I Won't Hesitate, No More, It Cannot Wait

(I'm yours)

Her name is Casey.

She is 6 feet tall with long black hair, an easy smile, and astonishingly light brown eyes.

She has an amazing family. Her sister may be the sweetest person in the world; her parents, a great two-sided mix of direct uprightness and silliness; her brother, an easy-going and intelligent guy. Her little nephew and niece, Mac and Annie, are 2 1/2 and 1 respectively, and are rambunctions, intelligent children that have no qualms going straight into the dip with the same pretzel time and again.

She's been hurt before, giving her this bizarre, intriguing mix of inner strength and vulnerability.

She plays basketball, coaches the cross-country team, and is a teacher of multiple grade levels.

She can cook, including an amazing, bursting plate of grilled salmon, fresh broccoli, and seasoned potatoes, served with bread and homemade garlic oil, set to a tasty red wine at a candlelight dinner.

She will shoo you out of the kitchen 47 times as you try to smell what is being cooked, and then end up shooing you twenty times even though you're not in the kitchen, because she keeps coming into the dining room for kisses, distracting you from pictures.

She will dress up as a French maid for a France party, and with you as French butler, will put the rest of the party to shame.

She loves dancing. Loves it. Loves slow dancing, loves hip shaking, loves wedding dancing, loves fast dancing until she is covered in sweat and can barely move her legs. The sensual and free spirited nature of her is released on the dance floor.

She loves my writing style and length of e-mails, and the conversational nature of words on my words on a computer screen. She will then respond in kind, replying to e-mails and creating her own as fast as you yourself can type. She will punctuate these with emoticons, italics, and all kinds of explanation points - and never misuse a word or spell it incorrectly.

She can pout with amazing cuteness.

She is proper, yet has an intensely wild side. She is moral but open to everything. She can completely let go with someone she trusts. And she loves to spend energy.

She will stay up all night partying on one night; stay home, read a book, and watch a daytime movie another.

She loves sleeping with someone she cares about. She can fall asleep with someone nearby, can drift seamlessly in and out of consciousness, and sensually lay her long frame across yours.

She will shout as loud as you at a Penguins game, and get out of her seat on a breakaway a half-second before the rest of the section.

Above all else, she loves life. There could be no more heady, intoxicating wine for my soul.


It is - stunningly - only a little over a month since I first met her, yet every meeting, every e-mail, every date, every touch, has been an unbelievable learning, a realization that in our physicality, our hearts, our souls, we have found a like person, someone who sees the world the same we the other does, who has hopes and dreams and loves like them, and, like them, is totally falling for the other - without reservation, without fear, and without any semblance of anything like this happening before.

I am taking it slow. I am taking my time.

But she is my girlfriend. And I'm not sure I've ever been this happy.

United 93

(we shall never forget)

I just finished watching the movie "United 93".
This isn't the first time I've seen it. For some reason I really wanted to see it when it came out, as opposed to the "World Trade Center", which I never wanted to see. Maybe I intrinsically got a sense that United 93 was better; maybe it was because, on the day of September 11th and 12th and 13th and all those days afterward, I always wanted to hear more about United Flight 93. The article about it in Time the week afterward - a huge section - was one of the most riveting things I've experienced in a long time.
Watching the movie was re-living that article.
There's something amazing about the information that comes up when you hit the Info button on the remote. It gives you the name at the beginning, and a description at the end. But in between it ranks the movie, from 1 star to 4 stars. Only four options; you don't get to choose two-and-a-half-stars. And there's no word on how they came up with this, whether there are votes, discussions, and who is making these choices, or its just the opinion of the one person who happened to code it in. But, oddly, the stars almost always seem accurate.
The Info button gives United 93 four stars.

