6

My body couldn‘t FEEL. For twenty seven years. Now that it is feeling more and more, more and more makes sense.
It‘s all so old and new at the same time. Memories, what it‘s like to be inside a human body, it‘s movements, what it‘s like to be alive. I‘m still deep in the rewiring. I‘ve been high for weeks now, and I was drunk for the entirety of the last one. I haven‘t taken pills in awhile, and I slept off the drink.
I look in the mirror and see my eyes still look a bit dilated, but I can‘t really tell if the pills are still in me, days later.
Back when I was a kid, I couldn‘t move well and always felt disconnected from my body. To be all the way in it would have caused me to remember something unrememberable. (Can I ever catch up to 27?) (Will this ever be over?)
(watching Sharapova play) With women it’s different. If she would have me I’d find that awe-ing. I’d be awed by her. It would stop me cold. I’d do anything she wanted me to do, any position, no matter how uncomfortable. I would be tender with her, careful, I might not even come at all, so she not experience any of the violence of it.
(watching This Week in Baseball) It’s like when I was little, I made this choice to never grow up, because then I’d be like them. I’d be an adult, and adults were horrific. There’s a side of me that refuses morality and it feels like a part of my problem. It’s not evil, but if I ever had to choose between having morality or honoring the boy; I’d honor the boy. Strange to articulate instinct.

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(waking Sunday morning)
By eating all that yesterday it made my body high again. House had told me about that, just not all the way. Something about you have to have food in your stomach for the pills to do anything, including working its way out of the body.

__________
　

All along I was trying to teach the baby all this. Like trying to go back in time and get it to cast a timeless spell in defense of rape. A wordless one, fit for a baby. How do I reconcile that? That my sexuality was a baby’s. It’s like my childhood was all of a moment, then rape and sex, then I grow older, then an old man by fourteen, an unnaturally old one now. To grow up fast means to have a fast life. It’s unnatural to be alive right now. It’s unholy to be this old.
I slept all day, had amazingly vivid dreams because the drug is still in me, though I haven’t taken pills in several days. I think it’s been a week now. Different relatives would show up in them, as if they had never left -- or I had never left, I should say. But also different locations, whole different lives that I started to see through, in order not to lose my psyche, as if I preferred the true life, despite the horrific.
The dreams were interlaced with these very sexual storylines, a celebrity here, a character from a movie or TV show there.
I wrote a story, I just didn’t write it all the way, just enough to know the ending, to have figured out the issue.
I put myself into a rehab facility, except I don’t do it, a concerned cop does in NY after I’ve wandered the streets drunk for days then almost get mugged but then I kill both of them with a broken liquor bottle.
I am admitted to the rehab facility covered in blood. They know I’m military and have just gotten back from deployment so they assume they know what’s going. It makes me feel safe, their assumption.
There are two dynamics, one between me and the counselor, a sobering, thoughtful man in his thirties, and one between me and my roommate. The roommate mirrors my past dynamics with S__, W__, K__, and House, where he says a lot, I say little, but listen properly. He seems impressed with me somehow, like he’s getting pulled in, getting more and more interested. The rest of the rehab facility is assumed, like the kind I’ve seen in documentaries and films and TV shows.
It bothered me that whenever someone liked me it always turned out their sexually attracted them to me, even if their purpose turned out to be platonic. It bothered me that the soul’s language was Want.
It’s like each lied. It feels like a betrayal. In real life I think about House. And how he seemed betrayed by my sudden attraction when he got me high on weed.
Really I felt betrayed, by life, that it acted as if to be liked was supposed to be sexual, was supposed to lead to that magic carpet place of inhibition under sheets. How can that be? It’s like Life gave R__ the go ahead, all family the go ahead, saying all love is sexual. No such thing as platonic love, love in a familial structure.
_But you’ve already proved it,_ the counselor says, _Just by the words you’ve spoken. El__ only liked you for sex, and when you stopped she disliked you, and really the whole time you didn’t really like her much. But with Trevor it was different, not because the sex was different or you were different but because you protected him horrifically. That’s why he forgave you for killing him, that’s why he forgave you enough to do as he’s done. You’ve been refusing it because it was so horrific you couldn’t remember it. That is until the drugs relaxed you to the point they took you to the soul place, and everything was illuminated, the memories, not necessarily how you feel about them, but that takes time, and you’ve done a lot in such a short time. And you’ll do this, you’ll realize what I’m saying is true, and you’ll be okay._
It’s like my whole life has been a testament, honoring that early early relationship between me and Trevor. That early, early honorable choice. I think it’s okay to fall from grace, to choose one particular person to die for, to be raped for. Like the way he, holy, chose to stay near me, inexplicably.
If I were abstract enough it hints of a ritual, each story of me ritually creating a similar relationship to the one Trevor and I had, one maybe ritually repeated lifetime after lifetime, century through century, sustained by that wordless, non-physical place through genetics and evolution and one chance meeting after another.

