Just Clearing My Head

Owen

2012-01-23T10:58:00.000-05:00

Remind me. Some things in life are just worth fighting for. Remind me that in a years' time it won't matter, the closed door meetings with her or what she thinks. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT.

Saint Crispin's Day

2011-12-16T10:51:00.002-05:00

She inhales the donuts they bring in to the point that you can hear her agonized lungs expand with each massive bite. And then there is chocolate everywhere, and the complaining about needing to lose weight and not having self-control. This is repeated at least three times througout the day, she is wearing pants that maybe used to fit and a top that doesn't help her to not look pregnant. She's not pregnant though. And there is this sick cycle of abuser/abusee between her and the boss. He makes inappropriate comments and/or advances and she laughs and plays along, then when he's gone she complains and complains and laughs still, during the complaining. She talks about how she has a million dollar sexual harrassment lawsuit and all I can think is are you crazy?

And there is a new girl in the office, younger and prettier, and she actually is jealous when the boss focuses his attention on the one rather than the other. It's sickening to watch and I seriously wonder about the thoughts that rattle around in her head. Or what she thinks when she's all alone, how sad it has to be to derive your sense of self-confidence that way.

And they modeled the Penelope skit on SNL after her. Sometimes it's a game to say something just to see how she will one-up it. I just told her I can't help her with something because I'm trying to finish an email, to which she replied "Oh I haven't even had time to look at email yet today." MAYBE IF YOU STOPPED ROOTING FOR THINGS TO SHOVE INTO YOUR CAKE HOLE, YOU WOULD HAVE TIME.

I have to get out of here. I want to find the courage to quit. I want to find the courage to ask Dan if he can help me to live off of part-time work until I finish school. If anyone still reads this blog and has advice for navigating this rough patch, I would love to hear it! Future Emily, how does it all turn out?

Jagged Vacance

2011-11-15T12:15:00.001-05:00

It always takes place in the cemetary. This time I knew they were in there, small apartment like a pine box there were padlocks on the storage units in front and the cars were in there, like a mobile impound. I had Linus and Rex was loose and more than anything I just didn't want him to come out and see me. And later my father and I were standing atop a peak in one of the clearings on High Divide, and I could see for miles, miles, miles. The juxtaposition of the two places, how fear can creep into your heart. The absolute lifetimes that exist between events like that, how you don't even notice their passing. There is this one specific moment that I remember with you, we were lying on our backs in the park behind the Vine Street house and we were talking about us just buying the place, it was one of those perfect Ohio autumn days crisp yellow leaves against the sapphire blue of the sky and I could see for miles, miles, miles. It is the only time I remember from that period of my life in which I felt we could be something more than isolated alcoholics. Those moments come all the time now and easily, the ones that fill you with hope for the future and promise and the deep knowledge of being loved. That you really don't have to go through life alone. And to think back to that girl in the grass how many Septembers ago, it makes me want to cradle her up and love her so strongly because of the road she doesn't know exists. But that she makes it, to know how that chapter ends! And I want that for you, too. But it will always seem impossible until you get there, and you just need the will to muscle through and how rock-bottom sad it is that that is what keeps you away from it. The glory.

The Pride of Cleveland

2011-11-10T13:03:00.001-05:00

He was fat. Well, to be fair, they were all fat, but he was the slovenly kind of fat that makes you imagine that his car is packed with papers and fast food wrappers and that if you were to get into said car after the offer of a ride, it would take five to ten minutes of moving the aforementioned papers and wrappers around before there would be enough space for a seat. And they were all Cleveland firemen and it made me glad I didn't actually live in Cleveland, apart from the other obvious reasons. He was thirteen months pregnant and as he lost his breath pacing the floor of the front of our classroom, I wondered if they made SCBA waist belts big enough to accommodate the girth. He spoke in a very peculiar language of half-sentences with tangential interjections peppered throughout like machine gun fire, the sum total of which made it nearly impossible to determine if there was a linear aspect to any of the instruction he was attempting to give, or if he was the kind of person who needed to get everything out, all at once, and the brain just couldn't keep up. Or keep track. When he spoke it was as if we were all invited to participate in his very disorganized and foreign internal world.

It was only our second lab with him, and my hope that the instruction would improve after the nervousness of the first session were quickly being put asunder. He was furiously scratching an equation onto the whiteboard. The paper in front of me on the desk said "medical math for paramedics," and I had stopped after the first three problems. This was the point at which he realized that no one in class had understood his preliminary instruction on the subject, and that further explanation was necessary. And probably, for many of us, it was the point at which we realized that any further explanation would be of positively no use.

"See, you can't just blindly plug numbers into these things," he mused to no one in particular as he plugged numbers into the equation he had just written. "That's why I teach you two ways," we all just looked at each other, "so you can figure out what works best for you. Now, the best way to do it is to work backwards see," I had no idea where the numbers were coming from that he was using, "now you know that the proper drip rate is 45gtts." I had scrunched my face up in the hope that squinting would make it all clear -- so much so that my eyes hurt. I didn't fix my face in time and he looked at me and chuckled, and started the whole cycle again, with a different problem. I had already decided that google would be my teacher for this particular skill and I cringed when I remembered that this was the guy who would be teaching us IV skills. And I immediately said a prayer for the first three to four victim....patients that I will be starting IVs on.

The Driving Rain

2011-10-26T11:28:00.000-04:00

I wonder what it's like now, that life. The smell of ketones on breath and the stench of drakkar noir why is it sadder to me than it is ridiculous? How at times you would really try to make a plan for the future and how those were maybe the worst moments. Worse than the three AM staggering footsteps falling into bed cheap vodka nightmares. Worse because it meant that you really believed you were capable of something more in those moments. Believed but would never follow through, no matter how many chances. I had this dream last night, after I heard about it -- you -- Rosie was dragging me by the leash all over my grandmother's yard. Out of control. Maybe that's the best way for it to be summed up and the dream was meant to be a reminder for the simple blessings in life. How good it is now, how different. How you can never know that unless you have been through the opposite. But I do remember playing football with you in front of that decaying house in Elyria, it seems like so much longer than two years ago. How I would drive past abandoned corn fields winter dust swirling in the Saturday morning sky, for just a few hours with you because it seemed like maybe there was finally hope. It's such a beautiful flaw of the human condition, how readily we give our common sense over to hope! The worst part of my life. You will only cause pain in the hearts of those who love you. And I can finally see how lucky I am to have escaped their ranks. You're breaking your own crown. I cannot believe that was my life. So grateful for the juxtaposition of now.

Occam's Razor

2011-09-24T10:59:00.000-04:00

I was caught off-guard by the frost, and the deep breath-in burned my lungs. Summer's reprise brings hubris and you forget how the winter-cold sneaks under collars and finds its way down the spine, chills you to your bones. You forget how much you have to fight. And how tiring it gets, how it wears you down to a little nub. But how you cling to it, try to find strength in it, resolve to not be fooled by summer again.

She sat at her desk and I in a chair next to her. "The most important thing," she said, "is the approval that you give to yourself. And strength is in cleaving yourself from those who put that asunder." It was so simple and yet it had never occurred to me prior to her saying it. An axiom that is at once sad and liberating. There are behaviors that can only lead to pain and suffering, and any medical doctor would tell you in your misery simply to stop the behaviors. And it would be obvious, and you would stop them. There are relationships also that only lead to pain and suffering and you can look at everything stretched out over time and see that there is always only one outcome. And how foolish it seems to think there will every be anything different. Life is the thing that changes, not people. And how you have to protect yourself.

Like Myxolydian

2011-09-08T13:03:00.000-04:00

A day exactly like this. Gunmetal grey of the autumn sky looming low and pendulous, parked in a cold Elyria parking lot waiting to go into a cold Elyria building full of vice and mistake-making and reckoning. There is the requisite smell in the air of leaves fermenting, fallen apples, the world getting ready for its cocoon of snow and ice and of longing. This is the song that was on then and it filled me with the lonely warmth of Ohio in September, a long dark day with a woodfire at the end of it, the red-cheeked kiss of wine and the slow release of leaf from branch, life’s longing for itself. She gets out of the truck and goes in, emerges an hour later and how sad and beautiful it is to look back like that, at all she will have to get through and how much hope there was and how it drains from you and sometimes you don’t even notice until nothing is left but the soul’s winter, that thunderous sad quiet feeling in the core of you, that loneliest leaving. The slow release.

We sat across the table from one another drinking margaritas and she had so much hope in her eyes, that he would come back, that everything would return to normal, and it’s been a month, and I had no good way to give her advice other than the story of my experience and how long the body can take to heal, how you can hurt everywhere. And after all the words that hope clung still to her heart and there was nothing more to say. There is so much heartache in life, I offered. But myocardium is the strongest of all the tissues and it will tear and strain and break into a million little pieces, but it will keep beating pumping moving. And so this becomes your task, as well. We stepped out into cold rain and broken asphalt and the realization that sometimes you just have to take the hard road. It is early in the evening and yet dark already, our paths home wind us in different directions and there are wisps of smoke emerging from the chimney as I pull in the drive, he has a glass of wine and we settle into the warmth of each other’s arms, against the cold and the wet and the dark of the outside. The slow release.

Mon innocence me ferait pleurer.

2011-09-06T19:21:00.002-04:00

He didn't mind, to be there. You have to sense that disdain too, regardless of how it's covered over with sweetness. She didn't know I was sitting across the table from her and I looked across the yard at him standing sentinel at the grill and I just felt so much sadness, for what he would feel if he knew, for what she was going to feel in the second it would take her to look up and those words can't be taken back, once uttered. I wanted to cry for all three of us, just sucked back the tears and up for one more shot and

This broken road.

Maybe I am severely mistaken and just can't find the right way. Someone once told me that you fall in love the first time for love, and the second time for money. Any variation and you are just a damn fool. But I have always been different. I have always found shame in that. As though there is a bar I just haven't found the way to measure up to, and that my life's journey is the trek toward that strength, the end goal being the other side of some status quo that until that moment will always be foreign, exotic. And he looks at me, from the grill across the yard, and all I want is that smile, the green eyes with the creases at the corner, and how he laughs at me when I emerge from the pig skin discarding sweat shop. And how she sat across from me and said that, how I can never talk about that. This parallel that I don't want to draw,

[how can you not]

new orleans and the announcement that I made and how I could feel how sick it made her and I can't remember what I felt then. Afraid. There has to be some point at which I realize that I know what is best for me. And faith in the decisions, once made. I wish I had been born the son of a female shark.

138 South Main

2011-08-10T21:33:00.002-04:00

I could smell him from seven feet away. Seven feet is the distance in the ER from the trauma room to the bathroom, and he sat in a wheelchair in front of the door to the latter. He had been ready to go for about thirty minutes, but just as we were getting ready to transfer him to our squad the service that borders us to the south brought in a ninety year-old man in full arrest. The ER went on hold as we all tried to stabilize him, which meant our seven hundred pound frequent flier would have to wait for his return trip home.

He had been to the ER three times in the preceding 24-hour period, each time for the same thing. And each time a lights and sirens squad trip and we push the drug that restarts his heart and you can see the panic on his face as it first takes hold, that freeze when for a split second everything resets itself. And three times thus in a 24-hour period and you begin to wonder what some people live for. To make no change in the positive direction, to know there is another squad trip in the very near future and that clinging desperation that the next trip could be the one in which the heart gives up.

Our full arrest gets transferred to a trauma center in Cleveland via helicopter and we make our trip back south, seven hundred pounds heavier. It is a basic life support trip and I am in the back with him. The industrial air conditioning blasting through the myriad vents in our truck is not near enough to overpower the stench of unwashed flesh. He is too big to wear shoes and his naked feet look like something from science fiction with their long and curled toe nails and elephant hide roughness. I breathe in shallow and erratic breaths to stave off the creeping nausea. He speaks and I bury my face into my t-shirt, the need to not vomit overtaking the normal social proprieties. The eyes roll around in his head as he complains about how the system has failed him and we leave him in the doorway of an apartment littered with cigarette butts, pizza boxes, empty mountain dew two-liters. It is the closest I have come to just not caring. We don't talk on the ride back to the hospital and spend twenty minutes disinfecting the squad when we get there. I punch in the door code to the ER and Freddy turns to me before the door slides all the way open. "We don't even talk to him anymore. At least you still have your niceness." It's a small victory. You can't save them all.

Necrotizing Faciitis

2011-08-03T15:07:00.003-04:00

I think it's good that I chose to be in the trenches. I can't even see those books on the bookshelf without thinking of the life I would have chosen before, the lofty ideals I had in my youth. You never put together that the awful people who are your peers in college turn into awful adults and so your task becomes to figure out what you love. And fuck all to the things (people) that would put that love asunder. Life is hard no matter what, but it's easier to fight for and justify your existence when it's something you can believe in. And barrelling down a busy street in a college town in the big white and red box sirens blaring and life clining desperately to its target in the back is the something for me. I hope it doesn't get muddied up.

I used to say a prayer, for the EMTs and the patient, everytime I heard an ambulance siren. It's funny and endearing that the girl who would have been content to make her world academia acknowledged what was going on inside there. Or perhaps like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel my future self was able to visit her and tell her, whisper quietly in sleep, your elbows gotta get dirty, this ain't the life for you, pea under your mattress. I wonder sometimes why it has taken so long. Or that perhaps my sisters got the Irish blood with their stout opinions and strength and backbone, levity and determination. And so I was left with the Russian part, the brooding and mania and staunch belief that my suffering will somehow be deposited into a bank that loved ones can borrow from at a future date. I will stay the same, there is no getting over that part. The goal becomes to find strength in that.

I still say the prayer, but the words have changed a little. I want to drive there but be in the back on the return trip. I want to be calm. I want to hear my patient's heart beat through my stethoscope instead of my own pumping wildly. To be the best at it. To fix a life! How can it have taken me so long to come to this. And a thank-you, that finally I did.

Bloodbuzz

2011-06-28T10:52:00.003-04:00

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees. We had no idea what we were getting into, once we set out, and as time went by we let the Lilliputians take hold of the brain stem, we more and more put our faith in those orchard thieves and the robber baron blood was put asunder. Not entirely a bad thing, but it's amazing what one will get used to. It's time again to wake up.

I was thinking about Olympia, how it was to be there before that last trip which may have forever ruined it for me (a lovely honeymoon gift! desperation...) and I suppose what I am most afraid of is a return to that feeling. Having never felt so solitary isolated and alone before in life. North Carolina is a long ways away. There are things to worry about, and my brain is quite adept at digging them up at every possible instant and showing them to me, assisting in their full examination. Sometimes I think that worrying about paying this mortgage is everything there is in life. Sometimes I think that when this house sells I will spontaneously combust for the relief of stress and they will have to clean the bits and pieces off of the wall/ceiling.

