Savage

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

 When I got to rehab on February 8, 2008, I learned very quickly that telling war stories was deeply frowned upon. I also learned that my fellow rescues wanted to talk about little else, so we did it quietly. Seriously though, what else were we supposed to talk about? We were all decimated by our recent life choices, and we thought that to speak of the trails of wreckage that we had left in our wakes was too intimate for strangers. We all knew why we were there. We were there on that island because we had destroyed our lives, we were there because we had hurt everyone we loved, or because no one loved us, or so we thought. The truth was more likely that WE didn’t love us, and that hurts. It hurts a lot, and we weren’t ready to go there yet.

To this date, my shoulder has never fully recovered from the 18 hours of unmoving sleep that I spent with it pinned at an awkward angle under my head in the hospital the day before. I hadn’t been sleeping much. I was physically beat up because I kept having accidents at work like falling on a upright stem of rebar, or stepping through the joists, or falling on the top a wall and cracking my left short rib. I nearly cut off my foot when I bound the blade of the skilsaw when I was trimming the edge off the floor ply and it kicked back at me. I was actually relieved when my partner in this house building endeavour fired me. He’d put up with my shenanigans for long enough. He loved me, still does, he’s a brother to me still, but back then he just couldn’t watch me anymore.

I then had a lot more time to spend by myself at home where I had turned the pictures of my children and wife to face the wall. I couldn’t bear it. They were all long gone. They couldn’t bear it either. Just like me. I wasn’t going to make it to the streets.

I ate a lot of cheese in those days when I wasn’t too high to eat, along with the occasional carrot. The cheese was, I don’t know, dense and quiet. I eventually stopped eating carrots because chewing them was so loud in my head that I couldn’t listen for whatever it was that I thought was hiding in the cupboards-which I could see into because I had all the doors open-and was waiting to jump out and get me. In my head were the endless visions of the shotgun blasted skull of my friend, and the last moments that I’d spent with my dying Mother, because those were easier than the thoughts of my departed family.

We always do what we think is best, even when it’s pretty obviously wrong. Endurance and recovery are hard, and they take a very long time, but numbing is easy, at least for a while. But humans are hard to kill; we are built to fight, to resist, and to live, and it’s very hard to convince a body to quit even when it wants to. I witnessed that stubborn strength in the protracted battle of my Mother against cancer. We struggle against the inevitable from our first heartbeat, maybe even sooner, and it’s a tough habit to break.

I didn’t want to die because I couldn’t face my kids, I wanted to live so that I deserved to. I was terrified of dying in that state, pathetic, and useless. Broken, too broken to conceive a life worth living, and in my misery, it all seemed limitless. An endless, wretched existence.

We didn’t start telling stories like these until day 4 or 5. Of 42. Some people never cracked, some people left, some people died. It’s a rough sport, addiction. Statistically, almost no one survives it simply because sober life is so much harder.

Very few people are born addicts, it’s not a natural state. They are just tolerable and intolerable levels of pain, and the diversion of drugs, or whatever your chosen coping strategy might be, like shopping, or work, or crossfit, seem to help with that, but only with moderation. And you’ve still got to pay for what you’ve done; that’s how it works, and it takes a lot of courage to walk back into that room, or that life, if you’re allowed, then assess the damages to figure out how you’re going to square up. If you’re lucky, you’ll be forgiven, and that takes about 10% off the top, and that’s a pretty good start, but starting is easy.

I was desperate to see my kids, but seeing them almost broke me all over again because clearer minds feel guilt very keenly when they look into clear eyes. It’s not enough to say you’re sorry, and you were sad, and sick, and you’re going to do better, that’s just the beginning. Forgiveness does not wipe away memory, and it’s almost inevitable that you you will remind people of why they didn’t trust you back then, or now. Time is irrelevant to memory; to them, you are who you’ve been.

I wrote a poem in early recovery. I wrote a bunch of them, and maybe I’ll share some here at some point, but this one ended like this, “The past a wedge between his lonely need and dream, and the water below says that he will drown. He leaves to prove how much it means to stay around.”

Early recovery is brutal. Recovery is you, naked and alone in a dark room, trying to reassemble the shattered remains of a mirror. Every move cuts, and you’re endlessly bleeding. Your jagged reflection is a shadow that you can only see because you stubbornly refuse to let the light die entirely. But you refuse to let the light die entirely, and that’s enough to work with. Fed by courage and dogged persistence, that light will brighten, and with it, you will see only the enormity of the work in front of you, and you will keep doing it even when you can’t, even after you abandon hope that rope of sand. You will suffer so greatly, but it’s the only way out of that dark room. It’s the only way to share yourself again, and that is what you need to do, because you’re worth it.

In rehab we weren’t supposed to tell war stories, but we did. I didn’t tell any of the war stories that I thought I might tell today, but I wrote about the one I’m in, the one that I’m still fighting, the one I’ll always be fighting. I did write about the only war worth winning.

I’ve always been fascinated by war, and by the unfathomable strength, and courage, and compassion shown by those who endure it’s savagery. Soldiers, children, war breaks all, and leaves everything in shambles, especially the survivors.

I’ve read a lot of soldier stories. I’ve heard a lot of veteran’s tales, and they all agree on this; you can leave the war when it’s done with you, or when you think you’re done with it, and you can go back to where you used to live if it still stands, and return to your family and friends if you still have any, and you did what you did, for good or ill, and you didn’t have to think about it at the time because you were just trying to make it out alive, but now you have to pay for what you did, no matter what, and so few understand because they weren’t there, and the ones who were are brutalized, just like you, and so you just have to find a place to begin, and you have to do it alone because it doesn’t matter how much support you have, how much love, how much means, if you don’t think you’re worth living for, you won’t.

So you have to be.........human.

Coming home was the hardest thing I had ever done, and I’ve been compulsively moving around for the last 16 years because I don’t want to bring the war home and break it all to pieces. It’s hard for me to burn bright without igniting all into flame.

I keep the light on, though, so that I can be found, and I can see well enough to know that I’ll never be done.

I have a place in this world, and I’ll fight for it.

Sometimes I don’t feel like I deserve it.

But I do.

Recover.

Burn bright.