Kitchen Conversations

“You know Hiro, it doesn’t feel like it but you have come a long way.”

Doctor E sat across from me trying to make it seem like I was doing better than I feel like I am doing. Therapy is hard. What’s that joke? You think therapy is someone sitting across from you saying “You suck,” but it’s you sitting in a chair saying “Wow, I suck!” I spread out my arm across the couch trying to make myself seem more comfortable than I actually am, fake it till you make it like my mom always said.

The doctor continues, “How is your home life? Lana makes it sound like it is much better on her end. Are the new meds helping?

I had fought medication for a long time. I knew I didn’t react to problems the way a “normal” person would but I thought I had it under control, of course, I didn’t. But I had convinced myself that I could handle it.

“The meds are working, I have to have a meal in the morning though. They tend to make me sick without something with it.” I sound curter to my own ears than I mean to but we’ll both live. “I’m still crushed with these intrusive thoughts and bad feelings though,”

She took a note.

“Let’s unpack that, what are ‘bad feelings’, Hiro?” Doc looks through her eyebrows as she moves her hair out of her face.

I have to remind myself not to roll my eyes at her psycho-talk. Jesus, I hate talking about feelings. Two years of therapy and I still hate eviscerating myself in front of her. “You know, getting down on myself,  feeling like I’m not good enough, guilt over killing.” She nodded along with my rapid-fire rambling before a pregnant pause sat in the room between us.

Staring at each other, she let that pause stretch to the point that it wasn’t comfortable and the pain of it sat in my chest, making me start to squirm on the faux leather couch.

“I meant it,” she finally started, “You have come a long way. You aren’t defensive to the point of obfuscation any longer. You are calm enough to actually handle yourself in situations and I think you’re ready for this: there are no bad feelings.”

I couldn’t help myself this time, I chortled and raised an eyebrow.

“I’m serious,” she continues, “remember when we went to the mall so you could get used to crowds again? You crawled the walls the first few times but you can handle it now. This is the same thing but introspective. Your feelings are messengers, they’re trying to tell you something. Sit with them, quietly and calmly, until they tell you what they are here for and then move on. Like watching fish in a stream. You aren’t the fish or the stream, you are watching and learning.”

Putting her notebook on the desk behind her she softly let me know that was it for the day and my troops were expecting me on the range.

In my truck, I could barely put the pieces of myself back together enough to go back to my team. Since leaving active duty I had taken on a contracting job teaching 14 professional tough guys how to do what I used to do.

Thinking back to when I joined, I was a poor angry child. The target demographic for the military and poor and angry enough to fall for it. These guys, however, have good heads on their shoulders. All of them came to service from good families and strong upbringings, not the child soldier that I was, but actual childhoods with bikes and allowances, the whole nine yards.

I should be proud. The current war is always started by the previous wars because nothing occurs in a vacuum and today’s fight is led by yesterday’s soldiers. I should be proud that my efforts led to their childhoods but instead I feel like I have no business being there. The hard-worn plastic of my steering wheel slides through my grip as I pull the old pick up in the parking spot. Trying to get my thoughts together is like soldering stained glass, every memory I pick up cuts me and demands attention, there is no safe place to put my thoughts as the smell of gunpowder and shouting drifts in my open window. 

A sudden pain slides between my ribs and I can’t breathe. The sudden realization that a stray bullet had sliced cleanly through my driver’s side door and found a new life in my heart hit me. After all the adventures I was going to die in my truck, 5.56 through my left lung, and set up shop in my ventricle. Panic settled in my mind and I vaguely registered my hands moving on their own, sweeping over my chest for blood. Searching, scavenging for work. A hole to patch up, an entry wound to identify. Anything that would give them, give me purpose. But they came back clean. My vision swims and I taste salt and blood as I collapse along the upholstery bench seats, blubbering, ugly crying with the realization that physically I’m fine, I was in a panic attack, not an actual attack.

The sulfuric smell of the gunpowder pulled me out of it. I’ve known that smell all my life, it’s almost comforting as the stinging scent wraps itself around my brain stem.

Tears and mucus streak my face as I catch a glimpse of myself in the rear view, the loss and emptiness in my own eyes catch me off guard. Is that me? If I’m not my thoughts and I am just watching a stream in my mind, who is this weepy mess staring back at me in this tiny rectangle?

I can’t do this.

          I threw the truck in reverse and limped back home. The sharp edges of my thoughts still cutting the fingers of my mind. How am I supposed to move on when I can turn into this weepy mess at the drop of a hat? I could not lead like this. Even if I have moved past actual combat duties, I would still fucking smell gunpowder. Combat might have been all I could provide to society, it might be all I was worth. I still don’t remember the drive. I must have been on some kind of autopilot of the mind because there is a scene missing in my memory, I decided to go home, scene missing, the old truck’s tires crunched into the driveway.

          My old world home wasn’t the mansion that you would think that it would be given Lana’s family and old money upbringing. Still, it was home and since I moved in after we were married it’s been the longest that I have lived in one place. The kitchen was its familiar rustic style and I laid my hand on the worn wood top of the island. It was covered from something historic in Lana’s home country but I can never remember the specifics.