Yes! It is time to wake up. Return to simplicity. We will ride his motorcycle to the ocean on the weekends! And the sentiment reminds me of that with which I left that foreign land for the last time, adventure burning deeply within my soul. Myopic as a return to that vision may be, it has to be a different fuel that drives me, I've grown far too comfortable with the undertakings of men and the requisite sterility of life that goes along with it. Most of the people with whom I work are unhappy. And that unhappiness finds palliation most often from downgrading the ones closest around, dissecting the percieved flaws generally only when said party isn't within earshot. And I have found myself from time to time engaging in this behavior! Oh, these failings of the mind. Yes, a different fuel is necessary. We used to talk about the banker-women on their smoke breaks and how the world so readily becomes a tiny indistinguishable microcosm. It's amazing, the propensity of time to move forward.

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees. Let cities light their lamps in the evening. My daytime is done; I am leaving Europe. The air of the sea will burn my lungs; lost climates will turn my skin to leather. To swim, to pulverize grass, to hunt, above all to smoke; to drink strong drinks, as strong as molten ore, - as did those dear ancestors around their fires. Boredom is no longer my love. Rage, perversion, madness, whose every impulse and disaster I know, - my burden is set down entire. Let us appraise with clear heads the extent of my innocence.

A Dead End

2011-05-12T07:13:00.000-04:00

"What's the process by which adenosine acts upon the heart? Like, its physiologic path?"

I get a smug look that I have grown to hate and the thing opens its mouth. "Why do you need to know that? You just need to know that it works. And that it's for SVT."

He is always right. Two hours earlier we were doing the truck check -- actually, I was doing the truck check, he was leaned back in the captain's chair gracing me with his golden platitudes of paramediGod wisdom and critiquing every movement that I made-- and I was checking that the lights on each of the intubation blades worked. This is something that was drilled into my head in school. The last thing you want if you have to intubate is a laryngyscope blade with no light. It's so important, in fact, that someone came up with a mantra for it. So as I snapped on each blade and nodded and "m-hm'ed" my way through the stories I was hearing for the 18th time, my mind was rythmically telling my hands, "bright, white, and to the right." He stops talking. I enjoy the silence for two seconds and look up.

"What. Are you doing."

"..."

:: smug stare ::

"Checking that the laryngyscope blades are in proper working order?"

"Why in the hell would you do that?"

It goes on like this for some time. I draw the information out of him (there should be hazard pay involved, or PTSD counseling after) and learn that the hospital has purchased blades with fiber optic lights, and you don't have to check them anymore because they will "never" burn out. Now, I'm sure that I'll still check them anyway because I'm type A like that, but we could have saved so much time had he just said, "hey, you don't have to check each blade anymore, they're fiber optic now." The entire rest of the truck check was spent thusly (he tried to trip me up by asking me to find the Narcan. I think he was actually disappointed when I pulled out the Naloxone Hydrochloride because he knows that basics don't have to know anything about drugs, and therefore I wouldn't know the actual drug name, and therefore he could lord his infinite wisdom over me. Again. In his inexplicable hillbilly drawl. Just an aside, but how do you grow up and spend your entire life in Oberlin, and speak with a redneck accent?)

The rest of the shift goes like this, and yet somehow he deems me competent enough to tech every single call we got. I just keep telling myself that God puts people like this into your pathway for a reason. I'm beginning to think that I'm not learning the reason quickly enough and God is getting frustrated with me because I have not been able to escape this guy, be it shifts at the hospital or training/calls with the FD.

We had our annual extrication training on Monday, and it was just like it always is. We practiced a bunch of stuff that we will never, ever do at a scene. The lieutenants run the trainings. This redneck is, unfortunately a lieutenant. An A Shift lieutenant. So I am always, basically, in his training group. Because our extrication trainings involve things we never do on actual scenes, none of us really ever know what the lieutenants want us to do. I am beginning to think the lieutenants don't know, either. This is how training goes.

Lieutenant 1: Hey, stabilize that vehicle.

Firefighter: ::chocks tires in two directions and lets air out of tires::

Lieutenant 1: NO! GO GET THE CRIBBING AND THE AIRBAGS AND THE PNEUMATIC STRUTS!

Lieutenant 2: Gain access to the vehicle. The doors are locked and you need to break a window.

Firefighter: ::gets halligan and flat head axe and breaks window in controlled manner::

Lieutenant 2: NO! BREAK OFF THE ANTENNA AND CREATE A FULCRUM BY HOLDING THE MIDDLE OF THE ANTENNA AGAINST THE B POST AND THEN SMACK THE ANTENNA HEAD ONTO THE WINDOW!

This is not embellishment. Maybe it's a man thing to train this way, but I don't think I was the only one who was frustrated by it. It just seems like it takes so much less effort to explain what you want out of your crew instead of letting them do what they would normally do, and then nitpicking the shit out of every action as they do it.

I lost it when they brought out the air chisel.

I was working with one of the rookies with the hydraulic spreaders. I like to teach what I know to new people, so I sort of just took over with him because the two lieutentants who were supposed to be training us weren't explaining the tool at all to him. All of a sudden, from the other side of the vehicle, came the loudest, most grating sound I have heard our service produce. We went around the truck to see what was going on, and the two lieutenants were standing over one of the rookies as he used an air chisel to peel away layers of the sheet metal that made up the truck's body. I didn't even know we had an air chisel, if that gives you any indication of how frequently it's used. The redneck lieutenant sees me standing there and hands me the air chisel and tells me, "peel off in front of the A post so we can see the hinges."

I have no idea how to use an air chisel, and I'm not too excited at the prospect of learning. But, it's not mine to decide what I do at training, so I hold the thing in my hands and look at it. It looks like an assault rifle with a big chisel bit on the end of it.

"How does it work?"

Really, Emily? Do you seriously think that they're going to start teaching you now?

"Put it up against the metal and pull the trigger."

I'm glad he isn't into guns and will never be a range instructor. I did what he said, and maybe exacerbated how ineffective it was to just "put it up against the metal and pull the trigger," and I stopped the thing. There was a long zig-zag line where the chisel had etched along the sheet metal, but it hadn't penetrated. The chisel head spins around wildly and moves in and out like a jack hammer, it is not a tool whose use is intuitive.

"Keep going."

I was frustrated at this point because he could see that I didn't know what I was doing, and he still wasn't going to actually teach me anything.

"It's not going to work. Can we do things that we're actually going to need to do on scene now?"

He gave me a raised eyebrow (I hate how this guy thinks no one will ever challenge him because he's a lieutenant.) Chapman must have sensed my frustration because he came over and actually went over the tool with all of us, explained how we could hold the chisel bit and guide it and that it wouldn't hurt us, explained exactly how to handle the tool and use it the way it was meant to be used. It was a far cry from the original instruction I was given, and it felt good to actually learn something in training. When I made the cut that redneck wanted, we learned that you can't see the hinges from the opposite and inside A post. I looked around the vehicles that the different crews had used the air chisel on, and all I saw were big gashes and triangle shaped holes along the front and back fenders. I still have no idea what the practical application of the air chisel would be in an extrication scenario.

About ten minutes later I heard Rob say, "can we do a scenario or something like what we would really do on a scene?" to redneck lieutenant. His reply was, "this is training, we get to practice all of the things that we never do."

...

We got back to the station and got all the trucks squared away and as everyone was leaving the redneck lieutenant came up to me. With his most formidable expression he asked me, "do you have ten minutes?" My stomach sank. "Sure." We walked out to the parking lot so he could smoke. He fires one up, turns to me and says, "do you have a problem with me?"

You can't answer a question like that honestly. Can you? At that moment I wished for more of Dad and Libby's spirit than my own.

"I am very frustrated. My morale is at an all-time low. I'm tired of trainings that have less to do with training and more to do with gratifying the officers' egos. I feel no brotherhood here anymore, I have no pride in telling people that I work here anymore. We just spent two and a half hours at extrication training, and the new guys are no better off as far as what they will be able to do on scene than they were when we started."

His reply?

"Well you guys won't be doing anything if we get a real accident, anyway. You'll be fighting all of us for the jaws."

Randomness

2011-05-11T07:03:00.002-04:00

This year has been the hardest year so far to lose the frigging Ohio winter weight. I need to stop buying sunchips and herdez because I fool myself into thinking that the combination is good for me and I can therefore eat a lot of it.

Tuna has decided that he will only eat his dog food if I mix fruity cheerios into it. This only started after mom watched him for a day over the weekend. I'm wondering how many other human food items she found in the pantry that she mixed into his kibble. I'm on to you mom!

Dan's brother got married over the weekend, so we went to Niagara Falls for it. The wedding was Saturday and we got there Friday night, a little before most of the rest of his family, so Dan and I were scoping out fun things to do. (His dad and brother are sticks in the mud and we were afraid to leave the planning to them.) We found this very very awesome wine bar in a very very awesome 18 floor hotel that had been decorated in the art deco style. We felt like we were in Gotham City sitting in there. The bartender told us that they had a lounge on the 18th floor with a great view of the falls that we could go up to. So, we went up, and it was breathtaking. Three sides of the room were windows, and there were leather couches wrapping around a sprawling marble floor. There was a big screen tv mounted on the wall that wasn't made of windows, a wet bar next to it, and there was absolutely no one up there. The bartender had also told us that we could order whatever we wanted from the hotel kitchen and have it sent up there. Dan immediately called his brother to suggest that everyone get together up there, but we couldn't even get anyone to meet us at the wine bar. Where did we end up with his family that night? The Hard Rock Cafe.

So Much More Than More Than Plain

2011-05-02T15:10:00.010-04:00

I ruffled his hair soft and unruly like goose down feathers, like baby goose feathers the ones that will molt off eventually. And when I withdrew the hand I wondered at the appropriateness of the gesture, but the little body on the cot the little eyes hesitant to raise to mine made necessary a different approach. They didn't have a parent's number to reach, just a court-appointed guardian who was not at home and I hated how this cycle of life can start out already, eight years old. A big puffy winter jacket in the back and dirty jeans and me. "No one is here to judge you." The eyes look up. "So young and already to know how cutting life can be." He nods. Looks away. A shot of life in a hungry vein.

Wanting to derail that train. Same as same. He will hate authority because authority will hate him will know his name will know that life. Tired of all those friends listening at your door mouths full of their picture of you before the brushes have even had a chance to touch canvas. And they sacrifice their lives. The badge is not the part that is sacred. And the brotherhood extends.

He is so little when we roll him out of the squad and into room nine the doc is already in there waiting for us and he closes the door after we've unloaded him and wheel the cot back out. And I heard, later, that he told the truth. And you left a little piece of yourself in there in that room just like you did in the back with me and sitting at the computer desk right before you passed out. And you leave these little pieces behind for good or bad and they are the markers for these moments, the points at which you move on. You replace those little pieces with bigger ones that are stronger for the wear and those ruffled feathers molt and you become something amazing: what you were meant to be.

If Only At Allen

2011-04-15T14:32:00.006-04:00

A friend who started out in the world of medicine as an EMT and who is now in med school had this to say about the work that we do as emergency medical providers: we are participants in life's longing for itself.

Recently he told me about a call he once was on, for a severe anaphylactic reaction. The patient was on a beta-blocker for an unrelated heart condition. When he treated her with epinephrine for the anaphylaxis, he simultaneously administered glucagon, knowing that the cyclic adenosine monophosphate level in the cell would be lower because of the beta-blocker, knowing that the epi would have a hard time getting its message through because of this, and knowing that glucagon works by raising cellular cAMP levels. This was outside of his protocols so he had to call med control and explain to the doctor why he was considering administering the glucagon. I could only stare open-mouthed and think, this is exactly the kind of medic I hope to be someday!

And they say you will never need to remember the cellular biology portions of A & P!

Crocker Stearns Extension

2011-03-15T09:15:00.002-04:00

A rock thrown up in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.

It just gets too insurmountable to think about and if it weren't for the long work weeks the three jobs I would probably drink more, to sleep through the night, if not for the crying dog 3:00 in the morning. How impossible it is to get back to sleep after. And ten hour day follows twelve hour day and you're still couting the numbers on the calendar, and they say to you

Well he called but I felt awkward cause I knew the whole situation, how you weren't there, and I didn't go. You can hang out with us though.

And to have no idea how many times, thus. To detour around that address because to be left out like that again could positively be The Straw. To feel how fucking tenuous it is, sanity. And how your name comes up at work when you're not there, and how it's impossible to be a private person, and how embarrassing that is -- to not know what htey know and to be unable to defend oneself -- and how there isn't even a way to deal with it. And will it affect who lets me go in? Geared up and airpack on and how do I have any way of knowing what they think about me, really? Not knowing what is said. There is no way to deal with it after the sixty hours and awkwardness of being around people who know more about you than you do about them and not by your doing, at every stroke feeling that it's down to go up. Up up up.

Just sell this place, move on. To be kittied up to someone eight months in only. To have no foothold. Second day and a call at 7:30 his car on the side of the road, second day and at this place there are only a few more chances. To be kittied up so. If it weren't for the work and the bills and the balancing of accounts and the research for future options there would be time to think and that would certainly be terrifying. And when I really let myself stop to think about it, I get swallowed up into this deep loneliness like the world inhabited by the newly blind, grasping with desperation at the last slipping fragment of memory. Of what the world used to be like.

H

2011-03-06T17:20:00.004-05:00

The rain, the smell of rain in the morning when we woke and the air perfumed with coffee it was just like Olympia, any one of those winter days that started so slow after a night of downtown and dancing, a langorous walk to the bus wet wool socks and breakfast at Darby's. The smell in some back alley of cooking paregoric. You cannot escape it. Eyes like gravestones and the new bags underneath, they know each other and they seek each other and they find what they are looking for.

I had seen her before, at the hospital. I remembered the grey face dust like a million years of age and in my assessment when I asked her the birthdate the shock when she was five years younger than me. Grey. All the way through, to the core. Back pain and I am allergic to medicines you have not even heard of yet. Boyfriend standing there silent and gruesome and I am almost afraid of him, the way she shudders at his eyebrows, the way those eyebrows move closer toward each other with each question that I ask. And push up the sleeve to read her blood pressure and there they are, gaping mouths little gravestones like pockmarks all the way up to the elbow. Fresh gravestones gaping mouths that are absolutely hungry, starving. She is staring at the floor and I am staring at the velcro of the cuff but we both know. This moment passed between us. I know why she's here and she knows that I know. She is praying that I won't say anything. You can feel it, the sentient supplication. Just let me get what I need to get through, just let me let me.