I didn't mean to watch this. I was turning channels, and happened to land on it, just as American 11 starts acting weird. I only watched for five or six seconds. That was at 11:30 or so. It's now past 1.
There are many amazing things about the movie, not the least of which include the amazingly objective portrayal of each side of the conflict - I once read a review that said the scenes of both the passengers and terrorists praying fervently at the same time was extremely powerful, and I agree - as well as the absolute attention to detail and truth. All the quotes that stuck in my mind from the article were there, right down to "Break down the door. If we don't get in, we'll all die!" that you can just hear over the din and the madness of the final five minutes of the movie, all taken from actual transcripts and phone calls and black boxes and everything else we know about that harrowing time. We saw The Happening yesterday, and it wasn't good, but it tried to be frightening.
It is nowhere near as frightening as United 93. My heart races like being backed into a corner and surrounded by men with knives.
Apt, that.

What really sticks out for me the most - both the first time I watched it, and now - is the amazing sense of inevitable death, and how people react to it. You get all kinds of reactions, from denial, to total incoherency, to emotion, to stoic resolve, to anger, to determination, to righteous fear. The bravery that these people showed in their last moments... its unthinkable. My stomach clenches and my mind wants to shut off when I put myself in that position, but I won't let it. They died, as did all the members of those four highjacked planes, but they died fighting for their lives despite the hopeless odds, died in an abandoned little field in Pennsylvania, instead of the White House. Died on their terms, not someone else's.
The military didn't know that United 93 had been highjacked until 4 minutes after it crashed. The nearest fighter jets were 100 miles away.
They died heroes.

I lay here at night and think, 'Can I meet my end in that way?' Whether being hit by a car and feeling my life seep out into the gritty pavement, or having my throat slit and have a few agonizing seconds as blood no longer flows to my brain and everything fades to black, or at the end of a long disease, ravaged by pain and weakened to a rancid shell of my former self, I have had time to wonder. None of those people were ready. I have had my lifetime to prepare.

Most terrifying of all, one day I will be faced with the choice of choosing - really choosing - between what is right, and what is easy.
Can I do that if my life might be the cost?
Can I do that if I know that my life is the cost?

Those are questions that I am still trying to answer. But I think of them because of you. We shall never forget. And thank you.

A Step

(to eternal happiness)

Barbara is engaged.

It was only a matter of time. Of all the people I had ever met, I was most convinced that Barbara would be married some day. She was just too much to withstand: too kind, too sweet, too cute, and too loving not to have someone fulfill her dreams of love, family, and (maybe) children. I was supremely confident that God would bless Barbara with someone she could spend the rest of her life with... not that I am convinced, may I add, that she really needed the help.
She is marrying Ed, who (by all accounts) is a fantastic friend and person, and who has been faithful in his time and place. He has been there for rough times, and on the occasions I've talked to him he has been very kind. These are all good things.
I find myself so... happy, about this. If this was anyone else, almost any other girl I met, I'd be confused, or perhaps jealous, or (with the right people) really jealous... but this is Barb. It's downright impossible to be jealous when Barbara is concerned; this is doubly so when I am this happy for her. I've never been happier for another person's announcement of impending marriage, even if millions of guys (if they knew) would be cursing the heavens if they knew the type of person that was now off the market.

I won't always remember everything about Barbara. Alas, that ability was stripped of me long ago; I must make do with bits and pieces around gaping holes, a Cliff Notes version of what should be a timeless classic. And I know it was that good because what I do remember was so special. Discussions on the West Campus grass... her quiet but strong, dignified belief... her cute, almost quaint propriety and her total enjoyment of abandoning it.
I learned friendship from Margaret, duty from Nate, and love from Julie, but I learned more in less time from Barbara about life than almost anyone I can think of. She was one of a very select group of women that could make me feel woozy, my skin tingle, my mouth dry, my palms sweat. She made me feel alive. I'll always regret not spending more time with her when I had the chance... but our situations were so bizarre, so unique, that it's hard for me to feel bad. I'm glad our paths crossed. I'm glad I enjoyed it. And I'm glad I got to see her find her way.

So I say to her: Go! Enjoy!! I could not wish anything better for you than the life you are already living, and the future I fully believe you have in store, in this life and beyond. You will now have someone to walk through the rest of your life with, to love with, and to lay yourself to rest with.
And I am content knowing that.

Congratulations, Barbara. I am so proud of you. I wish you the best.

