Thanks for your Patience, Reader and the Cunning Fennec Fox

13 October 2013

circa 1300 hrs

Good day, Patient Reader,

           Thanks for coming back, even though there’s been a dearth of postings as of late. 

            Between school and, well, studying, there hasn’t been a lot of time.  I am at right about 60 hours a week in school with all involved, but it’s good for what’s left of my brain, and it keeps me out of trouble.

             Well, gotta tell you, that lady I met on the bus?  Pretty darn cool, as it turns out.  Smart and sexy, which often are one and the same, but she is both.  We’ll call her…  Shmorrie*.

             Things are going swimmingly at this point, but I know that if I talk about it too much then I may jinx it.  Now I am not superstitious.  I believe that being superstitious brings bad luck…

          Suffice it to say that we’re going for a ride, and it’s pretty fun.  She is at a stage where it would be nice for her to hear things, things that I am yet unable to say.  I have said things in the past to others that hurt them, and so I try to choose carefully what I do say now, sometimes at the expense of those who need to hear them.

           I have also made promises to others that I have not been able to keep, and I regret these things.  I cannot go back to these, the chattering monkeys screeching in my brain, and pretend I can say things that will heal the wounds I have inflicted.  (Not that these people would agree to see me anyway).  The blade of my Heart was sharp, and cut deeply beneath the weight of its Pain.

           I had also heard promises.  Promises from women in whom I would believe ‘til the sun stopped rising (I know, hyperbole is the worst thing ever) and I believed them because I wanted to.  Someone like me with a love like that from her…?  Ladies, you have no idea the power you wield.

           All I can do now is say what I mean and mean what I say (I know, clichés are a dime a dozen).  I will not tell a woman anything she wants, or even needs to hear, just to make myself feel better. But I won’t tell her anything I do not mean or cannot back up.  I won’t make any promises I cannot keep.  But I think that’s a good thing, because she should know that what I say is true, that it means something when I tell her that I care for her, right?

            I think I remember telling you, Patient Reader, that my mother had a stroke when I was 14 years old, that her brain betrayed her with a sub-arachnoid hemorrhage, that the mother whom I knew was no longer, and that the 45 year-old me is still unable to explain to the 14 year-old boy why his mother looks the same, yet has been replaced by this doppelganger.

            I had a stupid fight with her the night before, and I refused to tell her goodnight, and I did not tell her that I love her, even though she was my mother, and she was my Heart. 

            I tossed and turned in that bed all night, telling myself that I should go in their bedroom… tell her what I need to tell her, that I’m sorry for being a stupid kid, I’m sorry I can’t seem to handle being an adolescent, and that I really love her even when my under-developed pre-frontal cortex shows otherwise.  Shit, I told my dad I loved him that night, (and he was an asshole most of the time). 

            So I tossed and turned and let my Heart hate my brain.  I had too much pride to go in there and fix it with 5 words: “I’m sorry.  I love you…”

            Then I was awakened the next morning by my father, panic in his voice, telling me to call an ambulance…

            So I vowed, then and there, no more will I leave things unsaid.  No more will I let pride get in front of my brain or my Heart, no more will I toss and turn because I am unable to put to voice that which I know must be said. 

            “She knows, Bear Cub, she knows…” is what I got from all who were not there.  Surely I could have done something, known that her stroke, a cerebrovascular accident is what they call it, as if she stepped into the street and was hit by a runaway aneurysm…

            Everyone who was not there told me I was not to blame.  But there was another there besides me, wasn’t there?

            I was the cub.  The Baby Bear, at a crossroads.  The cub with the ability to begin to change his species, to alter the course of his own evolution.  The world changed me from the Tiger Cub long ago, but I could become anything I wanted fro here on out.  

             I could be the soaring hawk or the wise young owl.  I could be the swift deer or the majestic elk.  Or maybe I could be a Human Being...  

             But my father was the Grizzly.  The Boar Bear, the killer of things and the eater of decaying flesh, corpses buried and dug up at his hunger’s whim.  

            He was the only other person who was there.  He was the only person who ever said to me, “Did you ever stop and think that maybe you were the cause of your mother’s stroke…?”

            I decided then and there that it was good to be the Bear.

*...  names have been changed to protect the guilty...