One small step

Something strange happened the other night.  At 3:15am I woke up with a stabbing pain in my head.  I felt it as though it was sifting through my body, shifting parts aside, looking for something.  I tossed and turned through the night, trying to ignore the pain, trying to ignore the thoughts running through my head.  It was death and it was evaluating me, looking for anything worth keeping.  When you are opened up so plainly, it’s painful to face the truth.  My only comfort was reaching over and touching the shoulder of the woman who loves me despite all my imperfections.  I never went back to sleep.

When dawn finally came, there was a lingering headache but I felt changed.  My passions have shifted.  I don’t care about the bullshit anymore.  I get upset over the smallest things.  I get upset about things that don’t affect me.  Why?  Why not just put down the bullshit and put my energies into the things I care about?

I don’t know how long this will last.  The feeling has lingered for several days now.  I thought it would go away, just fade away like a dream disintegrates on the morning’s first light.  But it’s stayed with me like the fog of sleep, burrowing deeper into the blankets and refusing to wake up.

I don’t know how to feel about this change either.  What if it’s here to stay?  What will that mean to me?  Am I ready to change this much?  Can I really stop ranting about every little thing?  Or have I just narrowed the field a bit, still passionate but about fewer things?  I don’t know how this will play out and it scares me a little.

But I do know one thing; it is forcing me to define what matters.  I imagine death skulking over my shoulders and watching what I choose to give myself to in my final days.  If I die, if I live, what’s the difference?  Death will put a period at the end of my sentence, if I live a life full of bullshit it will be a full paragraph, but one no one will bother to read.

Heart attack, stroke, lightning strike, however it happens, I’ll die.  No problem, everyone dies, I’m not scared of that.  My fresh new fear is having to live and at the end, realize that my life was wasted.  When the brain embolism hits and they find my body slumped over this computer, what will they say about me, what will be my legacy?

“He was a great man, he defeated every level of ‘Mafia Wars’, he had the latest version of the iPhone and he really raged at that driver who cut him off this morning!”

Suddenly, none of that matters to me.  I don’t give a shit about any of that anymore and that feels GREAT!  I’m not looking to be a great man, I have no vast empire or financial legacy to leave behind, I just want to re-evaluate what matters.  So what matters most in life besides ‘the crushing of your enemies, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentation of their women’?

All that matters is love.  Who do I love and do they know how much I love them?  Get through this life by dropping the bullshit and picking up all the love I can, making sure to spread it around.  Keep my integrity as best I can and make this journey as easy as I can for myself and all those around me.  When someone does me wrong, just let it go.  I don’t have to keep carrying their bullshit around with me.  If someone hurts me, I don’t have to hurt them back to make myself feel better.  I can just keep walking, leaving them behind and hope that someday they’ll catch up with me again…

Is this one of the steps we take in maturing, growing up?  I don’t know how I feel about it.  I sound like a goddamn hippie!  Where’s all the raw energy and rage from my youth?  The passion is still there but instead of sloshing around from one side of the ship to the other, we appear to have hit calm seas and the energy shifted to the middle.  I feel like I used to feel when I was on the meds.  I’m balanced and focused on better things but the meds used to make everything dull and boring, drained the color out of the world.  I know I’ve always portrayed a macabre love of death but the only time I was ever serious about it was when I said I’d die before going back on the meds.  They may keep me well but they paralyze my soul.  I may look alright but I’m dead inside when I’m on those damn things and I won’t let that happen again.

BUT, I’m not feeling that yet.  So far I have the best of both worlds; mental stability AND color.  Is this how the rest of you feel all the time?  Is this how a “normal” person feels?  A fella could get used to this kind of thing ya know…

Everything’s alright, for now.  But it has to be temporary, this “happy place” feeling can’t stick around forever.  With every high comes a low.  But maybe I’ll deal with it like the rest of you.  Maybe every little crack isn’t the end of the world.  Maybe, just maybe, something in my brain snapped back into place.  Could it be that whatever happened at 3:15 the other morning was “the grand fix” and from now on I’ll be “normal”?  I feel like Pinocchio, hoping to be a real little boy.

Is it too much to ask for that whatever this strange visitation from death meant, it fixed my broken brain and left me normal?  I say I want to be anything but normal but that’s not true.  These last few days have given me a taste and I want more.  This migraine headache that is living in my skull is worth what I am getting in trade.  I’d give anything to be the husband Teresa deserves, to be the father Becca needs.  I’d give anything to live up to the expectations of the people I love.  I’m tired of being broken, I’m tired of being surrounded by people and still feeling alone… and I don’t feel that way right now.  Is it too much to hope that I might be allowed to feel normal?  Even if for just a little while?