It was probably a butt dial. I was in the office, having just come out of a meeting. It rang twice, and as I reached for it, the ringing stopped. Her name was on the screen. It was 11.22am. I stared at it in disbelief… and then the fear took hold. I looked over at my colleague. “She called me.” His eyes widened. “Don’t call her back!” I shook my head, “no, absolutely not.”

I will never know whether it was a butt dial or something else. The call lasted only seconds. The phone rang twice and then stopped. Her name remained on the screen long after the ringing had ended.

We have had no contact in four months apart from a few cursory communications through legal channels. What had once been so beautiful had taken a turn that I still could not comprehend. The questions would ring through my head day by day, hour by hour. Never any respite. Always haunting. “How could she have done that?” “Why, Why, Why?” Never leaving me. 

I had begun to sleep better over the past couple of weeks, but only the night before I had woken at 3am with the same questions flooding through my head. A few nights earlier, she and her family had appeared in my dreams, taunting me with their very presence…never letting me go. “Please, just leave me be!”

Trauma is a strange thing to deal with. You think you are getting better; you will work on the positives. You will tell yourself to move on. You might even become more functional – to start focusing again on the fundamentals of existence.  To find new avenues for your energy and self expression. To live again. And then the call comes in. The butt dial. The trigger.

I had to excuse myself. I got in my car, shaking. I went to the nearest Dunkin, got a coffee and parked in a secluded lot around the corner. And then I sobbed for the next half hour. Shaking. Bawling like a poor lost boy. A boy who had lost everything. Abandoned. Alone in grief.

That for me is trauma.

Back in my home office,  I rearranged my meetings and then I sat on the floor and cried some more. I eventually picked up that phone, and went to block her number but pressed the wrong button. It rang once. I hung up, “Goddammit!” 

Trauma is not the phone call. Trauma is what the phone call awakens.