          The grooves and knots were real under my hand and I tried to stay present in the moment even while breathing still hitched randomly and my fingers tingle over the wood. Doc had given me pills for this. It started with an X but sounded like a Z, drugs are weird. Skimming the medicine cabinet by the window and the violently orange bottle called out to me. I swallowed three or four dry and the thought that sleeping it off might help occured to me.

          I turned the corner and the stairs towered over me. Even the one flight of steps seemed like a daunting task. I hadn’t had the energy to work, now  just the thought of  the stairs felt like mountain climbing. When did I get old? One bare foot in front of the other and the mental task of pushing my weight forward, one step at a time, progress was progress and I was moving. Just like with my mental health even if it didn’t feel like it.

          Stripping to my underwear felt like a weight came off my shoulders. My uniform thudded to the hardwood floor, was it really that heavy or had the meds kicked in? As I climbed into the sheets my last thoughts were of my wife.

It’s not every night.

Lately, it isn’t even MOST nights

But several nights a week I feel it. A child laughing, a little dog’s terrified yelp. Now in my waking mind, it sounds tiny, it shouldn’t bother someone like me. I’m stoic. I’ve trained since I could put one foot in front of the other, these things shouldn’t bother me. Still, they haunt me.

I can hear Lana’s breathing next to me as I open my eyes and look around our moonlit room. Of course, nothing is there that would justify this ominous, all-encompassing feeling of dread in my chest. My heart is still hitting like a hammer on iron, fast and hard, an inotropic reminder that I might be losing my mind but I’m still alive. Doctor E says that I’m supposed to look around the room to reassure myself that my dread is in me and not something external.  Showing myself that nothing is there, but my base level, monkey brain internalizes it. Like earlier with my panic attack, there is nothing there, just normal life that I am inserting problems into. It would be easier if it was something external, you know, something I could actually do anything about. I’ve never had the sitting bolt upright flashbacks, or anything like you hear about from the Eve Wars guys. Mine is an iron weight around my neck, crashing through my life and weighing down my relationships.

I’m done being preyed on.

I sit up and reassure myself that no great horror is waiting to stand over me with some amorphous doom. I’ve been at war since I could lift a gun, I can handle me and mine, but this soul-crushing feeling I can’t do much with. I used to let it spin me up, work out of all the problems in my mind and nothing was ever my fault. I was never the asshole in the situation. Now I need to let it sit with me. Doctor E dropped it on me that there aren’t any “good” or “bad” feelings, they only are. They exist and that’s all, I can get lost in the good or the bad and trying to avoid the “bad” but I wonder if she has had similar feelings at three in the morning.

Lana is asleep next to me with the cat perched over her head. Her schedule has her running around at all hours, she worked for so long in school and pushed through her doctoral residency while I was out trying to ‘save the world’ running from crisis to crisis and never stopping to look back home. She stayed with me through the deployments and the training. In truth, I don’t understand how she put up with all of it. I’m glad she can get rest with all this going on. We’ve been pushing our nights later and later, she has meetings and sessions late into the night but we’ve been carving out time to just be us. Together. One of the steps to reconnecting that we’ve been working on. Love is really just intent, purposefully spending time together. Somewhere between all the combat and travel and death, I lost sight of that.

There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep with this frigid hand still crushing my heart and pressing on my chest. I get out of bed and I’m hit with how cold our room has gotten. Moonlight spills in from the window and I catch myself noting the amount of lume outside and that nods would work well tonight. A useless holdover from my active duty days, like my morning push-ups, or going shooting with my squadron. I don’t need them anymore but it’s nice to have a touchstone to come back to while I’m failing my way through managing and coaching guys that do what used to give my life purpose.

I walk to the kitchen and pour a few fingers of bourbon. Drinking got away from me early in the process, it’s an easy escape. It’s hard to pay attention to anything serious with your norepinephrine blocked. It takes the sharp edge off the memory of that heat on my face. Rewatching the husk of a building crash into that apartment complex.

Why was that even there? It’s usually only strip joints, payday loans, and seedy car dealerships that are close to a military base. Who gets an apartment right next to a flight line?

I don’t remember her face.

Did I ever see it?

I don’t remember the breed of dog she had but I damn sure remember the weight of its burnt flaccid body in my arms. I remember being near panic trying to find something to do with it. It needed to be somewhere, somewhere that didn’t profit from war. I remember trying to find somewhere soft for it to rest. Scrambling for comfort in its last moments.

Which is silly, nothing is soft in war, everything is cruel and harsh. Despite all our incredible technological feats, humans are still just scared, violent masses, with brains that remain barely different than when we were running down animals, picking berries, or drinking the rot off corn mash because it makes my brain go fuzzy.

This. This is why feelings aren’t good or bad, they come, tell you what they came to say and hopefully leave. The booze only makes them stay longer and muddies their message. Just sit with them because they have things to say. Like Doctor E has coached me through a thousand times, I am physically sitting at my kitchen table in the middle of the night in my underwear, but I take a seat by the stream of my mind and watch the fish. I realize that they are my thoughts swimming by and I try to watch them without judgment as they float past.