Three in the morning an apartment we had a hard time finding and not many of us showed up. Least of all anyone comfortable with EMS. So two of us go, I am one of them, up the dimly lit creaking and steep outside staircase. The room has one lamp on the floor just a naked bulb, no shade and there is a mattress against the wall it has no sheets or coverings on it. Two or three others scattered about the room who are of absolutely no help, this time I am on her turf, summoned by someone with a guilty conscience who has long since left the dismal scene. A fresh gravestone like a garnet just below the bend in her arm and her works spread out on the floor next to her. I cannot tell if she's breathing. We take the Reeves to her and this is the hard part, to work in a profession like this and everyone so bitter and jaded against the weak. Don't want to have to endure the condescending comments from the one I'm in there with, can we just get her and get out. There is precisely no room in this world for guppies. You will absolutely be led to slaughter, by everyone. Even by people who have absolutely nothing to gain from the disinterest, and everything to lose. The ones who swear to uphold something more and sit around the table mouths full with their story telling and your life is stock and trade.

I crushed her works under my feet on my approach and ear hovering over the mouth I watched for chest rise and I prayed I would see something. Little snores though they were, respiration is respiration and thank God the other one up there could push the drug and in a few seconds she was gasping sucking for air, breath, life. Onto the Reeves backwards through the apartment to the snores of her closest friends down the creaking stairway and a lecture from the medic and we load her into the squad make the sign of the cross and it's back to the truck and home because it's three o'clock in the morning. Crawl back into bed with the nascent curiosity, is this the right line of work for me. Don't yet have those callouses. I fade into sleep clutching my crucifix and saying a prayer that I don't really want to talk about. Maybe it's the right line of work because I'm not calloused over. And how thin and frail that line really is.

Poseidon's Fury

2011-03-02T08:41:00.003-05:00

She had the look of panic in her eyes, and my voice over the falling rain and the rushing water that had washed out the road wasn’t enough to allay the fear I could see in her returned gaze; the fear that we wouldn’t be able to get her out in time. The fear that she had made the worst possible decision and that there was no going back now—the full weight of that realization sinking in and that she might never get home again. Truthfully, I wasn’t yet certain that we’d be able to fight the water and the cold fast enough to save her; who knows how long she had already been in there. A freak thunderstorm after a weekend of record snowfall had turned many of the city streets into rivers of very cold, very high, water. Thankfully the storm hadn’t started until well after midnight and was supposed to end before six a.m., so most of the city’s residents were sleeping peacefully against the sound of distant thunder and wouldn’t find the storm’s damage until morning when the water had time to recede. There were still people who had to be out in it, however, and for some of them the water covered patches of roadway weren’t enough to dissuade them from their normal daily routine, whether that was a commute to work or a drunken drive home from the bar. 911 dispatch beckoned us to assist the travelers whose hubris didn’t translate into safe passage; there were disabled cars in various levels of watery burial all over Lorain County.

She had almost made it through, but missed the curvature of the road and the mistake had sent her car into a ditch, sinking the entire front end into the murky depths. She had managed to get herself to the backseat and rolled down a window from which she reached up and out toward us with grasping hands like hungry baby bird mouths from the nest. We had our turn-out gear on and I wondered about its buoyancy as I made my way through the now thigh-deep water. I felt heavy and the ice cold water rushed into my boots and sent a shockwave through my spine. I focused my attention on the tag line around me and pushed the other thoughts out of my head. I knew the hands at the end of the line and the ones right next to me wouldn’t let me find harm’s way. With one hand under her armpit and the other holding the vice-grip of her frightened hand, we pulled her out of the window and into the water with us. Her lips were blue and her face was ashen and she trembled as we walked her to higher ground, to the awaiting squad. It was one of dozens of similar calls around the county in the six-hour period from the storm’s start to finish; we walked over each others’ radio traffic and donned soaked turn-outs and clenched our teeth each time the engine inched through the stopped water, hoping we would make it. I thought about Buzz and how he died rescuing someone in the exact same situation just ten miles south of us. How that was only six years ago. How that’s just the risk that you sign on to take and how you rarely think about it except in the face of rising flood water or a smoke filled second floor in which you can’t even see the bale on the hose line. And that it’s not about the glory of it, or even for telling the story, but that for that microcosm you are of useful, specific, meaningful purpose. How there is no word yet invented to describe what that feels like.

She was twenty miles west of us, maybe close to the same time that Rob and I traversed the deep dark cold to our first call that night. Her 911 call was probably more pleading than the one we responded to because as she made it her car hadn’t yet found the lowest spot it would settle in and she probably still felt it surging downward, still watched the water bifurcate more and more of her windshield. They searched everywhere in the area that the call came from and everywhere in the vicinity and didn’t find her until the next morning, eight hours later when the enemy had relented enough to allow them to be able to see. She was a nurse and driving to work and probably never thought it would be the last time she’d take that route when she started into the high water. I wish I could go back, find her, and tell her. It’s not at all like driving through snow. When it’s that deep you don’t have the option to just get stuck and wait for a tow truck to come get you out. When it’s that cold the hypothermia steals your body heat and your ability to think clearly and reason along with it. I only hope that it happened quickly. That even if she didn't hear the sirens, that she knew she wasn't alone.

525

2011-02-17T10:16:00.007-05:00

It started easily enough. I had never worked with Mike, and my tertiary interactions with him led me to believe that he was something of a hard ass, but Rob's assertations to the contrary were enough to allow me to start the shift with little more than the ordinary trepidation. Being a very green hospital EMT, I still had plenty of anxiety every time I heard our tone over the radio. At the fire station when we got a medical call, I just hopped onto the engine and knew there would be at least four to five others to help get the job done. At the hospital, as a basic and under the direction of the paramedic with whom I was partnered, I had to hop behind the wheel of the ambulance and take care of all of the mundane tasks including working the foot-pedal siren while careering through Oberlin traffic with a paramedic simultaneously laughing and yelling at me to go faster, getting vitals while not getting in the way, loading cots, unloading cots, spiking bags, establishing 4- and 12-leads, the list goes on. Add to the fact that I am PRN at the hospital and only work when someone calls off (which happens a lot less than you might think,) and the anxiety level just rachets up. It can be weeks between shifts for me; by the end of a twelve hour shift the nurses might have learned my name, but when they see me the next time I work two weeks later, they all ask me if I'm new and if this is my first shift. Suffice to say that there is a world of difference between fire based and hospital based EMS, and I was still traversing the murky area from one to the other.

In the shabby corner of the hospital that is the EMS room, I stood reading the weekly bulletin and waiting for my shift to begin. One of the medics that I work with at the fire department came in and gave me a hug before I had a chance to sidle away (his nickname is Lt. Pig Pen for very good reason.) "Thanks for coming in, you saved me and Jon. One of us would have had to stay and I have a staff meeting and this is Jon's Friday," he said with genuine appreciation. I would find out later exactly why he was so appreciative not to be stuck with the 7-12 shift.

At six minutes to seven, I clocked in and EMS was immediately paged to do a triage. The three of us in the EMS room gingerly exchanged glances and I was the first to succumb. "I'll go." At the hospital, the majority of the patients who are admitted to the ER arrive on their own. We only average about six ambulance runs per 24 hours, so during the times we aren't doing our actual EMS duties, we have duties to help around the ER. One of those is triage. In triage, we take a patient's preliminary set of vital signs, get their medical history, and find out what exactly is going on with them. This is not always as easy as it sounds. The ER duties have always been a bone of contention within the EMS department because our wages are provided by the tax payers of our community, and not by the hospital. Invariably when the nurses page us to do a triage or a splint or to start an IV or any of the other myriad tasks for which we are beckoned, it is when we're in the middle of a truck check or report or restocking supplies and there are three nurses sitting at the nurses' station, ten feet from the triage room, talking about who won on American Idol last night.

On this occasion, I rounded the corner to the triage room and was met by a man in his mid-40s, already sitting down in the patient chair. He was ashen colored, sweating profusely, and completely covering his left hand was a very bloody rag. Next to his chair on the floor was a plastic bag full of ice that, like the rag, had blood all over it. I knew I didn't want to see what was in that bag.
"What seems to be the problem," I felt idiotic asking this question of someone who was clutching their hand over a blood-soaked rag, but it seemed an appropriate way to start the ball rolling.

"Well we had this new guy at work who totally fucked up the machine and when I tried to fix it I got my hand hung up in there and I think I cut my three fingers off, I don't know, I don't wanna look at it."

"What's in the bag?"

This seemed the next logical question. It could be the pastrami he was planning to eat for dinner, right?

"The fingers. Do you think they can reattach them?? We put 'em on ice."

He had to get to a room ASAP. His color was bad, his vitals weren't good, and I didn't want to spend anymore time with the bag of fingers. He and I and the bag headed into the ER and I set him up in one of our trauma rooms. A couple of nurses followed us in and started asking him about what happened, and as I tried to sneak out of the room thinking they had forgotten about my presence, the dreaded bag made its way into my hands.

"Here, hold this," the charge nurse commanded without even looking at me. She thrusted the plastic bag at me, which was now dripping a mixture of melted ice and blood. "What the hell," I thought to myself. I opened the bag. I looked inside. I found three perfectly maintained half-fingers--index, middle, and ring--starting back up at me. They were dark from the blood and looked strangely small mixed within the ice as they were, but they were unmistakable. Three fingernails, three knuckles, no hand. It was far more surreal than anything, and I don't think I would even describe the sight of them as gross. The ER Doctor relieved me of my bag-holding duties when he entered the room, and I felt that I had just experienced some kind of ER rite of passage by not getting sick at the sight of the handless fingers. As I was heading back to the EMS room, one of the other EMTs, Rob, stopped me.

"Ready for a long night?" he asked.

"I'm just on 'til midnight. That's not too bad," was my reply. He chuckled. I raised my eyebrow.

"You're covering for Shannon, right? When she called she said she needed five hours of coverage because her dad had been life flighted to Saint Vince's with an MI and she was the only one in the family who could be there with him. I don't know about you, but if I had to drive two hours to a hospital to be with my dad who might be dying, I wouldn't be coming back to work at midnight. Of course, she could just be at home and wanted to sleep tonight. She's not exactly the most honest person in the world."

My stomach sank. Shannon's shift was 7:00 pm to 7:00 am. If she really didn't show up, I would be stuck working her entire shift and I'd have to go to my daytime job on absolutely no sleep, and no prospect of sleep until 4:00 pm! It was only about 7:15 and I was already yawning. Rob saw the panic in my eyes and laughed. "You'll be fine," were the only words of consolation he could offer. "We all have to stay awake for 48 hours sometimes."

Shapka

2011-01-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as two times two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.

Just,

2011-01-24T13:12:00.000-05:00

"You cannot add any time to your life by worrying about it." Matthew 6:27

Anxiety is an expensive habit. Of course, it might be worth the cost if it worked. But it doesn't. Our frets are futile.

Worry has never brightened a day, solved a problem, or cured a disease.

God leads us. God will do the right thing at the right time. And what a difference that makes.

Your Ghost.

2010-12-31T13:36:00.003-05:00

I woke up from it, and it made me sick to my stomach to think what I had been dreaming about with the love of my life laying there, next to me. A nightmare. He was drunk, like always, but the pig-faced girl was there. We were in the old house on Vine Street, and I felt so out of place, like always. He was walking around the house it was three o'clock in the morning I had been trying to sleep, they were laughing about something I was not privy to. A secret party where I was the butt of the joke. Just like it always was. And awake from the dream I looked over my shoulder and saw him laying there, sleeping so soundly, my prince, my king. I wish I could stop having those dreams. I wish I could just really get past it. And please don't get me wrong, it is definitely not that I would ever go back there, down that road of dust and bones and of dying. The world is certainly brighter now. It's just I guess that the feeling of failure is so final. There is not a hole in my heart where he used to be, nor have I filled it in a vain effort to replace him. There is hate in that spot. I don't have a problem with it, the hate. I would love the opportunity to knock his teeth down his throat, but I would give anything to make the dreams stop.

Allen 1 676

2010-12-17T12:53:00.002-05:00

It smelled like vomit in her room, and greasy fish left out too long. An overwhelming stench that assaulted your nostrils by just opening the door, and to enter the room was to commit fully to not become sick yourself, a continuous, conscious supplication. Small, quick, shallow breaths. To the point of hyperventilation. When she spoke it was the deep guttoral ramblings from a nausea so deep you can only know it if you have ever been very, very drunk, and unable to get home. To comfort.

He had just taught me how to spike a bag when I heard it over the radio. He looked at me half somberly, half like a five year-old on Christmas morning. "You ready?" I picked up the keys and we got out of the back and into the front, me behind the wheel. My lizard brain was in command of the next five minutes and I don't remember them entirely. There were sirens, and me speeding down 511, the engine roaring like a dragon startled out of sleep, people getting out of my way. Air horn. And Dan looking at me, giddiness on his face. "We need some response music!" He turns on the ambulance radio and it's on 100.7 and they are playing Let the Bodies Hit the Floor. He rocks out for a minute and turns it off and says it's too early for that and that I'm still in training, and I am laughing hysterically. Fire trucks, lots of personnel, the lady's car is on its side in someone's lawn and she is sitting on their front steps laceration to the head and it is spurting the way only an arterial bleed does. "Go start your assessment," cool as a cucumber he tells me, making his way to the backboards. And later you can actually feel in your chest the thumping of when the helicopter lands and the flight crew comes into the rig and you're working this lady, and everyone has a part to play in it, there are seven of us back there and we are a well-oiled machine. She is transferred to the bird and when it takes off in the snow like that there is a swirling of ice and cold air and against the bible black of the night out in the country it is like diamond dust and the cold feels so welcome after the heat and the sweat of working so hard in the rig. Dan looks at me and I look at him and we both look into the back of the squad and it is a miasma of test strips, plastic tubes, blood soaked rags and gauze and bandages, opened packages, discarded gloves. It will take us an eon to put everything back in order.

It is my first shift out of orientation. We walk back into the hospital after, and everyone wants to know the story of what happened. Dan grabs me by the shoulders and says only, "this is the champ."

It Happened Like This

2010-11-29T10:34:00.003-05:00

He was feeling so guilty after the party at Joe's, despite my efforts to console. We were huddled up in the dark and he was mustering up the strength that I have been trying to find. He reached over me and turned on the light on my side of the bed, and with tears in his eyes he looked deep into mine and said, "Emily, I love you. I wanted to tell you long ago, but I was afraid I would scare you away." And I smiled, and with tears in my eyes, I said, "I love you, too." God, to feel that way. It is just incredible.