__________

　
(Monday)
　
More detox, more dreams.
I remembered the baby boy and the world shifted again, everything became so familiar, recognized.
There will be memories. I want them. I want the baby boy who is me. I’ll claim him.
All the gods in all the universe can claim he’s not holy and I will destroy them in the face of such a lie.
I’d nail Jesus Christ, my own brother, holy, to the cross myself.

__________


(Tuesday)

I gave my notice today. I called the LT on how he so bluntly asking me to come back to work unreasonably early. He allowed me a two weeks notice on paper and one week’s in real life.
When I got home I felt so free, the world remained so familiar. It was all so different.
Why would I want to waste time? Why would I want to watch TV? I notice these differences now that my life is mine. Why not go running? Why not work out? Why not work on packing up the house. The difference of motivation is stunning when your life is really yours. To be free, in mind body and soul -- and life situation.
The house is now just a house, not some desperately needed home, some desperately needed haven until I got myself back again.
I understand now why I’ve been packing up, and why I haven’t put a sheet down on the mattress, but a sleeping bag instead as if I were still deployed. I needed to understand the place as temporary, somehow some way.
I hadn’t realized I’d been owned for so long. That I had always been afflicted with the mentality of someone owned. The Sicilians had this problem. Their heritage a part of the Mediterranean heritage tatooed on my right shoulder. They had been owned for so long, had functioned in secret for so long, they had no idea how to sustain themselves once they got their island free.
All these defenses I used to have in the face of being trapped, owned, the secret safe places I would go to, they fall from me, I feel freed from them. I see them in a more accurate light now, don’t feel so trapped within them.
I must go running now, and I must work out, and I must pack up the house, and I must find an apartment near the school, and I must drive up there and enroll. To be free, such a miracle, how can it not be relished?
I felt this way once, in the interim between deployment and going back to work. I didn’t know the un-freedom could be avoided. I didn’t know that the savings gained while deployed and the GI Bill earned would free me, would sustain me.
What a good job I’ve somehow pulled off. What a miracle the baby boy was, the boy with Trevor, and the adolescent numbed out and without memory .. What a miracle a human life is, a human boy .. To be alive. What a gift.
To think that those not from horrific have known this for so long, but I wonder if the moments have been as rich. According to K__ those who have freedom not earned can’t enjoy it the way those who have been through tribulations. He knows the pain of that. Like some secret he can’t put into words. Something missing. Maybe we’re even in the end, those from horrific and those spared from it.
I don’t feel stubborn. I remember L__ saying that to me, when I was little, that my main personality trait was stubbornness. Thank god.
Thank god I held out for true freedom, instead of accepting anything less. And now it’s let go -- there, in the wings, in my memory, in my instinct -- but not adorned by me now: not a defense, or an offense needed by me to fight off a world that wasn’t true, a definition of Life that was erroneous.
Maybe these feelings will last.

__________

　
Thursday 03JUN2010

My last day at work. The one week’s notice is over. I had already asked for Friday off weeks ago so I could go to New York again and my boss couldn’t undo the paper work so my one week was actually only three days. I feel free.
When I feel this free, it turns out it makes me want to pray. Just like a human being. So afraid of freedom, always wanting to fall under something, some protection, some guidance, somehow. I’ve got to be brave for the boy, for the baby boy, for the teenager. I’ve got this.
(bringing the laundry in, surprised by lightning bugs and the memory of when I was very little with a jar in the summer evening.)
Why’d you stay here, the baby boy asked me, in this same horrific land?
Why didn’t you move to some place totally different?
Because I wanted to remember you. I wouldn’t leave you behind.

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