“You know Lana is in the other room panicking that you’re going to do something stupid. She hates that you can’t seem to get your shit together.” The shrill child’s voice rips me back to my kitchen. The fish were gone and the stream shattered around me.

Lately, my thoughts haven’t always been mine, they’ve been the little girl. THAT little girl sits across from me and she is no fish, she is my greatest mistake and a specter that loves to remind me that I might still be alive but I will never undo killing her. Right now she’s in my kitchen in her ridiculous sundress and hat even though it’s snowing outside our kitchen windows in Belgium.

My own curated guide through the mistakes of my life. At first, it was jarring to see her, usually, a dream that woke me up with that stomach plunging, chilly hand around my heart feeling. The same feeling I got when that rubble crashed into her building. I had only seen her once while she was alive. I see her too often now. She makes sitting with my feelings jarring.

“You screwed up your marriage the same way you screwed up by cutting down that shuttle as a kid, remember that? Your shit-eating grin? Pretty fucking smug there. Remember Hero?”

I winced at her mispronouncing my name. The bourbon bit my lip where it touched. The feeling was real and I breathed trying to remind myself that it isn’t good or bad, it just is. You can even use pain to keep you in the moment and sit with your pain. She wasn’t in the moment, she isn’t even real. She is my mind wildly swinging haymakers to see what I will punch back at. Part of me blindly cutting myself in its rage. Feelings can be real but they don’t always tell the truth.

The snow made the kitchen brighter than it normally would be, softly diffusing the light across the walls and taking the glare off the windows.

“Speaking of the Noventas, how is Sylvia? Should we check up on her? Lana would get a kick out of that. It would be easy, just pull out your phone.” The girl’s smirk disappeared behind a teacup then under the brim of her hat. Where had she gotten tea?

When this first started, the girl was in the same white linen dress she had died in, showing herself in my low periods, I had fought. Early on, everything was a knife fight to the death. I was defensive with Lana, with work, and most of all with this bitch that I killed 20 years ago. Like the morning after a bonfire that has burned through. I’m tired. Fighting for your life is exhausting and being constantly ready to cut tends to push the people in your life away.

When I finally took a breath and actually listened to Lana, and work, and myself; the girl in the sundress showed up to kick me in the teeth while I was down. I’m working on being grateful for the things in my life and I guess I should be grateful that I have a hallucination of a child to show me my fuck ups and how I’m not that great of a person.

As a child, all there was in my life was combat. I was trained and led to believe that I was bred to end lives. Then at the whopping age of 16, we brought peace kicking and screaming into the world.

Some of us couldn’t handle the inertia of shifting the point of our lives. Mikey thought he could do it, he convinced himself he could pick up where he left off and thought he could be the bookish scholar he was before the war and he could keep running away for the rest of his life. I guess in a way he did. However, his new life after the wars gave him the downtime and ability to actually process everything he had lost in all that stress and fighting. He couldn’t run away anymore and ended up taking his life in his bathroom one night.

I’m not saying he made the right choice. I’m saying I understand why he felt like he had to. How he could feel like the hand on your heart will never let go.

“Oh! Are we lamenting Mikey? Despite all that rage, he was so weak he thought he could run away.” Her smile curdled. “He couldn’t cut it.” Her teacup was at her elbow now and she leaned forward on the table. Too excited at the thought of my dead comrade.

I swallowed my rage and reminded myself that she is a part of me.

Through my gritted teeth I chewed out “He had cut it his whole life. Every day and then he changed history and did everything he thought was right. If he thought killing himself was the right thing to do, I still trust his judgment.”

Sitting with her and listening was one thing, she normally goes away once she’s told me what she has to say, leaving me alone wherever I was at the time. Engaging with her like this only makes me vulnerable. The blue windmill on her delft teacup caught my eye as it raised in her hand.

“If it’s such a right thing to do, you should get to it.” Her voice drifted off but her eyes burned into me. Her words weren’t important. I knew what she was saying, suicide was always on the top of her differentials.

The idea used to pull to me, a constant companion. It tugged me deeper into myself, but since I’ve actually been talking about it and shared my plan, the whole idea doesn’t fit anymore. Like wearing a shirt that’s too big, swimming in the material, and feeling stupid in front of other people. It’s still there and maybe it always will be but it feels wrong and sometimes I feel like everyone else can see it as well.

“No. It was right for Mikey but I saw what it did to his family, how all of us have to carry that weight now. It was right for him, but it isn’t for me.” My voice is enormous and echoes in that empty granite and steel kitchen. When it finally fell to the tile floor the little girl was gone and her chair was empty. My glass is empty now but my heart is full compared to when I sat down.

That little girl cannot push me around the way she did when I fought tooth and nail. Now she has some room to breathe and some light shined on her from me going out of my way and sharing with loved ones.

Now I sat at my table. Alone.

Not the cold loneliness from the Eve Wars or the comfort of a militant objective like being alone in St. Gabriel’s. This is warm, I am home, and I have a life to live.