The Flour Factory on St. Clair

2010-11-17T08:31:00.004-05:00

I do get so down on myself from time to time. And it's usually about what I'm doing, and how I feel that it somehow doesn't measure up. And to what, and it's like today when Lizzie and Asa's mom came in for some reason and part of the experience was her updating me with everything her kids are doing andwhydopeopledothat how Lizzie is a famous artist in LA and Asa is working for a paper in the United Arab Emirates and how all I can think is how lonely it would be to be in those places. But how there is money, and status, and how to make your parents proud. But how you would be there in the Emirates and you would be so far from your family and I remember looking at his FB pictures one day when I was trying to remember, remember the girl you once were, the liberal girl who believed in peace and equality and freedom and all that fun stuff and it seemed so much the same. And that was fifteen years ago! Still smoking cigarettes with long hair standing in a sparse room modern art aloof in the corner morning light fading on cold coffee.

I don't care about the pursuit of ideas anymore, beyond the walls of my skull. The main thing, I have come to realize, for me, is my family. That it means something here, and that I am here. That I don't need something fancy and exotic for my parents to tell their friends I'm doing, or the money that goes along with it; just to allow my hands to be the machines they are, for my mind to switch over the way it does when the sirens come on. For me, there is nothing more noble. And the love of a good man. All of these innumberable little things. I am the luckiest. Titles are bandied about, Claudine with her effing articles that only serve to make you feel smaller, we watched the movie about Collinwood last night and the very last line he says, I think, is the reason the entire thing was filmed:

"Money, the job, it's nothing. Listen to me, I'm an old man, I know. Money comes, money goes. But to have someone to walk with... to have love.... that's everything."

And Tuna and Squinty Too

2010-11-08T23:18:00.004-05:00

It's in the quiet and the dark and the semi-lucid twitching of almost sleep, our limbs still entwined and his lips a centimeter from mine, that I remember the things I used to hear in youth. And I feel your arms around me and your lips against mine and how you say my name first, how you say my name, and I know, I know. I tried two nights ago to tell him about it, the path I had to take to get here, and I remembered the phone call to Anne and Olympia that last time and how instead of hating you more I think it made me hate ME more, and how that realization now makes me want to destroy you, just so much anger, and I looked at him and could not believe that this is the same life and these emotions were possible back then, too. That it took so long to realize what was unhealthy. And that I consider myself an educated person! His breath on my neck and we fall asleep like that and I wake with those fingers combing through my hair and he calls me baby and before we get up he pulls me closer and in the silence so much is said. And it is more than I ever thought possible.

Pancakes Sunday Morning

2010-10-04T09:09:00.003-04:00

Cold grey of the approaching autumn, gun-metal october sky and the rain that goes with it, the kind that gets into your socks and bottoms of your pants and chills you to your bones. We built a fire and just stayed on the couch, I love the feeling of both of those arms encircling me, and how he doesn't easily let go. We stayed on the couch orange glow of the fireplace I felt bad with Anne in the basement and all these thoughts rattling around in my head, but I was glad that you were there with me. There is so much more that I want to tell you. Grey raindrops hitting window pane and how warm it is within the space between your arms, how I fit totally inside there, your breath on my neck and the scratch of your stubble. One more time, and again and again and again. A world full of rainy autumn sundays and the cold tempered by the fire and wet wool socks drying, the beautiful saddness of something that has passed and the joy of the future now, and you, all the way, to the core of me. I don't want to hide anything or be strong this time. I don't want to hide or be strong and I want to be able to tell you that in plain english, in a way that will make you understand everything that goes along with it.

Swept Under

2010-09-10T07:39:00.003-04:00

I just want to say this, how crazy it is to be in something so healthy and good. I was listening to radiohead and the lyrics, how I used to get that black tar sinking feeling crushing my soul when I would hear this song, "you are all i need...." and how I really felt that, down in my core. But that it was something born out of fear, and not love. Fear that you would leave me or that no one else would understand me and it is like a sickness, to need someone in that sense. Because in the end, you did leave me. And I don't think that you ever understood me. But there I was, blinders and all. And now a sigh of relief. We were never right for each other but that feeling was like glue and the fear of being alone is a strong thing. And it sneaks up on you and you can't see it and you end up so far away from the person you were when you started that you almost have to go on a vacation from other people to remember that stuff, the good stuff.

And to think that all this time there really was someone out there like me.

Labor Day

2010-09-06T17:07:00.002-04:00

There was a point during our team's reign when you were standing across from me and I looked at you and I had the thought, good God, how can this be real/happening. And in some ways it makes me so nervous. You think for so long about what you would want in a partner, and you make compromises your whole life because that other person doesn't really exist. And then you find it and it is terrifying and amazing and easy and hard and wonderful, all at the same time. And then later under the stars and how you get nervous too and the way that you bite your lip and I just can't get over that this is real.

The Duty To Act.

2010-09-02T10:29:00.002-04:00

It took us a minute to find the place because it was Joe's first solo mission as operator/engineer of E41, and he was nervous. You could hear it in his voice every time he came back to 911 over the radio. That high-pitched adrenaline fueled shakey and too fast way of talking that leaves the dispatchers scratching their heads and telling you that you broke up, to retransmit. He turned north instead of south off of Locust Street, so we had to double-back. It was only a matter of thirty seconds, but you could tell the mistake threw him off his game. Joe and I are alike in that regard; perfect isn't good enough when it comes to doing the job well.

Once we got to South Park Street, there was no mistaking which house it was. Family members were running up and down the driveway looking frantically at the engine as we approached, and one of them was standing sentinel at the end of the drive, motioning toward the ground floor apartment. As soon as I heard the hiss of the airbrake I jumped out of the cab and around the truck, grabbed our basic EMS bag, and headed toward the man who had been posted at the end of the driveway, who was now headed toward me.

"SHE IS NOT BREATHING!" He was red-faced and his eyes were crazy with panic, like an injured wild animal's. He was massive and as I scanned his face I thought to myself, this guy is either easily rocked by stress, or there is something developmentally wrong with him. I moved past him toward the door, where there were two women holding each other and sobbing.

"Is she breathing? Is she conscious?" I asked them as I approached, hoping I could get more information out of these two than I suspected I could out of the neanderthal who was now following behind me.

"OH GOD!!!!! OH GOD, SHE ISN'T BREATHING!!! I THINK SHE HAD A STROKE!!!!" Everyone in this place was crazy, wild-eyed, and panicked. For an instant I thought about how I might react if it was my grandmother who wasn't breathing, if the sirens were for her instead. In the next instant my brain switched to the machine that takes over during emergencies; the one that makes my hands work before my mind tells them to and can reach instinctively into the EMS bag and find whatever tool I need without looking. Our job is to mitigate other peoples' disasters. You have to let the machine do its work.

I entered the apartment and found an elderly woman laying on a hospital bed in what appeared to be the living room. There was another family member standing at her side and doing what appeared to be supporting her head, and the sobbing women and the neanderthal had all followed me in. I positioned myself opposite the man supporting her head, but when I got closer to him I realized that he was actually tilting her head down into her chest and successfully cutting off her airway. I looked up at him and he looked up at me and he had the crazy eyes too, and I thought, where in the hell am I.

Over the crying and the shouts of "KEEP FIGHTING GRANDMA!!" I asked the man at the head of the bed to step away, to which he responded with something that I can only assume was English. As soon as he let go of her head the woman sucked in with a great, deep, snoring respiration. I tilted her forehead back and lifted her chin to fully open her airway, and the snoring respirations became deep, regular in-breaths and out-breaths. With my ear still a few inches above her mouth, I looked around the room and could not wrap my head around the level of panic contained within. Everyone in the room, with the exception of me and my patient, looked like they were perhaps the product of inbreeding, and I knew that there was nothing I could say that would stop the flow of tears, or the pleading for grandma to keep fighting or the need for me to do something more than a head-tilt/chin lift despite the fact that grandma was now breathing quite well and really only appeared to be in a very deep sleep. I checked her pulse next, and it was very strong and very regular, much like her respirations.

"When is the last time she ate? Is she diabetic?" I posed the question to everyone in general, and it was the head-holding mumbler who responded first. His eyes looked so sad and I could tell he wanted desperately to help in some way, so I strained my ears to understand him and said a silent prayer that whatever he said would be useful. "Shejustwonteatnuthin" is what came out, and at that instant the medics from the squad came in. "Let's get a glucose check going," I told them, and the lead medic shot me one of those knowing "we come here nearly every day" looks. And as we were pulling away in our big red truck after they pushed D50 in the squad to fix her low blood glucose level and grandma started to come around, I thought about all of the lives that pass through our hands as Firefighter/EMTs, and the responsibility of what we're doing hit me. Even when you're called by crazy people and it's not a life or death situation, they call 911 expecting the cavalry and your truck rolls up and you have to be the cavalry. Each time. She said to me, "We are the the blue bloods, Em, no matter how the day greets us." And that is right.

Lake Trash.

2010-09-01T14:39:00.003-04:00

King and Queen of the DUI fair. And she said, "and then I would arrest them." My sisters know just when I need to laugh, and when I need the possibility of a drop gun. My abs hurt I was laughing so hard this morning. Thank you for that. How quickly things pass by, and are gone. How did I get so lucky to have such strong women for big sisters?

To Juxtapose.

2010-09-01T00:01:00.003-04:00

So many of these innumerable little things and I have to tell them to you in some form, in some way. It would be folly to say that any of us know where this might lead but without trepidation I can move confidently toward that thing we all aspire to (future) because I have learned something. And taken it with me.

To wait for someone who doesn't complete me, and I don't complete. To be complete and to find each other, two wholes.

Your hands and how they look like hard work and strength, and how they are the sexiest things I have ever seen.

How you open the car door for me every single time that I get in.

When we played paintball and that guy shot me in my mask after I was already out and how you made it your mission the rest of the time to annihilate him. How you are so protective of me, already. It's crazy to be with someone who really COULD take on all my battles for me, but understands the need for me to go guns blazin' myself.

The goosebumps and how you shared them with me and how vulnerable that is.

I was driving in my truck today and I had the Dropkick Murphys album "Sing Loud, Sing Proud," blasting. That song "Forever" came on and it instantly transported me to three years ago Wednesdays and dying of anxious anticipation waiting for a phone call at a high school soccer game and when it finally came, how absolutely effing proud I was to be your sister. And to realize that there is nothing in this life that can ever touch that, let alone change it. We were talking last night, he and I, about life and what the best times are. And I said for me that it's this. Now. I have the best people in my life that I have ever had, and I'm close to my whole family. I have friends that I would sacrifice everything for and be weak OR strong for, and vice versa. Life has never been better than it is right now, even if it's not all tidy and complete yet. But is it ever? To think about how lucky I am. For everything. Even the road to my regret. Sometimes you didn't learn it well enough the first time. I will be 31 in a few weeks' time and I have never been happier. That is something! Thank God for this journey and putting the people in my path that he did.

Green Lights All The Way Home

2010-08-31T11:02:00.001-04:00

Sneaking up and overtaking me. Limbs entwined there are moments when I can't tell which arm is mine, if it's my heart beating so fast. He looked at me last night and said, do you want to take this to the next level, and I had no idea what he meant and the clarification made me weak and soft and safe and warm. "Like, be... like, a couple. Just you and me, together." And of course, of course, of course. And his arms encircling and a nervous joke and a blissful sigh, contentment. And 4:30 and I wonder if he had slept at all because when the alarm woke me his fingers were still running through my hair, tied up like concentric pretzels. This is so good. For this moment, I am very thankful.

In other news, Kristin and Leah let go of a charged hoseline Friday night under Sue's supervision. They were trying to fight a dumpster fire and I can't imagine that it was larger than an inch and three-quarters, which is the standard size hose you pull for any of the actual FIREFIGHTING duties to which we are tasked. The size that is expected for one person to handle in actual structure fires. The size that I HAVE handled by myself in actual structure fires. Well, the two of them let it go (couldn't handle it) and subsequently sprayed some of the on-lookers, one of whom recorded the fiasco and supposedly has put it on youtube. It sort of makes me want to throw in the towel because I feel like the dept. is such a joke at this point, but god damn if I will let them get to me like that. But, the light is pretty much green now. I used to just ignore them but I think I need to take a different tack. It has been around 2 years for Kristin and she's no bigger now than she ever was. It's not dress-up we're playing. Get your body ready to handle the job that YOU SIGNED UP FOR, or GTFO. It's bad for all of us but I feel like I have more of a stake in the game, them being female. I'll be damned if Chief has to ring the doorbell at 44 colony because your useless ass was my backup and you can't even hardly support an airpack, let alone do actual work.

Softly

2010-08-25T12:39:00.002-04:00

He whispers it so sweetly into my ear, I want to grab onto it and hold it forever when it comes out, the way that it makes me feel inside, to be able to bury that somewhere deep within and go back to it later, alone. To examine. And it's always when I'm wrapped up in those massive arms, chest so wide that I can burrow my whole entire self within the space, and his arms all the way wrapped around me, God but to accept that this is what I deserve. "Baby," he says, and I am weaker than I have ever been. Fragile but there are those giant arms around me and the way you smell and how I can never breathe enough of it in. And that he looks at me and what I see in that green grey slate is that he knows he deserves it too. What a difference.

Something More Honorable Than This.

2010-08-23T12:52:00.002-04:00

I don't want any of it. The way that his eyes looked he has been building up to that for awhile, I think, but there was some tacit supplication that I sent out into the far beyond that it would never pass his lips, that we could just continue to be best friends and comrades and all of that. And so, but it turns out that the quiet thing I hoped you would keep like a secret came out, and ...

I don't even have words for it. It just makes me sad, like I'm dying, to break your heart like that, why couldn't you just keep your mouth shut?! And now, and now. And in the middle of all of it a text, sweet dreams my emily, how can I possibly ever combine those two worlds now, after all that was said spilled out lying fragile there on the floor and still I didn't choose you? Cannot. They would kill each other. Desperation framed the conversation and none of it made any logical sense because really it should have worked, but it didn't, and so you move forward. You don't keep re-doing. We are still the exact same people that we were back then. His eyes so hopeful and end of the line and all I can think is how I want that space between your clavicle and sternocleidomastoid muscle, that little crevice, the scent of you, fill me with it. And how horrible it made me feel to be thinking that looking at someone so hopeful and a door slamming. Run over me.

Or The Highway

2010-08-22T12:18:00.003-04:00

The house smelled like summer, in its incipient stage. Chest full of air just to try and contain it, like the softness when you walk into the beach house you rented sand and coppertone white tile floor and nothing pressing to do that day, smell of coffee perfuming the late morning air. You can drink it all, too, there's always another pot. "There are always more cigarettes," she said, eight lifetimes ago. When we would stay up all night talking on the deck or Paul H and how we had Jay call him from the phone in the gym, and she was right. There always were more.

It gets harder each time, but easier too in a way. The strange symbiosis and I wonder if anyone else goes through it. Or if it's limited just to those born as two. You can take or leave any situation in life, probably, because there is always something so much greater than one. There is so much strength in that, more than I have perhaps ever realized. To be blessed so. I don't know when it happened but it was sometime last night when I smiled for how spoiled we are by each other. But that I wouldn't change any part of it.

