to be strong enough to fully remember.