PTSD. Draw a line, please.

Raquel Pons

Raquel Pons (1993, Madrid, she/her) is a writer, creative writing teacher, and artistic researcher exploring the embodiment of trauma, cruelty, power relations, and desire. Her work investigates how language is a tool to perpetuate power structures and a means of breaking them. Her pieces have been included in various anthologies, as well as in international magazines such as Iowa Literaria and Rio Grande Review. The cultural platform Masquepalabras invited her to participate in Caravana de poetas, and she was granted a scholarship by the Can Serrat artist residency (Catalonia, Spain), where she finished her literary speculative weird fiction novel about trauma and desire. She is currently one of the artists of the European project Future Language Innovation (2025-2026) and a student in the MFA in Creative Writing at ArtEZ (The Netherlands), where she is researching the language of trauma while writing a novel about hell.

PTSD. Draw a line, please

INT. APARTMENT IN MADRID – NOON

She locks every bolt. Instead of unpacking the suitcase and starting a load of laundry, she sits on the sofa and tries to breathe. She cannot feel her arms, though she knows they are there. She sees them as if she were in a first-person video game, but there is a bug: the body does not respond. Inside the suitcase, the jeans and the T-shirt that, instead of washing, she would rather burn. The clothes are mine. The girl without arms is me.

EXT. PARTY IN THE WOODS IN ASTURIAS – NOON?
I’m peeing by a tree. All around me, dozens of people are doing the same. The reggaeton makes the undergrowth rumble. As I am pulling up my jeans, a guy approaches. A friend of my friend, he is lost. Shall we go together?, he asks. There are more people than trees. I take his hand. Halfway there, he turns around and kisses me. Fade to black.

INT. APARTMENT IN MADRID – NIGHT
My body tosses and turns in bed. Did I lock the door? Every time I close the eyes, the woods, the kiss, and:

EXT. OUTSIDE MY GYM – NOON?
The instructor approaches and puts his hand on my shoulder.

INT. WRITING WORKSHOP CLASSROOM – NOON?
A classmate asks me what he has to do to fuck me.

¿INT. OR EXT.? APARTMENT IN MADRID – NOON?
Please, open the door for me, my ex whines, crouched on the doormat.

INT. FIRST HOME – NOON?
My body is fifteen. My parents are gone. My first boyfriend holds a knife.

INT. SUPERMARKET – AFTERNOON
My body goes to the supermarket, although it is not hungry, nor tired; it feels nothing except a slight tremor. It is delirious, as if it had a fever: all the customers in the supermarket are looking at me. When I leave, a car will follow me. And then another. I know it isn’t real, I know that none of those memories are actually happening again, but I don’t know how to tell my body that.

INT. CENTRO DE CRISIS 24H CONTRA LA VIOLENCIA SEXUAL – EVENING
The psychologist asks my body to draw the events on a timeline. But the events curve, they knot themselves, they form a spiral. Int. Ext. Int. Ext. ¿Int. or Ext.? Int. Int. Int. Help.