While The Sea Is Calm

"When does life get easier," he asked me. A voice not my own made the answer for me, because it's a question that has been on my mind longer than my ability to remember when it wasn't. "There is no guarantee that it does. But in my experience, keeping God in your heart beyond just Sunday morning helps you to not feel so alone."

I wish I could hold onto that faith even into the darkness when my spirit is whisper-thin and it feels like my life is pointless. Because the promise is that we aren't alone. My problems are not as bad as what others have had to endure, and do endure.

I think that God puts us on a path that will allow us to do His work best. I just wish I understood mine. And I wish it involved full-time Fire or EMS or both. Shawn was directionless and started at the bottom, as a basic, and he had two children. I wonder how long his applications sat on a desk somewhere. One foot in front of the other. If others were able to do it, so are you.

Just In Case.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current. No sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

My heart feels kind of sick, which is a weird feeling. I just don't want you to have pain or feel guilt. Just, be excellent. Onward and upward.

For The Glory

We covered the station in Carlisle when Ed Shepherd died. Ed had served in some capacity in the fire service for sixty years. Sixty years of dedication like that and somebody blinks and all of a sudden there is a wake and flowers and firetrucks circling the ten square miles or so that were your bailiwick. They toned out a final call for Ed, and I felt all at once the absolute frailty that this dance is, how quickly we can get called away. We lose sight of how tenuous that line is, how there is little more than flesh and membrane binding us to this side, and a little wisp of a soul. We stood in front of Carlisle Sta. 1 and our pagers went off and I wasn't prepared for it, for what followed. The dispatcher's voice seemed so far away like down an aluminum tunnel and the passing trucks and all the blinking lights and the slow progression of vehicles, and it was too much. But there we stood at attention and I couldn't let the saltwater betray my soft center, standing there so resolutely.

Lorain County 911, Carlisle Fire Department. This is a final call for Carlisle Firefighter Ed Shepherd. Thank you for your service to this community, you will be missed. 911 clear, 1341.

There is no way to preserve it, any of this. And I suppose the point is to stop planning for the day that you live out your purpose, and to do it, now. They are going to be laying people off next year, in the schools, because of the "tough economic times." Today I learned that my job could be one of the ones cut. The gut reaction that I had wasn't anger or fear, and I think it has to do with my faith. "Maybe," I thought, "I am being led." I think that sometimes I need a harder push than most because I am so willing to discount my dreams as foolish. I think it has to do with the Russian blood in my heart that tells me that life must certainly involve suffering, and that includes the drudgery of going daily to a job that kills whatever fire you felt in you when first you woke. It's not silly, Emily, if it's what you want. Why worry about what other people tell you? They aren't happy with their own lives most of the time, or know how to fulfill the desire you feel to serve, to do something worthy.

Rise up; this matter is in your hands. We will support you, so take courage and do it.
Ezra 10:4

Tachycardia.

I decided that it would be a good idea to have normal human contact. And even realizing that at this point I don't know what that means in its full scope, the idea of normal, of having thoughts ideas patterns that others could identify with and comment on in a way that's productive beyond a coworker nodding and saying "well in life, sometimes you have hard decisions," I knew I needed a perspective outside my own. Outside that which would do the other party some benefit, persuading my decision.

A coworker who knows nothing of the sleepless nights, a coworker who knows nothing of the exhaustion of not being able to make a decision that is in any way productive or tenable towards this thing you know to be progress, life, success. I have no idea what it's like, to know the goal early on in life, to know it and to work towards it, to work towards a thing like retirement in a career you started in your twenties. A passion that you found in your twenties and stuck with. How do you make a decision like that? My kingdom for the ability to see the fork in the road and to be able to say with assurance, "Gentlemen! To the right!!"

An outside perspective was needed, and knowing no other way to go about getting it, the same methods were tried: a liberal application of gin, and talking to a face that would nod and simultaneously begin talking of their own failings; a talk that would get you precisely nowhere.

So I find myself relegated to a basement that smells of sweat, and of cat piss.

What am I doing? I hate this question. This question is the bane of my existence. What am I doing? Thirty years old and still finding out, how to get it. A melody that bites bitterly ironically horridly sophomoric in my brain. There are two options.

I have never been good at making decisions. I will start school this winter, but is that what I want? I have learned to hate people my age who are successful. And I have no idea how to quantify the idea in my head that measures the person I deem successful; I know only that they have attributes that I don't. Because I don't deem myself successful.

Too many, too much. Too many failures and I want too quickly to write things off as a character fault of my own. The world is full of tragedies. We are never too old to begin again. This is what I tell the kids. The Great Lie. We are never too old to begin again when I don't even believe it myself. Still trying to make up for mistakes that were never mine in the first place. Are you fucking serious? And crying?! Crying gets you nowhere but with an icepack on your face four AM trying to make yourself presentable for work. I can't believe the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps bullshit that I try to peddle on everyone but myself. How do I take myself seriously. Do I?

I told him, it's grad school, or paramedic school. I am thirty years old. I don't know why I look in the mirror and see twenty-three and say thirty and it feels anathema. Like the blood in my veins is different than the blood I feel in my core. There is still enough time to make a monumental decision like that, right? After all, Grandpa J didn't start in Rocky River until he was 31. One year to go and right now it feels like eons.