Takes A Lickin'

(keeps on tickin')

(What follows is what I was able to get out in January. I was unable to finish. I enter it here because, sometimes, that's even more revealing than if I had. I make one --note of documentation where I had purposely skipped ahead. Otherwise, practically unchanged.)


I have now had two experiences in my life that I look back on and count as "life-changing" - at least in the sense of a health-oriented incident that makes me reassess things about life. One was the car crash.
The other happened this December.

A lot of times when I miss weeks - or months - of blogging, it is because a single entry is in the way. It's like a clog in the pipe - things build up and build up behind it, but until that cause of that clog comes out, nothing else is coming through. (And there's an analogy.) Some blog-worthy entries were missed.
But this was the big one; I had to get a handle on this situation mentally before I could even think of being clear enough to write about it.

-- The situation and the immediate aftermath, first hour in the ER

There were only three people in the world I wanted to talk to right then: Margaret, Barbara, and my parents.

Not Julie. The girl cares immensely, but handles difficult situations badly; exemplary to this was the time that I banged heads with Tom Miller playing b-ball at Nova, opening a wicked gash through my eyebrow and orbital ridge. In the process of the doctor actually moving towards me with a 5-inch needle so that I could get what eventually be 20 stitches and plastic surgery to reset my damaged eyebrow, I'm on the phone with the girl, convincing her that everything was going to be okay, as opposed to the other way around. Endearing, perhaps, but not ideal - particularly when this was such a more serious situation.
Not the boys. They were exactly what I needed two days afterwards, to lift my spirits after I digested the situation - Dave the day-after remedy, to bring me books to read (he brought half my damn library) and chill out; Nate the next day to act like this was a perfectly natural thing, to discuss the options and scenarios like they were cool options, not difficult choices.
I needed Margaret because of her loyalty in the face of adversity. I needed her empathy regardless of her understanding of the situation - sometimes she was as scared/confused as me about what to do, but always mixed with a resolute "I don't know how but we're going to figure this thing out" spirit I always admired. I gave her a call. There was no answer.
I needed Barbara for the exact opposite reason - her unflappable calm in the midst of tragedy; her long training as a nurse that had conditioned her to all sorts of life-threatening problems; and her unbelievable empathy that prevented her from slipping into callousness, a word that makes me laugh aloud even putting in the same paragraph as Barb. I have her a call as well. There was no answer.
And, of course, my parents dropped everything and were at the hospital when I was wheeled in, providing me an endless amount of relief.
If I ever have children, I hope I am half the parent either one of my parents are.

The doctors at the ER continued to test me, and they don't like what they saw either.

What I've Learned

(and what I've done)

Many times, my longest silences in writing are the most important.
They can speak of many things - a restocking of creativity, a busy time in my life - but this was the most important of pauses.

My life has changed. Irrevocably.

Five days after my last entry, my heart slowed to the point it couldn't keep me conscious and collapsed in a movie theater. I spent the next five days in the hospital. We discussed pacemakers, lifelong medication, a life without heavy activity, before realizing that it was more minor.
I tried to write a post on it, and only could get halfway through without being unable to continue.
It took weeks to recover physically. It took months to recover inside. I wrestled with mortality and the impermanence of life, the fear of something as simple as little parts not working right. And something breaks. That something being me.
Then, just when I thought I had a handle on it, my Aunt Linda took a turn for the worse. She finally passed away just a few weeks ago.
I was at her viewing. I was a pallbearer in the funeral. I carried her to her grave.

Life is very different.
My life, as it is, is much the same. I go to work in the city, I come home and hang out with my roomates and friends. I write whenever I can. I play sports and like ordering Chinese while watching hockey.
But it's all different.
Everything is different to me; more important, more real, more meaningful. More. I feel like the man dragged outside the convenience store in Fight Club with a gun put to his head just to make his life better. Only this was lighter - a reminder that this life is finite, and singular, and will not be offered again.
I think of playing sports with friends and the stories from them; the feel of wind in my hair; the sparks that led to some of my most romantic stolen moments; the pleasure of writing and creation; the hugs of my family; the calming enjoyment of video games and fantasy sports with the boys; the anticipation of a Penguins game; the comfort of a longtime friend's voice.

