Twisted Love

Childhood trauma is linked to sleep disturbances, difficulty with emotions, struggles with social interaction, certain sexual and romantic preferences, and memory loss. The lasting effects of Alex’s and Ava’s childhood trauma impact how they utilize coping mechanisms, approach love, and manage emotion which influences the trajectory of their relationship. Both Alex and Ava struggle with nightly sleep disturbances. While Alex’s manifest as insomnia, Ava’s result in night terrors. Alex also has HSAM—a condition that causes people to remember most things about their life in vivid detail—which further exacerbates his insomnia. He spends most of his nights reliving his memories in excruciating detail. While some of these memories are positive—such as when he first met Ava, or happy memories of a time when his parents and sister were still alive—most of his time and attention is spent combing over the details of the night he witnessed his family murdered. Any memory of Ava’s childhood prior to age nine is completely missing, but through her night terrors, Ava receives snippets of events that transpired during that period of her life. When Alex and Ava open up to one another about their memory struggles, Ava thinks to herself: “How ironic the two of us were sitting here: me, the girl who remembered almost nothing, and Alex, the man who remembered everything” (35).