My class starts tomorrow. Last night we drove past the Cleveland Clinic and I imagined the life I will be living when I make that trek several times a week, winter especially, a thought that both thrills and frightens. I woke up one day last week, and I said that I want every third day and that entire this could be the night! your name on the board next to nozzle or second man or hydros, everything that goes along with it. It's funny (insane) to me how long we have all spent talking about it like it's simply something that either magically happens or doesn't. But I decided that one of those third days is mine, and I have to claim it, and so here we go. It's paramedic first. I may be too old, but what else is there for it? Nothing. To finish the 240 is next and I believe there will be some divine intervention that happens so that I can do that and work.

It's so impossible to explain the smell in there of diesel and of nomex when you first walk into the bay late summer sun streaming in over top of 42 and how the heart races with the baritone rumble once the engine turns over and the hiss of the airbrake releasing. And how infuriating it is when you work with people who don't still get excited about it. How it's that exact feeling of going on a first date, how you become billy bad-ass, how it takes everything in you not to just grin the entire time. Infinite possibility. And that I could have that, every third day. Will have. Do have. Just have to finish getting there.

Pitch Dark

2010-08-16T09:23:00.003-04:00

This is how it started:

We had been prolonging the night because of so much joking and him letting me win at pool and how he nervously couldn't find the movie theater and then once inside, and late, his hand on the small of my back and there is an instant electric current shooting right through me, right through the core of me. We stood in the backyard at the ponderosa three o'clock in the morning looking at the stars and I felt those strong arms slide around my waist and a breath out and my head back against his chest, and a breath in and tingles up my neck. I turn to face him and have to stand on tippy-toes and our lips meet and the electricity is palpable and I can hear his heart beating through the roof and I wonder if he can hear mine too. And how his eyes were closed and the breath so fragile and how he bit his lower lip and that little smile every time we would pull away. This is so good. It's not a miracle, actually, to feel like that. Who knew.

The Memo.

2010-08-10T11:01:00.003-04:00

I found this last night, I wrote it five years ago. And I liked it.

Whatever it is that you do, do it well. Do it unceasingly, without failure, without pompousness or grandeur, or the infiltration of ego. Half-heartedness is weakness. Lasting fame is uncertain, and a foolish goal. Do now, not for lasting fame, but for the pleasure that doing what you are meant to do brings you. For being good at it. Your success will cause others to discount your methods, or downplay your talent, or talk about perceived imperfections of your character. Don't listen to these petty idiots, the human tendency is to muddy up what shines brightly in order to bring it to a dull and unnoticeable level, a level that the majority can relate to. Greatness doesn't happen to a person, it must be rooted out, sought after, captured. You have to work, you can't be lazy.

It's within your reach, provided that you're willing to make sacrifices and acknowledge that the potential is within you. And to hell with the fools that would tell you that working doggedly for your own greatness is selfishness. The world would be a much different place if each person worked to cultivate and illuminate themselves. People want you to fail, or to be mediocre, or to be affected by the drama that so often defines human existence. Shock them by doing the opposite. True to your nature, true to your self.

Yes.

2010-08-08T21:07:00.002-04:00

Heart beating like a hammer and how he sneaked in behind me. And those sea salt blue eyes, grey slate eyes that you could spend three lifetimes in. Too soon to think that way though but the subtle way he got closer to show me the pictures and when I grabbed his arm and the face lit up and I just had totally forgotten what that's like. Absolutely intoxicating. His smile was like when you close your eyes and try to permanently impress some fleetingly impossibly beautiful passing moment into your forever memory. Like as a kid at Myrtle Beach and it's the last time you'll stand in that hallway smelling the ocean and hearing the gulls, drapes flapping against the hotel window car's all loaded up time for the long trek home. The impossible fragility of that moment and how it tears your heart but how, somehow, that's where life really resides. In that moment.

It's nice just to be back out there. Possibilities feel limitless. Even if it doesn't last. I wrote that night, the night of the breakdown, there is someone in the world you were meant to be with. And you were born with her. The rest is anyone's guess. So make good decisions. And I will. Those giant arms around me and a good night, I have never even thought about dating someone that muscular. And attractive. And soft spoken. The rest is anyone's guess.

The place we send our prayers

2010-07-20T01:48:00.003-04:00

I guess I could sense in a way that it was the last time I would walk out of your house like that, Nina Simone just BLARING in the truck's radio I loves you, Porgy, and especially that second line, don't let 'em take me, that beautiful desperate sad quiet and solitary deep deep loneliest leaving. Like how lions can just sense which gazelle is the weakest. GOD, I hope to never be there again. Those hostas that I planted and the cord for your laptop that we ordered with my credit card and the dogs so happy to see me and the sad bag of dog food I brought, all the time knowing. God damn, the road to my regret. But you know what? I don't think I'd change anything. I went to pick up the pizza at 8:30 and I had this suspicion that you and whoever you were with had driven past the house a few times and were waiting just for my truck to be gone and when I got to Romeo's there was this most amazing beautiful rainbow that spanned the entire sky, 180. And I went to take a picture of it, to show it to you, and as I framed it within my viewfinder it suddenly hit me that there are some things you just can't share. That you simply have to be there to experience. All the blizzards at dairy queen and sitting on the truck's tailgate and the sunsets at the lake and how your camera equipment was always far more important than anything else, despite everyone else around us content in each other's arms and how you never ONCE passed the door lock test. Here is a hint for your next one, when she lets you into her vehicle since you can't drive FOR GODS SAKES open her door if it's locked, unless you truly are the world's most selfish person. And I think that perhaps you are. You never cared about John Coltrane but I always cared about Rancid. And not til you. Sunday afternoon drinking beer in your mom's store looking at pictures of your lives past and you telling about all those girls and after twenty minutes spent thusly you realize and look at me and say "I've known some pretty interesting people and I am standing here with one of them right now" and how you really didn't know anything about me then and the words fell flat, so why in the hell did I continue? What the fuck.

It's going to take me such a huge amount of time to heal from this. God damn, your voice sounded so small and so final in the phone when you said "yes" to my so it's just over then and the breakdown you had to hear on the other end and your just well I'm going now, onto the next thing. Flash of light, now I'm here now I'm gone. Can it really work that way? And that there will never be a way to say anything final, in any real sense. Just that goddamn nina on my speaker, but I loves you Porgy, why can't you get that. Don't let em take me. A week ago to this night we held each other and tomorrow you told me to have dale's keep my old bike tires so you could use them, what the fuck, seriously, one week? A thousand million horrible silent crushing hurricanes. And what comes next is not you and me. It's you. And me. And never the twain shall meet. Do you, do you, do you. Do you have any idea what it was like to walk out of that house sewer smell for the basement hostas that I planted dogs even looking at me through window pane like knowing it would be for the last time. Cannot even wrap my head around the concept.

Vomit.

2010-07-19T23:06:00.002-04:00

I have never been as low as I am right now. Just remember this, for Gods sake. How it's almost like a dream. How it comes up and hits you, knocks the wind right out of you. And that you really think that you'll wake up any second now and boom, it's all over. And the phone clicks and the last six years are gone, just like that. And in between the sobbing shaking stabbing nothingness it's your voice you hear yelling at Johnny Friendly, "I coulda been a contender, I coulda been..." silence marks frame your desperation because there is absolutely black hole nothingness to fill the void.I will find strength in pain. I will change my ways. I'll know my name as it's called again. Where else can you go, but up? There is strength in that.

The heart is gone so what else is there to fall back on? You're smart enough to figure your way back to sane after this, at least. What I've learned is that amid all of the crazy hard sad painful moonless nights, the joyful and the drunken happy dancing nights and the rest of it, all the rest of it, is life. In those little staccato blip strung together moments. And so I take my gift. And try to go live. Get on with it.

Ryan.

2010-07-17T20:08:00.003-04:00

That thing like some great hunger-sadness, when it takes over there is no retreat in the mind from it, I can scarcely imagine a time when the body wasn't consumed with this great seeking longing downgoing, it was all my fault to set myself up this way. Sometimes I think maybe because there was no clean break I will forever be trying to create one. To understand. This control mechanism, this absolute need to make all of this happen on my own terms. And the sinking feeling when it's over and the person is just humoring you at that point and how you can feel that, how you know a returned phone call is nowhere near as important to them as it is to you, how you're not even within the same universe. That nearly immobile sadness that makes you want to go in everywhere, and as soon as you get there you want to leave, you can't be alone but you can't stand to be around anyone. I should have learned before, about the crucible, about the heartbreak, about how it is simply not possible to relate to/understand some people. Some of them are just crazies and you will never get into that head. Fully. Sunglasses on a Friday evening watching television disconnected a million miles away.

It happened this time like ten thousand thunderous sad quiet beautiful hurricanes.

Olympia -- that was four years ago, idiot argument in the room they got us, stuck in that place and the hollowest hollow you have ever known in all your life, like actually really being alone, 26 years old and this is the first time ever. Not knowing that razor sadness could run so deep all the way to the core. I went to priest point park on final rites and there is some layer of crust over my heart that developed there that I have never quite yet fully excoriated. And the whole thing was over me drinking too much beer at dinner and falling asleep early, sleep sleep always the damn issue of sleep and to this day I am self conscious about going to bed early. Two and a half years later at your parent's breakfast table my father stood there with me and you signed the papers sunglasses saturday morning and you did not even utter one word or look up, we left and you were off to fuck some girl in freemont who probably stayed up all night with you.

And scabs you pick at take forever to heal. Like trying to replay the choose your own adventure novel til you get to the ending that doesn't make you feel like all of it was for nothing. It is the innocence I would cast off, the naivete. I wish I had been born the son of a female shark.

Sea And The Rock Below

2010-03-19T23:02:00.004-04:00

It's too much, sometimes. She sent me a text about it and I in disbelief and hoping for some innocuous answer to just explain it away checked the chronicle and the sickness that ensued. The feeling of lead in the pit of the stomach, the downgoing, and the thought of the loved ones who could be and are in those shoes every day during their eight hour scope of practice. This complete and total farce, this thing we lead called life. This thing that leads us. She can't choose anything else, so there is no good done in grieving the point. And he leaves three children just too much like us, and I can hardly believe even, if a day exists that I will wake up and she will not also be doing so. I do not think it morbid to wish for a car accident at 85, maybe on the dunes in Michigan, me the navigator, her the driver.

I don't know what you do the next day, the day after, when you wake up. And the gravity of the thought that there is nothing we can do about it now, you still have to wake up, there is still this earth and things to do. What would you be? A little wisp of a soul inside of a corpse. Saint Michael, please watch over my blue team with a ready sword. Oh little weary soul. I never think about the job that actually has to get done. I want to tell the Kerstetters something so important, but the words are just flat and weak because they have already awoken again and put bare feet down onto that very totally unfamiliar carpet in a bedroom that is ugly awful hollow for the memories and what would you do with the pillow that still smelled like him? Wash it? You couldn't bare to do so but the smell would haunt you like a ghost and rip your heart every time to a million pieces more than the time before. Impossible even to imagine.

This ocean dissolving my kingdom of rust. Holes poking the sunlight through and onto all of the spots I want to ignore, this life that is so far from solitary. Just, thank you. If I haven't said it. Can't even imagine.

NREMT-P

2010-03-04T15:58:00.002-05:00

I used to talk to myself. That is to say, the me I used to be would hold conversations with the me I am today. I remember so clearly, sprawled out on the kitchen floor in that apartment we had on soroya court, green butcher block shards surrounded me as I stirred sweetened condensed milk into safeway coffee. The world was so accessible then. Exciting. Full of promise. The Moscow Boys Choir contained a set of magical lyrics that you could only hear if you really strained yourself and if you already knew they were there. I have either grown so cynical, or much too far removed from those conversations with myself. The forty year old me, what does she look like? What are her dreams. Myzel, will she still think of him perched on a grassy August hill, late sun kissing the wild strands of hair as he fades into the distance?

Forty. We sat across a plate of chips and salsa when he told me that his taste buds aren't as sensitive as they used to be. "Well," I said laughingly, "you are pushing forty."

You musn't start thinking in those terms. If x equals y and you add z plus x, you will certainly arrive at v! And it startles me to think that the whole system that we all believe in supports that idea, that very idea which of course does not equal life. That anyone with any amount of living can tell you with great certainty does not equal life. There will always be salesmen, bankers, janitors, secretaries, etc. To break out of that chain of thought all together, to no longer be an organ stop, that line of thinking that fear gives birth to... oh, this line of thinking, this great thing I have tried to come to, the journey ... cowardice is peppered throughout ... to stop, perhaps caring even what I think, going into a thing. There is no better advice than your own that anyone can give you, and it is the last you seek. Can you imagine such a thing!

It is nearly summer. Little excites me beyond the smell of diesel and watching the hands turn into little automotans. This imperfect creature. There is not a thing I would change.

Just. Thank You

2010-01-09T14:29:00.005-05:00

To be thankful for the little things. To see them and let them not be overshadowed by the temporary accolades. To not downplay the importance of everyday kindness. "If variety is the spice of life, the routine is its essence." To be as smart as the one who told me that, and to really feel it within my soul. To understand the implications.

To value others in my life, all the roles that people play. I am blessed to have the friends that I have. To have this undeveloped of an understanding of how to relate to other people and to have the friends that I have is a gift that I think myself, sometimes, unworthy of. But because of this gift, to be the last one to talk about my own achievements, and to be the first to glorify yours. To be satiated by something as simple as putting the welfare of a friend over my own. Or to be able to offer a willing ear in a gale. And to not boast or look for thank-yous.

To have been given the calling I've been given, even if I don't fully understand it yet. To be able to start the hydraulic tools on 44, use them to cut open a passenger van that holds a patient with two tib-fib fractures, and to not need to talk about it once the scene is cleared. To have it be a part of the routine. To understand simply that it is what I can do, and therefore what I should do, and to have it be no more than that. To each what they can withstand, and from each what they can withstand. Not my will, but Yours.

For the award. Nothing has come out right since he held the plaque and said my name. All I really recall is getting not one, but two hugs from the man I wish to emulate more than anyone in the world. That I didn't even want the interview. Or the picture. That it was given in front of those chosen few was enough.

For the solid understanding of common courtesy. For not blowing up when I came home on Thursday night. For the wisdom to know what is petty and what is not, and for not overreacting to either.

For seeing life as the small and staccato blip on the radar screen that it is. While you are alive and able, be good.

While The Sea Is Calm

2009-12-14T17:02:00.002-05:00

"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.

2009-12-08T07:26:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-11T10:11:00.000-05:00

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.

2009-10-29T00:59:00.003-04:00

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.