I enjoy them all.
I didn't want to write this post without time elapsing. Too often this kind of thing is a short-term change.
But five months later - and after my Aunt Linda passed away - I feel it just as much. No. Stronger.
I had to leave Pittsburgh for a while to realize how much I liked it. I had to leave the security of my youthful naivety about mortality for a while to realize how much I liked life.

Oh.... and chocolate tastes even better than before.


So let mercy come
and wash away
what I've done

For what I've done...

I start again
and whatever pain may come
Today this ends
I'm forgiving what I've done

I'll face myself
cross out what I've become
Erase myself
and let go of what I've done

Something Damaged

(something damned)

This promises to be a tough one. I write on. One does not heal injury without examining it.
If this can be healed.
(Very tough one - third attempt at this.)

After dodgeball on that Tuesday, I rode with Martin and Stella to go pick up Luke while Dave went ahead and bought tickets for The Prestige (which was decent, but had some structural problems. 1890's cloning, anyone?). Often forced to take the front passenger seat due to my length, and not wanting to regulate Stella to the backseat, I offered (insisted?) to take the back, and stretched across the length of the seat while I had the opportunity (until Luke arrived).
We were barely to 376 to head back to the South Hills to get Luke when Stella commented about my ability to fit into the back seat. Before I had a chance to answer, Martin commented that it was actually due to the fact that I wanted to sit back there because I was terrified of his driving.
This was not the first time that he has made a comment along these lines, and in the past I have defended my side, that I had no problem with his driving decisions or ability - indeed, I have enough other friends that have questionable ability/judgement (and sometimes both) to worry about - and I have disliked the insistence with which he holds to his statement. As usual, I stated that I had no problem with his driving.
"You should see it," Martin continued. "He puts his hand up on the dashboard like I'm going to hit something all the time." He went on to demonstrate. Stella chuckled lightly, in sort of a socially-appropriate manner.
I was furious. Absolutely furious. I have enough problems in my life (to absolutely steal a Julie-ism, and one I don't even like - frightening) to have to deal with people insulting me to others while I'm actually there.
Here's the frustrating part - I do do that. But I do it with everyone. It has developed into an uncontrollable thing, one with a life of its own.
And I hate it.
For three years I had no idea what was going on. Like my allergies, they started small and grew, finally getting to the point where I could no longer ignore them and had to wonder what was going on. The same thing happened to me here - it started small, than gradually got worse. I would be riding along - usually with a friend - and would reflexively put my hand on the dashboard, as if to brace for impact. It mostly happened when I (and I use "I" here loosely; there was little conscious decision) thought that we were too close to a car ahead of us. People asked me why I would do that, as indeed, most of the time it was unnecessary. I would say I didn't know. And then it would happen again.
I remember very well (for me) the first time I figured out what was going on. I was talking to one of my friends - it may have been Barbara, which if true would be downright riotous - and was explaining how I didn't know why the hell I did it. I didn't even mean to do it; it would just happen.
"No conscious thought," I was saying. I paused, to give a half-shrug, and just threw the next sentence out there. "It's almost like I'm still getting affected by the car crash I had with my mom when I was 16."
I froze outwardly; inwardly, it was like I had been hit with a jolt.
It was one of those weird life experiences where you say something just to say something and as you say it you realize that it's true - I hadn't even really thought what about what I was saying and suddenly I heard what was coming out of my mouth. That was it. I was sure with the eerie certainty of when multiple different puzzle pieces fall into place at the same time. This problem hadn't developed until after that car crash on the highway. I never had it when I was driving, or when I was in the backseat - only when I was in the passenger seat, the seat that I was in for the crash. And I was never worried about the driver losing control, or getting rear-ended. (As I type that I realize I hadn't even thought of the concept of rear-ended in 10 years.) I only worried about running into something. Often because we were too close behind another car.
Invigorated, knowing the source of the problem, I confidentally approached my next trip in a car - which happened every month or so at college - and self-assuredly took the front passenger seat. I sat back comfortably, only to make a horrifying discovery.
I couldn't stop it.
