Getting My Candid On....

(Originally July 10 2006)

I visited the nearby Mall twice today to have a meal. Earlier it was after I visited my new Primary Care Physician so that I could 1) Take advantage of my newfound medical health insurance, and 2)Find out why the thumb and forefinger of my left hand is numb. Being "overweight" kept me from ignoring the symptoms another week, so I worked half the day and for the other half I went to see what was what.

Both earlier and just now (for dinner) I found myself slipping back into bad thought patterns. (The food was still breadless and sugarless, so I'm still maintaining that, but I haven't hit the gym since Friday). There's a scene in the first X-Men movie where Rogue is running away from the mansion because she thought she was being forced out by an unhappy Charles Xavier, the mentor who had promised her so much hope when she found herself unable to touch people without harming them. So she was on a train, thinking about her sorry state of affairs, when she sees a mother absently, but lovingly, stroking the cheek of her child. Rogue sees the physical bond between the two and her silent tears fall as she realizes how much she missed that in her own life, and how it seemed at the moment that she'd never have it again.

My bad thought patterns drum that scene up just before they take me down my own sorry state of affairs. Aside from the financial morass, I see myself as the Rogue of X1. There are people I want to get close to--friends I want to adopt as family, walls I want to let down. In the mall, I watch people doing it everywhere. Teenaged girls sqeeing themselves silly, lovers walking hand in hand, pals sharing secrets, cellphone walk/talkers connecting by remote control. It's a primary human function of trust and sharing that leads to love, and I know this. But like Rogue I live with the knowledge that someone will get seriously hurt if I obey this desire. And that someone is me.

So I just sit and watch the Mall people, missing the times when once I was vulnerable and when once I trusted, but now am fleeing from a community that I thought supported and loved me--and I am realizing that I may never have that kind of life again.

All the clues to whatever it is that I'm talking about is laced throughout this blog and the other, spread far enough apart to help me keep my sense of safety, but obvious to anyone who studies human nature.

I'd like to summarize this entry with just a nice, clear revelation but I'm not wired that way. I am buried in a sheath which is wrapped under layers, then placed in a box and buried deep.

It would take an inhumanly special and amazing woman to save me from all this, but someone like me just can't easily believe that someone like her exists.

By the way, the doctor ruled out heart disease as the reason for the numbness and gave me anti-inflammatories to address a possible nerve bruising originating in the neck our at the fingertips. It's what I wanted to hear, but a heart attack would have been more ... beneficial.