2009-07-11T21:56:00.002-04:00

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

2009-05-31T18:17:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-05-25T14:59:00.002-04:00

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.

Pictures Of You

2009-04-20T11:05:00.003-04:00

My spirit vascillates from feeling utterly shattered to feeling excited at the prospect of really starting anew. I'm trying to be honest with myself and instead of just putting the pain aside and pretending like I can simply harden my heart, I'm going to try to work through it. I don't know what's in store. I'm still no better at making big life decisions than I ever was, but I feel as though I have the clarity and strength now to make the decisions based on what's best for me. Epic.

I haven't gotten past my relationship with Ryan. I guess that's not totally outrageous, considering that we would be celebrating our three year anniversary this June. There is so much awful, painful loneliness down that road. And it all went downhill so stupidly, I can't wrap my brain around it. Every time we would try to start again, it would explode and all the emotions I wasn't dealing with would come back ten times stronger. So much crying and wondering and not knowing, and not dealing with it. All I wanted was to be important to him, to hear him tell me that I was important, to be important enough for us to live a healthy life together. I think it's still what I want. The failure at times is overwhelming. There is a big hole right in my center, gaping valley that sucks the wind down into it, and it whispers to me when I'm vulnerable, "you weren't worth it." I haven't figured out how to face down that valley, how to fill the hole. In my heart, deep within it, I still feel that we were made for each other. I haven't figured out how to tackle that feeling. How to move past.

I tried last night, in my search to understand the recent past, to re-ground myself, to talk to Rob and get his opinion on what passed between us. His claddaugh ring was turned back upside down and his face looked sad, and I couldn't muster up a single emotion. I felt nothing. I felt nothing most of the time that Rob and I poked at what was supposed to be a relationship. That hole in my center wanted so desperately to be received by arms that would hold me and tell me that I did matter. That there was someone out there who really was willing to love me enough to make it work. But it didn't. It wasn't him I was in love with at all, but the idea of being loved. Of being needed and valued. It's a pretty low moment when you come to that realization.

I will try to pick up the pieces. The most powerful tool I have against that hole is myself. I will try, day by day, to be stronger for myself. To be more of an optomist about myself. Somewhere in me there is a piece that truley believes that I'm awesome. Gotta grab onto it.

Through the hill.

The Roof Is On Fire

2009-04-17T12:36:00.002-04:00

"They got marvin to show up, he just had no idea how to work anything or what he should do -- I will make sure to schedule all fires from now on with you."

A single text from my all time favorite LT (I have the words "the great" after his name in my cell phone) and suddenly it all doesn't seem quite so bleak. There is something in there that I am most of the time ridiculously proud of. And I keep it like a secret. My weaknesses have always been much more verbal than my strengths. And sometimes in life, you need a little help to get moving again. The thing I find most sacred about my life is that, for me, the help will always be there.

Myocardium.

2009-04-16T20:47:00.002-04:00

A tin box in my heart, and it gets hot in there. Should have known better than to open it and all the memories that come rushing out fly past at a speed far too fast to catch. Couldn't cram them back inside fast enough. A dark night. Hold onto a step once taken.

There was something so childlike, so ephemeral to all of it. Overtones of a graceful decay, like tending to a garden that you know won't bloom again next spring. The soil is clay or the roots are rotten and there you stand, rake in hand, knowing that you will look back on that picture of yourself and think yourself a fool.

I think the problem that I have with moving on is that there's no good reason it shouldn't have worked. I will never fully understand the grip that alcohol has on your life. There is no good reason that it shouldn't have worked. I toiled and labored and I made those same vows, and you will never understand how I protected them, held them up overhead, tried to keep them safe from the mud and the muck. Our garden was watered with the tears of so many nights of feeling all alone, the nights of crying myself to sleep, the nights of inadequacy and above all of not understanding. It is not exaggeration when I say that it took six months to just stop the constant recording in my head that told me I was worthless. And tonight I realized that the record has not yet broken. Warriors have to take off their armor sometimes. I wasn't prepared to look at the places in my soul that are still broken. Somehow those moments don't wait for the times that you're prepared for them. I would have walked with you to the ends of the earth. Somehow an $8 bottle of vodka was a better companion to you than I ever was. It is hard to come to that realization and to not feel utterly worthless. Cheap grain alcohol over a life so full of promise. Winter came and that little garden was far too fragile to recover. A flower pokes through now and then and brings my existence to ruin. There is nothing to do but prepare new mortar. How many times?

At dinner tonight Anne and I sat near an older couple who had a small child with them, no older than four. "Sometimes in life, people get stuck," I overheard the father saying to his boy. "And in those moments, you sometimes need help to get moving again."

I shouldn't have read the blog about Fremont. It has been a long time since I cried that hard. Did you go there after my shift scraped you off of the bar floor? Did you pick up the pieces of your broken soul and make love to her after I had my favorite Lieutenant tell me that no one would know because of HIPAA and because he told them to keep it close? After I had to repair the damage and you didn't call to apologize, but to explain that someone must have put something in your drink? Was she prettier happier smarter than me? Why wasn't I WORTH IT?!

I want to be able to look back on what we had and see a logical reason for the end. I want the conditions of change to be something far more unattainable than just an end to the drinking and a (even part-time!) job. You could have met those demands in one day. But instead the days turned into months and the months turned into a year and there is no way I can understand how I wasn't worth even that. No more drinking. The ability to take care of yourself. We are not talking about Everest. Or maybe, we are....?

Sometimes when dealing with my latent sense of inadequacy, I think simply to myself that I am a firefighter. It is a nice band-aid that gives me enough confidence to breath a bit and really think through the issue. I wasn't enough for you. I couldn't hold court with the other matters of consequence in your life. But I am enough for myself. And that, for now, is enough.

Go very quietly, very gently. All is for the very best for you. It was out of the depths that David cried unto Me, and I heard his voice.

Every Last Embrace.

2009-03-17T22:35:00.002-04:00

If I could tell you in a poem the way my feelings on everything have shaped themselves, it would be a song gently wafting along some march 17th, a slight brogue to it, thin and wispy like the new spring air. The lyrics would sound like crying, but the melody wouldn't. There is another place, an alternate reality that exists in my mind, and in that reality I'm by the church, waiting. You appear and there is nothing to fear, and nothing to hide. And sometimes I wish with everything that I have that it were so. But it's not. And what do you do with that, the pain and loneliness and desire of the reality you're left with? You put one foot in front of the other, and you keep going. Nothing for it but that.

We might as well lie down, love
Lie down and close our eyes
We might as well go walking
In the country of the blind
The long grass is grown
And all the birds flown
To their homes away in the blue
And nothing's left the same
The whole world is changed
Since you and I were true

And how can a story be ended
When it didn't hardly begin?
How can my glass be so empty
When it's filled up to the brim?
And it wasn't always so
It didn't always go
We had something better to do
And it didn't always rain
Every single day
When you and I were true

In a country where we are headed, love
There is nothing but rocks and stones
No friendly plant or animal
No angel to guide you home
Until some day you'll find
In the country of the blind
Some wonder just like you
And the singing of a bird
That nobody has heard
Since you and I were true

We might as well lie down, love
Lie down and close our eyes
We might as well go walking
In the country of the blind
The long grass is grown
And all the birds flown
To their homes away in the blue
And nothing's left the same
The whole world is changed
Since you and I were true

Praetorian,

2009-02-07T12:06:00.002-05:00

The winter cold clings to my soul and makes me think of all the things that might have been, but aren't. I have been seeing the two of us sitting on the driftwood log at Vermilion's public beach, the sun streaming into our faces and the feeling that things might be able to turn around. We sat on my truck's tailgate waiting for the pizza to be done and the air I breathed in was laced with infinite possibility. And now the sun is gone and the snow blankets the world in a quiet desperation that seems most apparent at night, when it's just the occasional orange glow from warm and sleepy windows punctuating the darkness.

Nothing has changed. Absolutely nothing. That's the thing to remember. You are still the same person in your core that you once were, and so is he. No sadness, and no regret. Today the sun is out and the snow has begun to melt. I will run today, until I find clarity. I think it is right around the corner.

30:2

2009-01-30T10:15:00.006-05:00

The tone came in and Mikey was up before I was. I still haven't memorized what tone goes with what department, and I'm more used to hearing the beeps on my pager than I am hearing A shift's tone come through the station's speaker.

"Lorain County 911 to Oberlin Fire Department. Report of a 53 year old female unresponsive, ambulance requested. The patient is outside and CPR is in progress."

I threw my turnouts pants into the back of 41, donned my coat, and climbed up into the Captain's chair. Mikey already had the engine rumbling, and as soon as we both snapped our seat belt buckles the wheels were rolling toward the street. My heart was pumping in my throat as my mind raced over the checklist of things we'd need to do. 911 came back over the speaker in the truck and the only words that I really heard the dispatcher say were "confirmed" and "unresponsive." There was a foot of snow at the low points in the road, but Mikey is God behind the wheel and we sped toward the apartment complex that 911 beckoned us to in no time. When the truck stopped I hopped out and grabbed 41's go bag. I heard no sirens, so I knew that we'd be working without the aid of an ambulance crew for at least a few minutes.

There was still too much snow to get a vehicle up the 50 foot long drive to the apartment the dispatcher had told us was the right one, so we walked as briskly as the conditions allowed. When we turned the corner, six pairs of panicked eyes looked in our direction; I'm sure that me with my bunker coat and go bag slung over one shoulder and Mikey with his fluorescent 5.11 jacket made a pretty impressive sight. And that's when the realization hit me: these people called 911 expecting the cavalry to come, and here we were! The cavalry. I felt all at once proud and as though I was going to puke. There was a woman doing chest compressions over our patient and my mind quickly snapped back to the checklist. Mikey bent over her to assess breathing, and I grabbed for the bag valve mask. We worked like a well oiled machine, Mikey taking over chest compressions and me ventilating. I don't remember what anyone was saying until I heard the sirens in the distance. When the ambulance crew arrived we loaded her onto the cot and one of my Lieutenants told them I'd be riding on the squad with them. "You had a good seal while you were bagging her, Rookie." He said to me in his unexplainable southern drawl. "You need this experience more than any of us do. Get in there."

I was in charge of chest compressions the entire way to Allen, and once we got there my face was red and my arms were aching. We worked her for another 20 minutes, but she was already gone. Dr. Scott pronounced her and told us we could go back to the station, that there was nothing more anyone could do. I wondered about that thin precipice that separates us from the afterlife, how impossible it is to understand that one minute you can be shovelling your car out, and the next you can be clutching with shaky hands at your very existence. I said a prayer to St. Michael and put my turnout coat back on, radio mic strapped across the front. As I was walking out one of the medics said to no one in particular, "man I feel like I work in a big trauma center! We got firefighters clearing scene over here!" There was no mockery in his voice and I felt that pride welling up again.

Mom sent me a single text that night that really gave me pause. It said, "thank you for being there when people really need you. It is so rare." And all I could think was, "thank God for putting this job in my path, for putting this calling within my reach. There is no other life that I want."

My Favorite Mistake.

2009-01-23T09:48:00.003-05:00

So, we were up until like forever and by the end of it I was just standing there, looking at him unable to offer any advice that would do any real good. He was crying, talking about how limited he feels his future is, and all I could think to myself was Jesus get me out of here. Haven't I been here before? I had brought out all my big guns for that, and he was still spiraling down down down. We are the masters of the universe.

I am extraordinary.

I always seize the day.

The universe treats me as special.

God supports me in all I do.

Everything that happens to me happens for a good reason.

I always find a way to appreciate and perfect every moment of life.

I magnetically attract the life I want.

It is like me to be a champion in life.

I am going to feel supremely happy regardless of anything else going on around me.

The Truth

2009-01-21T12:39:00.001-05:00

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

I Was Always Too Worried About the Greasemark.

2008-12-12T08:05:00.001-05:00

There are a few websites I keep bookmarked for when I need a laugh. My favorite one is List of the Day. The guys posts the best Engrish, the best Mugshots, the best of humanity at its goofiest/worst, basically. You all have to look at the list he posted of animals with their faces stuck against glass:

I think especially Anne will appreciate this one, for some reason:

http://listoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/12/animals-squashed-against-glass-of-day.html

In It To Win It

2008-12-11T08:40:00.003-05:00

I wasn't going to go, originally. There is bric-a-brac piling up in my life that needs to be addressed, like cleaning the leaves out of the gutters of my existence. My room is a mess, the floor covered with clothing that I haven't put away for weeks. I have pictures that I need to edit. Haven't worked out in awhile. Lately I have been instant rice in a pressure cooker and the resultant stress has caused me to break out, which I am very self-conscious about. I was going to work the game, and go home to start ticking off items on my to do list, just be by myself. That is, until Bradley called.

Brad is, I'm pretty sure, my brother separated at birth. He is one of the funniest people I know. He is a genuine person and he would go balls to the wall for any of the people he cares about. I think that we are not too unlike each other. The invitation from Rob to go get a few drinks after the game was easy for me to mentally shoot down, but when Brad was part of the equation it gave me pause. Sometimes being near Brad is like breathing a nice, deep, breath of fresh air. So substandard pulchritude aside, I told them I'd be there.

We stood in a group at the bar, the four of us. I was still in my school colors from the game and the first comment from Rob was that it was nice of me to dress up. Brad and I slammed a couple of christmas trees and the vitriol started. It's too easy to make fun of Rob, and I felt bad, but I tempered the feeling by reminding myself that he started it. And already, it has begun! We cannot have reached the level of comfort with each other that allows us to be grumpy toward each other in public and for some god forsaken reason, tender in private. Or rather I should say, he has reached this level of comfort. I think that for most relationships this type of behavior signals the beginning of the end. But then, I have always gravitated toward extremes. You're either with me or against me. The pot-shots are for fifth graders.

So, the evening ended with Brad leaving to see his boy at the Inn. And I left shortly thereafter but not before we stood alone at the bar and Rob asked me in his boyfriend voice what was wrong. I swear I must just have no patience for people. I looked away and didn't answer, finished the last swig of gin and headed down the stairs. And this morning he asked me to accompany him to dinner tonight. I know! I'm excited too!! I need an alternate plan, quick.

Luke 12:25

2008-12-09T09:23:00.005-05:00

You're so good, you're so good! Screaming out in my head. Fuck. Beat yourself up some more, you care about the wrong things too much. And you care about the right things too late. And above all human beings are made to be happy, said the Elder Zosima.

I stood in Angela's office alone for the first five minutes, I had to fumble up the dark and narrow stairway and once upstairs I scanned the wall with my hand for a light switch. No one was home, so I busied myself by nervously studying the map of Ireland that someone had hung on the wall. When she finally arrived I felt even more self conscious because of the peculiar way she looks at you, almost as if from behind her eyes, as though there is a detached entity looking through the openings in her head and rendering some secret judgment.