I don't even remember who was driving. We were going to Pat's, I know that - because that 20 minute drive felt like an hour and a half. It was terrifying. Not because I was having trouble with the driver - who might have been any of the Singers - but because I was having trouble with myself. I would see us coming up on a car. I would tell myself that I didn't need to react, which was weird since I never was telling myself to act in the first place - but suddenly my left hand would dash out, like I was fending off an imminent collision. At first I was surprised; then I was laughing nervously; and by the end I was actually fighting back panic. I had no control over it. None. I was putting my full concentration into not moving my arm, not moving it, don't move it, I was utterly ignoring the conversation and my fellow passengers and the radio and everything else, and still I couldn't control it. It was my own damn body and I couldn't stop it.
That ride shook me.
It was inevitable that this would come up with Julie. A long-term relationship brings out almost everything in a person, good and bad, just from the sheer amount of scenarios one can find themself in; a long-distance relationship, particularly where Julie was the only one who owned a car, made it a downright certainty. Julie, too, took it as an insult to her driving, which was already a difficult point with her - having been in multiple accidents that were mostly her fault, she had low driving self-esteem to start with and freely admitted as such - so my reactions were like throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire. We had discussed it at length and had an uneasy truce on the subject, rare for a couple that stayed together based on excellent communication.
Then, one day, we were driving from Shippensburg, to either Pittsburgh or Philly - one of the two - on a 3-hour trip (Shippensburg being right in the middle).
I forget what Julie was unhappy about - she didn't have a good living situation at the time, but it could have been the day, or something class-related - but she was on edge. My reaction to her coming up on a car in front of us was the perfect match for the powder keg.
...I've sat here for some time now trying to remember the words. The order of sentences. I can't remember any of the details. It's all wiped out in a rush of emotion that makes me pause. And think.
The facts of what happened remain the same: Julie purposely, in a fury, drove right behind a number of cars, far beyond where my normal reaction would start, and way into the range where normal, even careless people would be shocked, all the while yelling at me to stop reacting. Everything about it was amazing; the way she would zoom up to one car, then to another lane to zoom up to another - turned towards me as she did so, not even watching the road. "Do you like that? Do you like that?" I remember that.
I have paused for the last three minutes with the amount of emotion going through me right now.
The effect. Well, I might as well have tied one of my friends to a bed and dumped a bucket of live spiders on her knowing she is borderline arachnophobic, or bring a turned-on flamethrower to another of my friends trapped in corner and who I know has an abject fear of open fire. It was... awful. Just unbelievable. And there was nowhere I could go, nothing I could do without endangering at least one of the occupants in the car(I had enough sanity to remember that, but boy did some ideas flash through my head). I distinctly remember that the amount of fear I was in was actually scary; I did not actually know that I could be that afraid. I was actually afraid of how afraid I was. That sentence looks downright ludicrous on paper.
Oh, and behind the fear was the rage - the absolute fury of being purposely subjected to a nightmare scenario. Entire books and horror films are crafted around forcing characters to live out their greatest fears. And I had trusted Julie with this information - this personal information - and she had purposely used that to injure me. It was as if you had told a great fear of yours to a friend, and years later, they were angry at you and remembered that, and purposely brought it out to punish you.
I now am sitting here again with that rage going through me.
She purposely injured me. Through one of my weak spots! Like a goddamn revenge strike going after an open wound! I have hurt friends, deep friends - but mostly because of my own stupidity, not thinking through the situation to realize the full effect of my actions. I never tried to actively hurt others. This.... this.
And she embarassed me. Reduced me to the base emotions of fear and avoidance. Thank God no one else was there, because it was not pretty. It was very, very not pretty.
Smoldering anger.
There are only three incidents my heart has yet to totally forgive Julie for - the events surrounding that cold October night long ago, her fifth-year anniversary decision, and that drive.

This actually leads to the ironic part about this 'problem'. So many problems with relationships and feelings and emotions are partially - and sometimes predominantly - driven by the fact that the person themself doesn't really understand what they want, or the forces awake inside them, or the conflicting desires that cause them to act one way one day and another the other.
This was, in some ways, worse. I knew the problem. I knew the actual origin. I understood it perfectly. And I couldn't do anything to fix it.

