A little more about our Hero, Before the Fox Came: . . . and the Cunning Fennec Fox

     Strange and sad how the world defines its things for us and how we ourselves are defined by it.  Truly we are only anthropomorphized animals.  We are merely man-shaped critters.

     I wasn't always the Cunning Fennec Fox, for I was born a tiger cub.

      

     I was born in northern California into a close-knit family of four, five years too late, 20 years too late, the third and last living child to a military man and his military wife.  Born after an earlier miscarriage, a would-have-been sister, I, a mistake, began recently to consider myself an only child.  So what now?   Shall I seek forgiveness for being the Family Fuck-up?  Certainly.  But as is often said about those who have strayed from the White Sheep path once or 15 times too many, I fear forgiveness, and the road to it, (at least as far as family goes) shall be a long road indeed, if I can ever travel it to begin with.

 

I used to have friends also, but they learned more and more of the AlternateMe, the potential for evil that (we all) I carry with me like a secret, a terrible sack filled with tears and darkness, grief and pain and lies.  A sack so heavy that it would surely break the back of a lesser man.  I have learned the valuable lesson that a sack filled with my own burdens will never be too much to bear.  Not because I am stronger than the weight of my pain, but because I am incrementally weighted; there is no proverbial back-breaking straw for this camel .  We endure, we two-legged beasts of burden.  The trouble is, too often we bear the bags of sand filled cruelly by others.  To use another metaphor, I have simply tired of looking from the stern and seeing the wake of my passing, the flotsam and jetsam that trails behind me like the pollution that it is.  I am truly sorry for the pain I have caused others and myself.

     My So-Called-Friends know where I am . . . know where I live and work and go to school.  These friends, like old wives, like the lovers of my past, making and breaking vows that were supposed to last longer than Twinkies and nuclear waste.

      I have a beautiful daughter, somewhere, who knows who I am perhaps, that I have not seen for 17 years or so, who knows of me if not me myself, and who surely knows where I am.  "She'll find you one day," say those who know nothing of the dark heart I have buried behind me.  "You just hang in there, m'kay?"

 

      Sure.  Hang in there.   I have never loved more deeply or ardently than the love that I feel pour out of my heart for my beautiful baby girl.  My 19 year old baby girl. 

     I have seen, because of the nature of the recovery circles that peppered my previous-ness, people wait to live until their loved ones come back into their lives, full of distrust and fear, apprehensive that their fist-fulls of One More Times aren't just pieces of silver that will be tossed into the Tiber

like offal, or perhaps even spent on Aceldama, a field forever fallow.  

     I will not wait to live.   I will not bide my time for those who may never love me again, who know just where I am and still make no attempts to meet me, to reconnect and see the healing .  I cannot wait sitting idle, thinking that life will begin once my kid comes back into my life.

 

      I must begin to live right now.

 

      To be a cliche, life really is far too short.  My mother, her brain ruined by strokes, unable to be the woman she was and wanted to be in the future that should have been hers.

 

      She was 48 years old when her brain betrayed her, but she died in her semi-paretic state a terrible 26 years later.  What was the lesson for her in that?  You live a good life only to spend the last third of it wasting away?  Bruxism tearing away your broken teeth, dying confused and afraid?  "it's all part of God's plan, " I am told . . .  "HE works in mysterious ways . . ."

 

      The Old Man, forever "Sir," dead in 1988 at the age of 50.  He had been admitted for secondary respiratory symptoms related to his COPD and cancerous tumors that ate his lungs.  He dismissed all the visitors from his hospital room, then he let his cardiovascular system fail him, a condition completely unrelated to his respiratory crises.   His abdominal aorta exploded, ripping fast and wide like the Earth on a fault, killing him in seconds.  Both of my parents died from something breaking inside and spilling warm.  My sweet mother from a broken brain . . . my angry father from a broken heart.

      The brevity of existence.

 

      As I said, he was alone. It seems he was too proud or ashamed or stubborn, maybe, to do something so weak as to  die in front of anyone.

  

      Early on, I think, my mother saw in me the sociopath I probably am (if you believe the pshrinks that diagnosed me in my teens) and she tried to get me to channel those ways, to use these terrible skills for the furthering of us humans, to do my minuscule and finite part to ratchet up the evolution of our species.  They called me "Tiger" then, still a cub at two and three and four and five, and I swelled with pride at the thought of being such a handsome and powerful creature,

a graceful and fearsome critter atop the food chain of his environs. 

     I find the dichotomy of later becoming a healer a lesson in the duality of man; this angry monster, Eater of Man, with a burning desire to solve the puzzle of disease and improve an individual's quality of life.   What a fool was I.

 

      So what is it, do you think, that I should do about this "Crazy Little Thing Called Love?" The last time, the second time I ever fell in love, I found that my heart is a dangerous creature.  Perhaps those that have loved me in the past saw this in me, and were very afraid.

     It attacks me at will, this heart . . . it hurts me at every opportunity, and I must learn again how to suppress this

ugly animal. I simply knew better than to let my heart yearn, to let it reach for that THING that will never be mine. Ever.

  

     I fell in love once again with a woman from whom promises can be made whimsically, a crazy whirlwind of mercurial oaths that change with the capriciousness afforded only to those whose hearts are dysfunctional. Oh, the things she said to me . . . 

Please do not misunderstand.  I know me better than anyone and to be honest, I was amazed that someone like her could contemplate being with someone like me in the first place.  I don't blame her one IOTA.  The fault lies solely upon my own shoulders.

 

     As I said, I should've known better. I know that love is neurochemical; that it can be explained rather easily once we know how the great chemistry of our encephalon works.

     So I recover from the blows of love, for lack of a better phrase, and come out the better person for it.  We are, none of us, simply the best and worst things we have ever done.  We should never judge one another this way, if at all, and we should never expect more from others than we care to give from ourselves.  We must remember that others are as broken as we ourselves are, that we should not expect others to fix us when they themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, are broken, too . . .

     I am healing, both myself and my own little corner of the world.  Like most of us, despite the misanthrope I pretend to be, are good people who, sadly, do bad things.  

     I will care for someone again someday;  I will feel for them that which they need to feel from me up to the limitations I can give.  We all, I think, know this of ourselves.  I am merely, in a very roundabout way, stating the obvious.  I will however be much more guarded, never again extending trust and faith so blindly to the words of another that could be couched in lies.

     I don't believe anyone, even those who would call me their "mon cher," will ever Love Me Dizzy.

     So I return to college, bettering myself, choosing, I think, a field (computer sciences) forever as necessary as medicine.

     I believe in myself, despite the things others may say to break me down.  I will succeed once again . . .  maybe twice.

     Like you, Patient Reader, I have dreams even still, that require nurturing, and as I have stated before, I will surround myself with those that make me feel good, that build me up, and discard or at least minimize the time spent with those who do not.  I will strive to be happy.