New Limp, 1

Here at FOB ___, away from familiarity, I feel low.
It’s draining me, the Difficulty of writing this, of living this, as if I’m asking for a depression.
I hate the death-by-power-point droll of military classes. Mace__ is here also, and though we are not in the same section anymore he’s going out of his way to hang out with me.
I forget sometimes that people like me. It feels awkward, being liked, and having no reason why.

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_No, Chuck, thing about you is, you’ll call anybody out on their shit,_ M__ again said to me, at first seriously, then he laughed.
_No matter who it is. Not only will you actually say it out loud, but you say it to their face. I got to give it to you for that._
W___ and I shared that quality. Same as K__ and I. We could see right through other people. We could tell the Unreal apart from the Real, even when sophistication was required.
I wish I could see through myself easier.

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It is inexplicable anger that asserts Him.
Inexplicable because I’m not as good looking as others, not as smart, not as capable. The anger pushes away any erroneous thoughts of low self esteem.
When it occurs to me to be conscious of my anger, I think Kill Bill, and the sheer material beauty of the assertiveness. Then I think of the word Mafia, the word at the heart of the underground Sicilian culture -- underground because they were considered too African, and were always owned by the Europeans as a slave nation.
The word, tattooed on my arm and signifying a heritage, means _a beautiful form of violence, sometimes used synonymously with the word independence._
I think of the drill sergeants, yelling pushups, insisting we would never be powerful until we got angry. I remember June 1^st, _Anger isn’t Abuse._
My anger is my best thing and that’s okay. In the House, I knew my violence was my best thing, but as I grew up, I became more ashamed of it, because it turned self destructive, aggressive, out of control.
The anger insists it; courage honors it. When I feel low, I don’t feel naturally courageous.
When I have courage, I can believe.
A certain courage that has always manifested as Toughness, a Toughness that now feels detrimental and erroneous.

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Upon arriving back from FOB F___, K__ informed me he was going on leave in a few days. At the beginning of the deployment he had opted not to go on leave, same as I had, but due to the numbers game the Military plays, he was being forced to go.
I confessed that I had known for a few months that I would be going to ___, a nearby Arab country, for a required pass. I would leave in about a week.
On Saturday we went to the Chapel for the leave briefing, given by the Chaplain, which was long and all about not freaking out about leaving the war environment.
The weather was eerily nice. Warm, not hot, with a strong, clean breeze. It reminded me of baseball. I always played baseball on Sundays. Of Eric W___, my only friend when I was a teenager, and his house, with the batting cage. I usually went to his house on Sundays. The normalcy of his house. If allowed, I can feel the normalcy of it to the point of tears.
K__ told me it was the first time he’d been in a church in a long time and it reminded him of home. He wasn’t a Christian but had grown up in the Baptist church same as I had. I had read one of his letters from his mother. She reminded me a great deal of Angelica. I suppose every mother reminds everyone of Angelica.
We were sitting out on the bench we’d made. I told him that between the church and the weather it felt like Sunday.
I showed K__ the bump on my foot, which had me limping badly. I had assumed it was athlete’s foot, since I’d never had athlete’s foot before, and had been spraying it with Desonex and rubbing lanicane over it.
K__ informed me it was not at all athlete’s foot and that I needed to go to the BAS (Battalion Aid Station).
K__ said when I got back we should eat at the local Arab restaurant. As I sat in the waiting room, still feeling the weather, the Sunday-ness of it all, I tried to soak it in, this new strong feeling of normalcy.
Again, I had the feeling like I was still the person I was intended to be, harrowing childhood or not. I remembered the days of my life as effortlessly as if they were in my bones.
When I arrived the doctor pumped me with a bag of antibiotics, then told me what he had to do was going to be painful.
I started wishing K__ was there. I wanted to ask him exactly what does _lancing_ mean? The doctor tried to numb the foot, but was unable to. The doctor started laying out his tools, all of which looked either sharp or archaic. I began looking around for something to bite on.
When we were kids no one was better than anyone else. All my life I’d been so busy fighting, surviving. It’s all I know, hence I don’t know my self.
As a kid, I knew this feeling of normalcy because I felt I was in the same boat as the other kids. It took awhile for me to realize my life was nothing like theirs.
As I got older that sense or easy equality and normalcy faded, due to the drastically different paths we were on.
I saw that normalcy in a film once when I was eighteen or so. It was called John Q, starring Denzel Washington, where a man has to hold up a hospital in order to get his son a transplant, because he has no health insurance.
The film is set in a small Midwest town and has the landscape and atmosphere I knew in God’s County, before the Bad truly took hold.
The truth is the Bad occurred within that normalcy -- something I have always found impossible to believe. Now I accept the obvious truth of it, like another price to pay. It all fell within normalcy. Even the Bad stuff. All along, I was normal.
I remember feeling disconcerted during one scene where Washington puts his arms around his wife at the kitchen sink. The fact that sexuality was at the center of their relationship suddenly caused me to feel a dislike for Washington’s character, because he was a man with sexuality, which I knew meant he was capable of the sexual abuse I had known.
The book, Undoing Depression, said that in the end I would find myself so unfamiliar as to be difficult to believe. When I feel the Value, I am Him. I realize I’ve always been this person, and yet find Him totally unfamiliar.
The doctor got into position, as did I, every muscle tense and writhing in pain over fifteen minutes, my finger nails biting into the stretcher all that was keeping me on it.
Mos__ -- my old friend, who’d just happened by -- would occasionally reach out an arm and absentmindedly press my torso down. He had walked in just as they were beginning, and though he had good intentions he got lost in watching the gore occurring to my foot and seemed to have forgotten about me altogether.
As the doctor was cleaning up, I realized it was Halloween, a year since New York. I remembered how that was when I first realized how my life lacked human connection, to the point it was undeniable my subconscious had done it on purpose.
A year later the strong feeling of normalcy had me feeling connected again. I felt like I belonged.
I hobbled back to K___ on his bunk, working on his laptop. I told him the whole gory story. I told him it turns out I’m not a screamer, or crier, or a fainter. Who knew.
We went to eat and ordered a chicken and rice dish K___ had had before. We were alone in the dining room, so we talked as if we were still in our room. It still felt like a Sunday, though now it felt like a Sunday evening.
_So you really don’t watch porn. It doesn’t do anything for you?_ I asked.
_I mean, it’s not like I feel its disrespectful to women or something -- even though it is -- but that’s not the reason. It just seems to go against real sex. I just don’t recognize it, so it doesn’t do anything for me. You know, I mean I can look at pictures of beautiful girls, but I don’t have a porn stash you know?_
_I’m like that too, except I don’t admit it, because every one then assumes there‘s something wrong with you. Like strip clubs. It’s like the favorite place of soldiers so I go along with it, but none of it’s real, or correlates with my sense of sex and sexuality, so it doesn’t really do anything for me._
_Abstract thought is where it’s at,_ K___ later said, talking about the purpose of higher education, despite that people consider the educated as being liberal weird-dos.
It’s not to educate you on facts, he said, but to teach you to listen to your own genius. I didn’t feel so bad about the way I write and the fact that I’d never seen education past the sixth grade.
So abstract thought, even though it seems to come from the head, isn’t intellectual psycho babble, or mental noise -- it’s Real. Who knew.
We talked for over two hours about Realness, Life, and Sex. When we were done, and paying at the register, I felt the accomplishment and normalcy of it.

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