What I ended up having to do was to have a truce with it. Unable to fix the problem, I began to work on living with it. This is not healing, and this is never going to make it better. But I learned how to hide it, to keep my coat strategically positioned, or to confuse it, use both arms and purposely use the dashboard to stretch, so that when it happened the only outward sign was that my knuckles might whiten perceptibly. In some cases - depending on the person - the reflex has even weakened somewhat, so that my left arm's movement is at half-speed, and at times doesn't even get to the dashboard, like a deer that's grown accustomed to humans but goes into a half-hearted trot when the lights come on just because of habit.
But if the situation warrants it - and sometimes when it doesn't - that reaction is alive and strong.

...Just like the reaction itself, when the specific conditions aren't present, everything is totally fine. Unless you stumble upon it, you don't know how much of a weakness this is. And Martin didn't know. Julie did.
Damn it all, how can the girl use that to hurt me?
Damn it all, how can I fix something that seems to have been permanently damaged?

Time Isn't Poison

(but the past can be)

I got some IM's this morning, and they knocked me on my ass.

Your past is a funny thing. It's at once black-and-white - this happened, that happened, no two ways about it - and subjective, as your perception of why and how changes. As time goes on, events take on different levels of importance in your mind, have different meanings and different causes.
This graying of concrete facts is accelerated by my memory. As some may know, I liken my memory to a huge hallway with the walls endless dwarers of files that hold all my memories. Unfortunately, there's only one worker, and he's 84, has a cane, and is going senile. Whenever I'm trying to remember anything, he has to amble down to the right dwarer and find the right file. Unfortunately, since he's old, not only does it take a long time, he often gets the wrong file, or the wrong dwarer. So there I'll be, trying to remember the name of the band at a concert I attended a year ago, and I'll come up with, "The Pulsating Squids."
The point is that of all things to remember, events are one of the worst for me. With the rarest of exceptions - I can tell you individual seconds of my mother and my highway car crash and the bloody aftermath - events, important turning points of people's lives, of my life, vanish like mist in the morning sun. I happily remember taking Julie on our second year anniversary to the Grand Concourse. I remember her little chocolate cupcake she got and looking around at the train station. Why is this important? It's the only anniversary of the five I can remember. I don't remember what we did for our first, our third, our fourth. I just can't remember.
And these IM's got my old guy working overtime.

I've spent the whole morning feeling sick to my stomach. What I can remember of the events of years ago keeps replaying in my head. I sit at work and I can't concentrate, images of the past floating by, unbidden.
Betrayal. I've never really thought about it in such a blunt, harsh way, but that's what it was. I betrayed someone. A friend. The circumstances were complicated, I was in a difficult position, it was a tough decision either way... and that is all irrelevant. I know that now, aided because the past is a little clearer as it gets farther away. Regardless of the circumstances - the excuses - I was wrong. I held something beautiful in my hand. And while I didn't crush it, what I did was I took my hand away, and it fell to the floor and broke.
I thought that the pain would eventually subside, that I would learn to realize that it was a huge mistake and I would learn to live with it. Lord knows I learned from it. I changed because of that incident; the more I thought about it in later years, the more I realized what I did wrong and what I should have done. And it changed me. I am a better person because of the lessons I learned, probably because those lessons burned with the shame of my choices. So, tons of regret, but shouldn't I feel that at least I learned from it?
Not a chance. The magnitude of my mistake grows every year.
And its proven by the way my stomach is doing flip-flops now. One IM, bringing up the past that I never got close to putting away to begin with. How do you put something back together that was so intricate, so wonderful? What was there had been special. One-of-a-kind.
I miss those times.
So, this IM reads, do they.

I have had enough. I have spent years regretting my decision. I know now that I will never make it again. It may be impossible to totally fix what was there. Maybe it will be better. Maybe it won't. But what I had - what I threw away - was so wonderful, so great, that what memories I have left of that time deserve all my effort to recreating it. Successful or not. Second chance? Maybe not. But I'm damn well going to try.
My stomach butterflies just left.

If I wrote the emotions I felt now, I'd go on for hours.

You don't know what you got 'til its gone.