3

Trauma is pathetic. No matter how Grand the reason for the trauma, it’s always the same. It’s just fear. It’s always a waste of time. That’s why it’s hard to look it in the face and accept its presence. The only dignity in having trauma is the quiet knowledge that it’s Real.
The trauma was in my body. It was forced upon me. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t feel the truth: the Value down to my fingertips. The Value is what saved me on 25^th birthday, I understood just the day before that the only natural movements of a human being were ones of royalty; every man the movements of a king, every woman the movements of a queen. I could almost feel it, but not quite.
Whenever I can’t feel it, it’s truths are just the Toughness insisting to me what‘s true, and my endurance will run out, and at that point comes the next suicide attempt.
I’m always trying to distract people. When it comes to work, I’m all work. When it comes to subjects, I’m all subjects, I hate to show myself. It’s the opposite of how to live.
It’s How you do, it’s Who you are that counts, not the work, the subject, the distraction. When I don’t live that way, I feel like I’m giving other people something they didn’t earn.
All the Abuse was, was a distraction, combated with daydreams of my own. All that the Story’s ever been was a distraction, that’s why June 1^st was such a shock, my mind suddenly clear, the distraction had been distracting me from my own memory, memories always there, lurking in the shadows, condemning the Abusers like I could never have imagined at the time.
To be the sheer Value and nothing else, that‘s the only way to live. I remember the Buck, majestic, with its antlers, standing outside my window in the cold, the way it stood, the way it looked at me.
In some sex dreams, especially when I was young, instead of me being the one having sex, it’s like I would become the guy, any other guy, usually someone random off the TV. When I become another guy in the dreams, all that’s happening is I’m taking on the Value.
Nowadays, when I fall asleep with out daydreams, while still feeling the Value down to my fingertips, I already have the Value, I don’t change into another guy, I don’t even feel the need or attraction to.
In the book I’ve been reading, Middlesex, the narrator -- a person with ambiguous sexual organs, a person whose gender cannot be determined scientifically -- does that, enters the man’s body in his sexual world, since he is trapped in what has been assumed a female body. It’s why he’s not a lesbian but more a transexual instead.
The trauma may have had a purpose of its own. It ensured I get it together self-aware-ing-ly, ensuring I wouldn’t f-ck up my kids or waste a good woman’s youth.
Slowly the references to old trauma and stories will disappear, which means at some point the sadness will go away too, and the heavy weight of old fears.

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I catch myself trying not to notice W___ isn’t okay, at least he doesn’t seem okay around me.
I hate it, because I know I’ll fall into that role of being his concierge, his advisor, his confidant, as if he were the Godfather, and I were of some lesser bloodline.
His confidence isn’t good natured, it’s forced, with a set of supporting bullet points at the ready. His conversation is only easy when he’s telling a story about himself.
I know I broke our trust once, but so did he, a year later. We haven’t talked about the year long break in our friendship, we act like it never happened, even though it’s still present, a certain aside look there, a re-posturing there. I want to say to him: so my phone was messing up and I missed a few of your calls.. Big whoop.. After the third missed call he stopped calling. After awhile I thought I had done something seriously wrong and simply had no idea, but since I couldn’t narrow down what exactly it was it simply f-cked with my head. I drunk emailed him once, a few months later, and regretted it.
Our friendship began in the same place, back when I was in Artillery, he was not okay after a violent deployment and I wasn’t okay after a twenty-odd year horror story. But then we changed.
The friendship used to be easy because we wanted the same things, saw the world the same way, but then I got to know him and changed my mind. I didn’t want his brand of confidence, bullet-point dependent as opposed to effortlessly faithful. I knew he was technically younger than me. Things got complicated.
W___ told me once that he’d always been a lone wolf, that a friendship like ours was not the norm for him. It’s the norm for K___. The contrast between the two friendships is strong, even though they both started out the same, with that honeymoon period all friendships start out with.
They say you attract to you who you are, the stark difference between W__ and K___ speaks to changes I know happened in my life but can‘t completely articulate.
Sometimes I think about how my friendships with W__ and K___ both started out the same way: I felt a kind of mild intimidation, coupled with a mild infatuation, like some mystery that always ended with my realizing that I’m one of them, just as good as them .. with my own.
I want to tell W___ that a lot happened that year, that I had my own accomplishments, had lived a life, had even had a blast and maybe he should’ve been there. I want to tell him that just because I freaked out a couple times, it doesn’t mean I’m a freak.
At the beginning of the deployment, over a year ago, he walked up to me at the exchange, and said Hi, and acted like everything was back to normal. I allowed it. We exchanged numbers, we texted occasionally until we got overseas and had to let the cell phones go.
Then we crossed paths here and there on the FOB, including once on the stairs while K___ was on TOC duty. After K__ left to see about his father, it turned out W___’s main buddy had also left and here we were, suddenly dealing with each other.
I have an incidental loyalty toward him that he may or may not deserve. At the time we met I had few close buddies. It was back when friendships were nerve racking because I was becoming more and more aware that I would never happen to run into someone with a similar past to mine, because those people were all dead or worse.

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