pictures

These pictures are all that saved me in the really dark days. I didn't know it was coming, consciously, but I think that some part of me knew the end was near.

I had a compulsion to just put all the things I love into wood so I could surround myself with them, see them everywhere, in every room. The making of them carving it into my sinews and the polishing and the placing.

I didn't know why at the time and it annoyed the fuck out of my wife having so many of these lying around.

But I think they saved my life. By showing me why.

But even then, it was a case of having a job to do, and just a sliver of joy in a dark world.

Now I have found a solution for myself and the son pictured and I am coming to terms with what that means. This has brought light to two entire universes, and the downstream impacts of that is hard to fathom.

The thought of having to go back to living like that fills me with so much dread. All my research suggests that this can be a lifetime solution though so.... stop thinking about it James.

I honestly don’t know if I’m ever going to want to look at my old life again after this is all done.

All I see is pain, right now. A man struggling, barely keeping his head above water, everyone oblivious. 

My children. If I hadn’t made my children I would have killed myself long ago. Somehow. Some stupid swerve on the bike. Those dump trucks I trained next to looked pretty inviting. Surely there was a reason I was there. A reason I was in the back country alone. Surely I wanted to die.

So the kids kept me from killing myself consciously but not unconsciously. I was still out there, doing the things that a 40 year old father of two probably shouldn’t be doing, considering that his children are his literal world.

But I wanted to die.

Let’s get that said. I wanted to die. I didn’t know it always; there were times when I was fine. But my baseline was in the negative, and when I went back to my baseline, I wanted to die.

My child has been born with a similar baseline, and and people all the way up my ancestral line will have been too. Now; they have a prosthetic.

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