Options

I feel like I have two options at this point: 1) Let her consume me and my thoughts to the point of obsession until she’s mine, feeling that unrequited longing the old poets wrote about. 2) Kill it off. Kill the feelings and thoughts and memories and hopes until there’s nothing left. No memory. No regret. Nothing.

Options rephrased: 1) Drink and find something meaningless to fill the void. 2) The death of what I’ve struggled for years to believe in again — the very thing I found in her.

Or maybe, just maybe, I can put these thoughts aside and keep living knowing that even if this is as good as it gets, then I've got it pretty good.

You're a door without a key, a field without a fence
You made a holy fool of me, and I've thanked you ever since
And if she comes circling back, we'll end where we'd begun
Like two pennies on the train track the train crushed into one

Or if I'm a crown without a king, if I'm a broken, open seed
If I come without a thing, then I come with all I need
No boat out in the blue, no place to rest your head
The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead

Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A

In the movie Fight Club, there is a scene where Tyler Durden drags a convenience store clerk into the alley out behind the store by gunpoint and makes the man get down on his knees. Tyler stands behind the man with the gun to his head as he goes through the man’s wallet. He finds an old student ID the man has and asks him what he had been going to school for. The clerk says, “Biology, mostly.” Tyler then asks him “What did you want to be?” The clerk responds, “a veterinarian.” Tyler then tells the man that he is going to keep his driver’s license so he will have his home address. He says that in six weeks, he’s going to check up on him, and if the man is not back in school on his way to becoming a veterinarian, then he’s going to kill him.

After some thinking and talking with friends, that is what I realized I want to be. I want to be an agent in people’s lives who changes things. I want to inspire people to live better than they did before. No, I probably won’t take such a drastic approach as holding a gun to their heads. Hopefully, I could persuade people through more positive means. But, as I’ve learned through my own experience, you have to be on the edge of losing everything before you can learn to appreciate anything.

I don’t know what a job like that looks like, but if you do – and you’re hiring – let me know.

Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life.

Recovery

My recovery from surgery was a bit longer and more difficult than I had expected. But the experience of it – including a lot of time where I couldn’t do much but sit around and think – really gave me some perspective. I realized that life is to be lived, not to be worried about, planned, checked off or calculated. I get one go round at all this, so why not put all of me in it? I feel like I’ve been waiting or saving up for something. But I recognize that that something is now. Right now. Yeah, life could always be a little better in this way or that. But I’m done thinking about that. Life is good, and I’m gonna live it.

Pre-op

“Does your skin tear easily?”
As I was filling out the pre-operation form this evening, I ran across that question. I mean, I’m not one who likes to think about what goes on in a surgery anyway (or even in a hospital at all, for that matter), so this was a bit unsettling. So I’m just going to keep telling myself that, after they put me to sleep, they only use high-tech lasers to complete a scalpel-less and bloodless surgery on my sinuses. Ahh, the bliss of willed ignorance.