The awkwardness was amplified by the shot of some dark Hungarian liquor that she poured for both of us. A dark shot, like an ounce of molasses, and a half cup of some dark and what appeared to be entirely flat, beer. She made a toast to change and I raised the ounce of bile to my lips, and swallowed it in a gulp. In the furious half-second that the liquid mingled with my tongue I sensed anise and chimney soot and gasoline. She was looking at me, the now nearly full glass still at her lips. "You drank the whole thing!" The warmth of the alcohol was rising in my chest and combined with the embarrassment of not being privy to Hungarian drinking etiquette; I felt the internal flames began to lick my cheeks and ears, they were turning red. And there she sat, mouth agape, looking at me, and I felt very deeply within myself that, at that moment, I was a buffoon. "You will never be better than you currently are." Shame is what gives birth to sin.

Suffice to say that as far as filling the position of solicitor is concerned, there is still currently a vacancy. I left the meeting defeated, but only after she asked me if I was ok to drive home. I went promptly to buy a pack of cigarettes despite my vow to Anne that I was quitting, that we would quit together. Vice helps ease the sting of self deprecation. And so failure continues to give birth to failure.

Lupi.

2008-12-08T10:55:00.005-05:00

He's leaving, he says, and too late for me to do anything about it. I am getting to a point that I feel as though attempting to make any plans in my life is utter folly. Like I am trying to manage a top as it spins wildly out of control. He is leaving, running away, and there is nothing left for me to do but pray that he really shows up for the court appointment that will give me back my name. Six little letters and it's all I want in life, and it feels so utterly impossible. I told him 30-90 days after I file and it was too long for him to wait. "There is too much at stake," he said. And all I can hear in my head as a reply is you have absolutely got to be fucking kidding me.

Christ Jesus,
help me to find Your purpose in this.

Just Like Faramir.

2008-11-30T15:29:00.002-05:00

For some reason it really hit me the other day, the degree to which I live my life internally. So much going on inside that never makes its way out. I think I struggle with depression because I struggle so constantly to find my calling. It's hard sometimes, to think about getting older and not feel that much progress is being made. I am so hung up on titles and rarely give myself credit for what I actually do. I am my own worst enemy, this I know. I told Ryan that it took me six months to stop hearing "you are worthless" with each in-breath. No longer that frequent, it is still there with a nagging desperation, winter's cold breeze on the heels of springtime. You can't really plant anew until that fear of frost is gone.

According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it.

Direction. If only I had a compass to show me what to do, which steps to take... but the future is not ours. Faith, and patience.

A Dedication.

2008-11-19T21:57:00.003-05:00

I used to look forward to the Friday nights so much. There are times in your life that are simply magical, and there is no other way to describe it than that. I would get the first call at around five, and if it was after that I would get anxious. By the time she'd show up it was near half time and the jack and coke would flow like water. There is a deep, deep love that I have for you, and I keep it like a secret. There is no one else in the world that I would rather have on my A team, because of everything. Because you don't think it's sin, and instead of judging me you helped me get rid of the one and told me to call the other to come over. For everything. I think now that I understand a little bit better, the need to hold onto each second even though you know it's fleeting. Even though some part of you knows that it is folly. But you know what? It's not. Life is solitary moments strung together and there is nothing for it but to go balls to the wall. I wouldn't trade the heartache and I know you wouldn't either. The world breaks everyone, Anne. Some grow stronger at the broken places.

Thank you for that.

Disambiguation.

2008-11-18T14:29:00.001-05:00

He said it started years ago, he pulled me closer as he talked about it and the words melted into the hairs on the back of my neck. I dared not speak or stir for fear that the moment would evaporate or crush under the weight of my disbelief. I danced around the eggshells and just listened to him talk, lost in the void of being between coming and going. His breath lingered heavily around my mouth, dark and sweet, and when he kissed me something stirred within my chest as if in sleep.

"I miss you already," said the text that came at 5:30 this morning. When we had parted two hours earlier he looked deep into me, down to the core, the three years of longing and the fear of long distance and the bliss of the past five days all hungrily melded together into a fragile and furious gaze that made my heart sink right down to the bottom. I wanted to give him everything. "I will be here when you get back," it was all I could offer standing there in the snow and the cold and the dark, and once said I wished I had instead let the silence carry the weight of that gaze. "You don’t know that for sure," he looked away, and the spell was broken.

How cruel a fate, to be at once in love and also heartbroken, with the same person.

Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenters.

2008-11-18T07:41:00.003-05:00

It's there, the damn acid in the pit of my stomach, the weight that I didn't think would exist. I can't swallow it, it's stuck in my throat. I keep seeing your face and feeling those strong calloused hands, hard to breathe. I don't even want to be at work because that reminds me of you, too. I don't like to be vulnerable and I don't know how it crept up on me. And I feel so silly for it, but somehow more alive than I was before.

I thought the present you gave me yesterday (my unfaltering grin) would stay with me all day today, but I can't muster it now that I know you're really gone. Today is going to be really, really long. Down to go up.

Like A Polaroid Picture

2008-11-17T07:33:00.002-05:00

I kissed the tattoo that sprawled across his shoulders and tried to remember what it was like to have that rock in the pit of my stomach, to have that gnawing desperation that this might one day end. Somewhere along the way I turned down the volume of my emotions, and I don't know how to crank them back up. He turned over and his eyes radiated passion, desire; I looked away because I knew my return gaze didn't match the intensity. That's a lonely feeling.

And I placate my fear partially by admitting that the only other one after Ryan was a total dud, that the experience taught me to not care, to be prepared to walk away at a moment's notice. Like marking time until a better one comes along. Except a better one came along and I don't feel much of anything, I still feel that I could move on two minutes from now. Part of being human is having weakness and vulnerability, being able to share that with another person. Down to go up and all that. There are tears on the precipice behind my eyeballs that I don't even share with Anne. I don't think that it's strength to have hardened my heart to the world. I think it's unhealthy, and I worry about what it's going to look like when something pokes through the crust.

A Start.

2008-11-06T16:23:00.003-05:00

warm air and the smell of cigarettes,
early summer evening feel of alcohol buzz wearing off
like someplace more exotic than this,
like spending the late afternoon drinking rum drinks in a pool at a rental house.

like spending the whole summer like that.

it is november and the last warm spell clings greedily to the calendar
we don't have the pool but the long shadows cast by a heavy sun bring the same ease
it is all that i care about, that she understands me and i her.
the same bends on the same jog at night down the same old neighborhoods.
everything else in this life will change, but not that.

The Way I Wanted To

2008-11-03T07:49:00.003-05:00

I'm supposed to be the one who never loses composure, least of all in front of you. There are too many expectations to slip for a second. Everyone is waiting for it to happen and I wonder what it's like for Anne, if she ever feels that way. We argued all night Friday and I stood in your driveway just trying to get past you to my truck, I thought about Mom and the pot of coffee and there were tiny cracks starting to form in the exterior, I was glad it was night and dark. I don't know why I'm even still pursuing you, you don't act like you're even interested until everyone's gone. Maybe it's the challenge. Maybe I'm too busy being pissed off to be able to see what's really going on with my other emotions. Need to learn to throw in the towel when it's time.

Daggers and claws. Who is the bigger idiot in this situation. Mon innocence me faire pleurer.

To Endure the Burning

2008-10-09T14:56:00.000-04:00

The days are getting shorter. Instead of watching the sun rise, the morning drive to work is punctuated by headlights and inside my truck cab I can see my breath all the way to Park Street. Alison Krauss fills the silence, her voice on infinite repeat and it calls back memories of better times. It reminds me of being in my dad's truck, of hard work, of belonging to something greater than myself, of being safe.

I feel alone in a snowstorm, idle on the side of the road. Headlights turn into brake lights as the entire world goes past, I am anchored to the shoulder and feel more pathetic and lifeless with each passing streak of red. The applications on my desk for different futures renew my sense of hope for something better, but I know it's only a first step back onto a path that I abandoned four years ago. It is amazing what we settle for because it's familiar. Four years ago the leaves crunched under my feet when I met you and the cold autumn air against my face helped to conceal my flushed cheeks. It all fell apart so rapidly, and underneath the rubble somewhere there's the spirit that I used to carry, the one that could never be defeated. I catch glimpses of her -- when I'm thirty feet in the air and placing a roof ladder, when my Lieutenant tells me that it's time to replace the black helmet with a yellow one -- and rather than dig her up I think I've got to rebuild. She doesn’t know how to operate the car anymore, so the thing to do is get out and walk. The world breaks everyone, and some grow stronger at the broken places.

The rumble of my truck's engine was the only thing cutting through the autumn dark last night as I made my way to a friend's after EMS training. The world had the pungent-sweet smell of decaying leaves, there were pumpkins on the stoops of the houses I passed and there was that electricity of potential that only exists in Ohio autumn hanging heavily in the air around me. To have been so blessed, I thought. And as soon as the thought passed there were headlights approaching in the passing lane, and the familiar clambor of an old muffler-less engine, a shiver down my spine like a bad omen. That rusty orange filled my rear view mirror and I worried for a moment, about where my truck would be all night, about passing sharks and phone calls that would be made, the cycle of desperation.

And then I thought, how fitting that your truck was travelling the opposite direction of mine. So much like life. And I put it behind me, and I kept driving.

At night, each footfall.

2008-09-02T16:14:00.002-04:00

They are yin and yang, each toeing the line on other ends of the room. So very tired.

I know less now about my own life than I did when I was 21. I own more things. I have responsibilities that I never thought would exist back then. I still haven't figured it out, and I am believing more and more that there is nothing grandiose like that. Life is tiny little moments and you stand still and they just pass you by. You stand there waiting for some overt reason to hit you over the head and it never comes, and you find it impossible to make a decision. Little tiny feelings and it's not a road but thousands of tiny little tributaries with many many opportunities to funnel back if you lose your way. "Woman! Why are you thanking us as if we just saved your life? It's all just adventure!"

One of the generals inside the army of the light. That's what my title used to be. I will save you. We run at night to tap back into that girl who wouldn't have backed down. He told me, "I want to do it right next time," as though he already had a plan laid out in his mind. As though he had spent time thinking about it, thinking of what went wrong and how to remedy it. I am

no longer the moment of hesitation. Just get it right. We waste our lives, being too kind.

A cold bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and tall grasses and you, late summer sun throwing heavy shadows in the Ohio autumn, there was nothing that was going to stop us. To be that naive and so sure of everything. I remember, the way it used to smell taking walks at dusk on the westside early September, you could hear 41 go past and the woodsmoke billowing up out of happy chimneys, the absolutely exquisite feeling of belonging to something like that. We walked like warriors and I would have followed you to the end. I have only changed by growing weaker.

The tide will turn, each day is a lesson. We don't live for each other, we can't. Side by side, each on our own tributary, the fates crossing our paths. It happens, it does. Patience.

Dum-dums run the world.

2008-08-11T19:57:00.002-04:00

I walked in and my desk was a miasma of papers, boxes, old coffee cups, baby pictures, food wrappers. My computer had been unplugged and disassembled, the monitor was shoved to the wall and the secretary's huge LCD screen took its stead. There were boxes and unopened mail on absolutely every surface in the office. Walking back into work today was a quick descent into the stagnation and depression that fills me in that job. There won't even be any kids to take my mind off things for another two weeks. It is hard, I kept hearing my voice say in my head, to work for people that you have precisely no respect for. I am tired. At this point it is 10 AM and I am praying for my pager to go off so that I can wisk myself back to the life that thrills me.

And after the eight hours I find myself sitting on mom and dad's porch sucking down a rum and coke. I remembered sitting in that very spot three years ago after a different yet equally bad day. "You've got the Jindra spirit, kid," I remember my dad saying to me. There was and still is no greater compliment. Things will get better because you have already decided that they will.

Today I overheard Lynn say from her office, "geez, you really accumulate a lot of stuff in a desk you've had for ten years." My spirit crumpled and felt like wet wool and just then St. Florian is listening to this dialogue in my head, now I'm sure of it my pager toned us out to an alarm on campus and I was out the door before anyone could figure out where the beeps were coming from. I pulled up and donned my gear and was instantly transformed to the indestructible Emily who stands fifty feet tall and carries a stern, intent expression.

The fortune in my cookie after dinner tonight said, "you are transforming yourself into someone who is certain to succeed." I know, I remember. Just help me feel it in my bones when I'm at my "real" job. My way; my way or the highway!

170

2008-07-26T22:09:00.002-04:00

There is nothing noble about entering into change, or heroic about emerging from it. Time moves only in one direction.

When I run at night I think about what she might be doing at that moment, on duty. I wear her tshirt from OSP and think about how she must have sounded, yelling her loud lion roar, being totally invincible. The running becomes easier. My mind strays and I feel powerful, for a rare moment. I make people get out of my way when I'm running, I play a mean game of chicken and I never lose at it. "You are a freight train and you don't stop for anyone," I hear in my head. Some of the best advice ever given.

There is no room for weakness. Half-heartedness does not reach into majesty. No in between. You either do, or you don't. I'm tired of the mobius strip in my head. Doesn't have the right images. Or the right words. I should have more confidence than this.

You don't get out of the way for anyone. It doesn't matter that things aren't different right now. They will be.

I Snapped.

2008-07-09T21:31:00.006-04:00

The thing that makes me so mad about it all is how gung-ho the sixteen of us were at first. We all looked forward to class, we showed up early to study together, we set up an email list so that we could bounce things off of each other. And now, a little over halfway in, we drag ourselves in and trudge through the four hours, the little surreptitious stabs we poke at our instructors the jabs of solidarity we need to make it through. Today was a lab day which means we had the two most loathed instructors.

Instructor #1, Tom, is a firefighter in Parma and a cop on campus and a textbook case of a egomaniac riding out a powertrip. The first day we had him in class he stood at the door five minutes before class was scheduled to start and asked each person who came through "can I help you?" He was the time cop that day, and it didn't matter that no one was actually late yet. He had the badge and you didn't, so you could shut the hell up. After the third student who came through the door "late" had to go through this, the rest of us couldn't even look at each other anymore for fear of laughing. I mean... seriously? This is a college class. We are all paying to be here. The ritual is different each class, but is essentially the same; "there is no protocol for you to follow for what I want you to do, which makes it easier for me to yell at you when you do it wrong. How can you know what I want if I never tell you?" Last week one of the guys in class said he was going to make Tom a tshirt that says simply, "I love myself." I joked that Tom wouldn't get the chiding and would actually wear the tshirt with great pride. "look what my students gave me!"