The thought process: I didn't choose Guidance. It was the easy fit for the time, the thing that paid the bills and something that I was comfortable enough with to make it stick. But I chose emergency response. When I go out on calls, I feel the adrenaline in my blood stream. There is a checklist you go down in your mind, on the way to the call. My last full arrest was a little over a week ago and though now in my self-conscious state I question my decisions, at the time the course of action was clear. And the eyes are something you never forget. Cold hollow blank stare his shirtless body bloated and blue, dyspnea and cardiac arrest and there is a prescribed set of motions that your hands begin and after a time, the mind follows. As much as you question yourself afterwords, your hands flow like well trained pilots to the tools in your bag and you put the instruments together as best you know and you make life happen. To the best of your ability. I would want someone like myself standing over myself, in that instance.

Why is that a hard thing to say?

So, it's grad school or PRN and paramedic school. I don't know why I sell myself short. I pray only for the ability to stop. For those same hands to work as calculatedly and as confidentedly on my own life. Down to go up. Money, at the end of the day, should not be the factor. I have no idea why I am so terrified of the future. In all honesty, I think I know what I want. I am too close to my own thoughts to see them in perspective, and I am too much my own worst enemy to do myself any good. If you care about me, this summer ask me if I am in grad school and if I am fulfilled. Or if I am on ambulance runs and working closer to running on life flight. We get one life. There is no playing it safe. There is no back-up plan. Is there?

A Good Looking Group.

It has been an eventful summer so far.

I've gotten to drive some of the trucks, work in a house fire that some of the guys from neighboring departments were too queasy to go into, and house break my dog. The hardest, by far, has been the housebreaking.

Life can be sweet. There are ups and downs, and sometimes even on the ups you hit rough patches that make you question your purpose on this planet. But you keep going, you get on with it.

"Be on your guard; be firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong."
1 Cor 16:13

One More Round

Shame is what gives birth to sin. Five weeks in and that thing around his ankle recording every drop once a half hour, so the decision to trade freedom for a drink was an entirely lucid process. I have been a fool to allow myself to believe that I know that life. I wonder if he thought of me that way; the fool who will always be there, no matter how much shrapnel there is to wade through. I wonder if he was still meeting girls on myspace and sleeping with them, up until the end. I wonder if that's why he made that decision about the drink. If it was a girl at the bottom of the bottle.

I don't know what to do now. I tried closing off my heart to that section of it, and it just ended with a breakdown when the floodgates opened. I tried to let him back in so we could work together through the emotions, and now my heart is broken again. So frustrating, so incredibly frustrating. To wade through the process slowly, and alone. I wish I could make sense of any of it.

Veritas, Aequitas.

Just tired. Probably because I had such high expectations for the weekend, and I hit the first brick wall early into the shift on Friday night. He is a good old boy, and he doesn't even know it. We had conversations about how tough it is the fire service, how hard it can be for a woman, and he really never did much but offer his examples of the meat-headedness he's come up against. There are never any words of advice, but it's ok because I really don't listen to the advice from people who I don't think are as smart as me, anyway. I know that is a very acerbic thing to come right out and say, but it's probably true for most people. And it hit me on Friday, at the station, that he is one of the asshole types that I was always afraid of running into in the fire service.

The realization was a hard one to take, because I had always thought him to be such an ally. Isn't it funny how sometimes, without our realization, we gravitate toward that which we fear? That's why unexplored fear is such a dangerous thing; it has a magnetism to it that, unless you're vigilant about, can be pretty hard to escape.

We were going to an open burn today on the grass fire truck. It was just after a call to Kendal, and I had my gear in my personal vehicle so I ran out to the lot to get it. I came back to the truck and was waiting for him, so I grabbed one of the pamphlets we have about open burn laws in the city. Finally he appeared, but without gear, so we pulled next to his truck in the parking lot and had to wait to go until he loaded everything. The house was only a few down from the firehouse, so the senior firefighter who had been waiting for us in the front station driveway just walked down there and was waiting in the homeowner's driveway.

"What the hell took you so long," he said to both of us as we hopped down. As the jerk who I won't name was gearing up (which I had already done at the station!) he says without dropping a beat, "I was waiting on Emily."

I just kind of looked at him. He grabbed the pamphlet that I had brought, and we all walked to the backyard. I put the fire out while he proudly handed the homeowner the pamphlet and made his bullshit smalltalk with anyone in earshot. As we made the short trek back to the station I said to him, "how were you waiting on me when your gear wasn't even in the truck yet?"

He did his good-old-boy laugh and, quite pleased with himself, said "well I had to blame it on someone!"

I don't get that. It was a harmless enough thing and the senior firefighter wasn't even that concerned that it took us a few minutes longer than it should have to go about forty feet down the road, but it's the principle behind it. Sometimes lately when I look at him I think, I hate your guts. That is a terrible thought to have. I am trying to examine the part of me that is so put-off by him, and adjust my reactions. I don't have to like him, or talk to him, or be around him, but I don't really think it's healthy to hate someone's guts. And I have to add the guts part to it because it becomes so visceral. That is really not healthy.

He backed the truck into its spot in the garage and was blathering on about how you can't take stuff that seriously and let it get to you, and it reminded me of the advice that he used to try to give me about dealing with the assholes in the fire service who won't accept women. And I thought, how ironic. And I looked at him and said, "you're a fucking asshole." And I jumped down from the truck, took my gear off, and went home.

I'm only responding for the rest of the day if we have a structure fire. It gets tiring being around guys so much.