The Comfort of Strangers (or Old Friends)

Listen:

I am sad.

I am far from over this thing that happened to me.

Many years ago, my brother was racing his sprint car, and in a chase up the backstretch, he got up on someone's right rear tire. If you've ever seen someone lose control of a piece of wood while working on a belt sander, that's basically what happened to my brother. The other guy's right rear was the belt sander, and my brother's car was the wood. He was catapulted over the other guy, and did five spectacular endo's before coming to rest upside-down somewhere outside the track perimeter. We have it on video. It's actually really cool to watch now, because he was okay. But he was achy and sore for days afterward. Oh, yeah? Well, YOU try bouncing ass over teakettle five times and see if YOU walk away unscathed.

Like him, I'm kinda really banged up and bruised all over, and Jesus Jumpin' Christ, what does anyone expect me to do? All I can do is what I can do, and if there's no getting what I want, at least I can want what I get. So I'm limping, missing a couple of teeth, I have a couple of real shiners, and I'm still counting mysterious bruises. It takes time before you wake up one morning, take the inventory and say, "oh, look, I don't hurt anywhere."

I have managed to slap a band-aid on the bullet wound to stanch the bleeding. Go into a pretty decline with red-rimmed eyes and bravely trembling lower lip? Nuh-uh. Not my style. I go back out into the world, and I lead with my chin (which is usually where I take it), and leave all that weepy shit for when I'm home by myself.

But I will admit I'm still sad.

And the weird thing is that when you look at it objectively, it wasn't really that big a bullet. Not one of those armor-piercing, cop-killer, explodes-as-it-moves-through-the-viscera bullets. It was more like your garden variety .38-special, in-an-out wound through the shoulder or the fleshy part of the thigh, one that nicks a vital artery.

I don't know what it was for him. Birdshot? An official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock, and this thing which tells time? A straw with a spitty, wadded-up piece of paper? Who knows? I never will.

But god's honest truth? I feel like I climbed up to some mountaintop and opened my own chest and said, here, you can eat my heart before my dying eyes.

And so, returning to the arms of someone who is about 180 degrees from the other person feels necessary, if only to keep two hands on the gushing wound. It's gonna have to be my tourniquet until the flesh starts to mend on its own.