Instructor #2, Randy... how to even describe. He is an idiot. Thankfully we only have to see him on lab days because he's the "lab instructor." Everyone dreads lab days. Randy is one of those people who just wants everyone else to be wrong. He will give us scenarios in lab and as we're going through the motions of how we'd respond, he yells at us about how we don't know what we're doing. About how we're wrong. He'll ask us the same question eight times and doesn't accept any of our answers. When he finally tells us what he's looking for we all roll our eyes for the fact that the first or second person to respond answered with that. He doesn't hear it because he wants us to be wrong. I will never understand this mindset. I have only experienced it with men. Men, this is what makes me think that you are flawed. :) He doesn't actually instruct us, ever. He just throws us scenarios and yells at us about what we did wrong. Last month my best friend in the class yelled at him because the answer he was looking for was "assess the ABCs," and the first guy said that. Randy didn't hear it. When he finally admitted that this was the answer he was looking for, she told him, "that was the first thing we said. When you didn't acknowledge it we all started to doubt what we've been reading from the text. We aren't learning in labs, labs are actually doing us damage because we are starting to think that what we know is wrong."

He hasn't changed.

Today started out the same as always. Tom yelled at us about passing around the sign-in sheet in a way he didn't like, and we all collectively rolled our eyes. We split into two teams and the first team had to go with Randy. My group had to do the AED and CPR with Tom, for probably the sixth time. We are all champs with the AED. Anything else practical, not so much.

When Randy's group came in when it was time to switch, everyone looked so downtrodden. One of the guys, Axel, was shaking his head. "What's wrong brother?" I asked him. "I just can't deal with this guy. This is just ridiculous." Another one of the guys came in, shaking his head. "What are you doing out there," those of us who had been Tom wanted to know. "You don't even need to know what's on the skill sheet. You can't be right. He will just sign off on your paper, just nod in agreement a lot."

My blood started to boil right about this point. We are all taking this class to be EMTs, to help save people's lives. An instructor who just wants to be right is a liability if we're not actually learning anything from him. I went out into the hallway with Randy in the wrong mindset. I could feel it, my ears were already red.

The first scenario went exactly as they always do. Yelling, frustration, no learning. I wasn't in the first group, so I got to stand back with my group and vent about the whole process. When it came time for my group, no one wanted to be there anymore. He asked us what we would do because the patient was going into shock. "Administer oxygen, keep them warm, and provide rapid transport." "WHY??" His eyes were boring holes into me. "Because their perfusion is rapidly diminishing and the body will need more oxygen." I fired back. He just looked angry, and he was only looking at me. "You are so set on this idea of perfusion. You have perfusion down." He was angry. He was mocking me. I thought of the first day in lab when I answered one of his questions using the word "exacerbate." He said, "hey that's a good word, exasterbate." Did I say yet that he's not really the sharpest tool in the shed?

His face was red and it was like he and I were the only people in class. I was giving him Dad's patented eye fuck, and I felt my cheeks flush. I felt like the Incredible Hulk, except red where I should have been green. "You guys can't think outside the box!" Before he could speak anymore, my mouth opened. I heard my voice speak for all of us, collectively. "Well then you tell me. We are all rattling off what we know, what you have taught us. This is so unbelievably frustrating. We have all obviously reached the limit of what we know to respond with, and still we're wrong. Yelling at us isn't going to help us pass the test or stick with us when we're in the field." No one would make eye contact with anyone. I don't even remember what Randy said after that. I was past the boiling point. I remember someone making a joke about my perfusion looking like it was pretty good at that moment. It was the end of class and Randy just started signing off on our test papers, truly demonstrating that his appraisal of our clinical skills was nothing more than a rubber stamp. He wasn't even evaluating us as we did the drill!

I just wanted to leave because the last thing I wanted to happen at that point was to be pulled aside and roped into a one on one conversation with the guy. As he signed his initials at the bottom of my paper he said, "you can't get so rattled by stuff. I'm putting this stuff to you guys so you know it." It was the way that a weak mind seeks justification for being wrong. I couldn't let him end on that note; call it ego, call it whatever. Maybe I'm a last word freak. "It's not about getting rattled. It's about being extremely frustrated with the way labs are conducted," and I took my paper back and I started walking up the steps. We left one by one, as he signed our papers, so I didn't have a chance to gage my tiff with Randy off my classmates. I don't know if they thought it was inappropriate, but in my heart I know that it was warranted. The whole time I was down there I was thinking, "how would Anne react to this?" and as my ears grew redder and I couldn't bite my tongue any longer, I just smiled knowing she would have done the same thing. Rob says they have to make their hot tub payment somehow. I say you don't go into the field of teaching without taking the full responsibility of that choice into your heart. We are his charge, and it is ethically unacceptable for him to screw dick around with us the way he does.

Maybe I'm naive or too sensitive. I however, think it's the Jindra Spirit. You have a responsibility, making the choice you did. I am here to not let you forget it.

Single Family House, Smoke Showing

2008-06-27T16:30:00.002-04:00

I have had my firefighter certification for less than a week and already I have been inside two structure fires. The first one was a small, contained kitchen fire and I got to go in with another guy and search for fire extension in the attic. We put on our face masks and started sucking down air while we crawled around the hot, confined space searching for hot spots. I felt the sweat rolling off of my face in rivers, I felt it roll down my back and pool in the spot where my turnout pants met the tshirt I was wearing. It was hot and there was smoke and dust everywhere, and I couldn't wipe the huge grin off of my face. I could hardly believe that I was actually being called to use everything I had learned in training! I was breathing air in an actual fire house! We stayed up for about 15 minutes to make sure that nothing would ignite, and when we came back outside and around the corner of the house, I could see six of my brothers standing at the engine. I pulled my face mask off and the grin was still there, bigger than ever. When they saw me they all started clapping, it was a moment of pride and comraderie that I had no idea would actually exist. When I told one of the guys who wasn't there about it he said, "what the hell is this, Ladder 49!? No one clapped for me when I came out of my first fire!" He was proud too, and it's amazing to really feel how much they all want me to succeed. We few, we happy few! We band of brothers.

And as I sit here typing this I can still smell the smoke on my clothing from the fire I just came out of. It was a mutual aid call to wellington, and when I pulled up to the station Markian was standing there motioning me to hurry up. "What's going on," I asked him as I ran past and started gearing up. "There's a worker in progress in Wellington and you're next to go." My heart lept into my throat. I double-checked all my gear. Triple-checked it. "House fire still burning?" "Yep." As I buckled my last buckle the two liuetenants and other firefighter who were going to came out to the bay from the control room, and we loaded onto our backup engine, 42. I grabbed one of the jump seats and put my headset on as we rolled out. "You guys should go ahead and pack up," the one LT said from inside the cab. We were going to be going in.

The drive to Wellington seemed to take twice as long as it usually does. My mind was a mobius strip of all the things we might do when we got there. I thought about handing the hoseline. Regulating my breathing to make the air last longer. Climbing up onto a roof with an axe and placing a roof ladder. The engine made a sharp right turn and I could smell smoke. We passed ambulances, police cars, rescue trucks, and came to a stop. I stood up, belted and cinched my air pack, grabbed a pike pole and pick head axe and headed toward the fire scene, toward my already in action mode LTs. LT Ryba was talking to one of WFD's officers, and as I walked up he looked at me, looked at the other firefighter who came with us, looked back at me and told me to get my air on. I saw smoke billowing out of the open attached garage, and out of a ventilation hole in the roof. I was swallowing my beating heart back down into my chest as I pulled the straps of my air mask tight against my face. All I could think to myself was that I needed to have a good seal against my face because we were going into heavy smoke conditions. I walked behind my LT toward the opening to the basement and the smoke kept getting worse and worse. One of the Wellington guys tapped me on the shoulder and put an axe in my hand while saying, "here you go, bro. Be careful." Firefighters in turnout gear are sexless and I chuckled to myself.

I kept close watch of Ben's airpack in front of me as we descended the cluttered staircase. There was a charged hoseline to my left which I made a point to keep contact with via my left foot. When we got halfway down the stairs I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. I heard Ben ahead of me, "you still with me Emily?" I knelt down to feel the hoseline in my hand and said, "I'm with ya," and hoped he didn't notice the quiver in my voice. Five more steps in and the only way I knew I was heading in the right direction was that hoseline in my hand. I prayed that the guys ahead of me were following it too, that it wouldn't be an unmanned nozzle at the end. Five more steps after that there was a break in the smoke and I could see the beam of the flashlight ahead. Ben turned to me and asked for the axe. He started to put it through one of the overhead windows and even though the glass was broken I noticed that there wasn't any smoke moving. I went up to it and saw that there was a plastic dome over the top and asked him for the axe back. I shoved it up through the plastic, ripping huge holes into it, and the smoke started to move out. He let me do the other two windows in the room and it dawned on me that it's not an exaggeration when people say firefighting is the most physically demanding job in the world. I was standing in a room that was probably 150 degrees, wearing about 50 pounds of gear, trying to shove a 15 pound axe head through a small overhead window. My shoulders were screaming. My forearms went into some prehistoric overdrive. My breathing quickened and I gave up the thought to try and regulate it. When I was done with the windows my heart was beating harder in my chest than it's ever beaten before.

We stayed in the basement for about another ten minutes. We found the homeowner's dog, dead from smoke inhalation. When we went upstairs I found the cat, also dead. I wrapped it in a towel and took it out to the backyard, away from the homeowner's eyes. I went around front, turned off my airpack, took off my helmet and mask and knelt on the ground. I said a prayer, asking for more strength. I was utterly tapped out. I sucked down gatorade and sat in the shade of a tree, watching all of the hustle and bustle around the house. When I got to the point that I felt I could go back in, Wellington cleared us to leave the scene. I left with a mixed feeling of excitement for having gotten the experience, and disappointment for feeling that I could have done more, should have been less exhausted. There is so much to learn. Today is the first time that it really sank in. I'm a firefighter.

The Color Red

2008-06-21T21:02:00.002-04:00

"I'm not always as sure of myself as I seem," this, to me, has always been one of the most poignant moments in The Royal Tennenbaums.

I have been feeling life crush down around me in so many ways lately. Depression. And then he leaves a message after message with that voice so little and afraid and alone and terrible, Can You Just Call Me Back. Been Feeling Low. Falling Apart. There is still such a huge part of me that wishes I could take care of you, everythingisgonnabeok.

I wish it was easier to just not care if you ever did anything with your life. There is some part of me that is kittied up to your stability. I want to see you make it. Why do you keep falling down, tripping over your own feet? I think about your future and I feel a deep dark cancer snaking its way out, all the way down. The world breaks everyone.

Zeus,
bring down the rains
on the land and the fields of athens.

Sing Loud, Sing Proud

2008-06-09T08:25:00.002-04:00

I just wanted to say,
Thank You for being in my life, for always being there with the right thing to say and the right mental attitude. Every time I hear your voice on the radio I grin and I think about the thundercats, how we used to think we could transfer our energy to each other like they could. Truth is I still believe we can do that. When I'm 30 feet in the air on a ladder and have to climb off onto a roof with all my gear on and an axe in one hand, my knees don't shake because I picture you doing in-and-outs, running for six miles yelling cadence, really knowing in some deeply seated place that you're invincible. I think about that and I feel it too.

Thank the gods that I did whatever I did in a previous life to have been born with one so strong.

Tidal Waves

2008-06-05T12:46:00.003-04:00

It has been a total whirlwind. Wake to work to class to calls to sleep to wake to work and the cycle goes on and on, cramming food and studying in whenever I have enough time to come up for air. It's all so exciting and the bonds that have formed already in EMT class have reaffirmed my belief in myself and my abilities. Fire school tends to crush my spirit little by little because it's all guys and there is so much posturing that goes on. I end up judging myself harshly and too much, and sizing myself up to impossible standards. With the EMT classes, people are younger and less set in trenchant ideas of who should be able to do what, and plus, most of the guys in the class want to be firefighters someday and I think I've earned their respect simply by already being one. Plus I act goofy as hell and can usually answer all the questions, and my natural leadership abilities are really taking center stage. Yesterday we learned how to use the various lifting and moving equipment, one of which was a stair chair. A stair chair is a really rugged chair that has tracks on the back of it. It's designed to be like a human dolly, and you can basically roll the patient down a set of stairs via the tracks if you have them rolled back toward the head, like a dolly. It is a pretty heavy piece of equipment but it's designed so that when you're using it right, moving somebody up and down stairs is simple. We took our instructor down three flights in different groups, and when we got to the bottom he wanted us to do it again. "Ok, let's get this thing back up!" he said, looking at the chair. Without thinking I went up to it, broke it down, hoisted it up into my arms and started walking up the stairs with the rest of the class behind me. My instructor just said, "ok then." Someone in the class said "geez, muscles!" and one of the guys whistled at me. I was telling mom that I think being on the FD and especially the academy has conditioned me to just springing into action with confidence before one of the guys does. The constant need to prove myself. The constant need to show that I can do anything they can do, better......

On my way back into town on Tuesday night I was heading South on 58 and saw our main engine, 41, barreling toward me. I pulled over and 41 stopped in front of Hall Auditorium so I got out and geared up. Then our aerial and rescue trucks arrived and I asked Mark what was going on. He didn't know. People from both shifts started showing up to the call, and I overheard something about an extinguishing system going off. Two of our guys packed up and went in on air and I started asking questions. "Do you know what a Halon system is?" The assistant chief asked me. "It's an oxygen exclusion extinguishing system used for energized electrical equipment." The guys standing around looked at me. "Somebody read the book," Joe said, looking at me. They chuckled. I beamed. Why am I such a geek? I definitely felt like Anne's twin in that moment, for both of our eagerness to prove not just that we have the brawn but that we have the brains to make the brawn useful.

At the end of the call my Lt., Shawn, recruited me to help him put the SCBAs back together. After I washed the regulators I recruited a couple of the other rookies to help me reconnect everything. I had to remind one of them to test it out before putting it back on the truck, and what to look for! I feel sleazy blowing my own horn, but it was such a vindicating feeling. As I was taking the last pack back into the bay, one of the other lieutenants said to no one in particular, "Man, we got a girl on Carlyle and we can't get her to do anything... and here's Emily doing it all!" I couldn't suppress the grin. I was just glad that I had my back to them and was halfway out the door and could feign ignorance that the comment was even made.

I love this job.

Caught In A Jar

2008-05-31T19:07:00.003-04:00

I'm sorry. It echoes around and around in my brain when I'm with you, I have this deep deep sinking downgoing when I look into your eyes because of the hope in the reflected gaze. By being too kind I have made this a million times more difficult, for both of us. And I think about it, why it has become more difficult, and the reasoning makes me angry. When I tell you that it's over, that the hope has gone, it will deflate you and you will grow sullen and think your life is over and make hints at suicide and maybe even try it. And it doesn't even have anything to do with me. You cannot shore up your reserves of strength on something external from you. You cannot seek the structural supports in everything around you and leave yourself weak on the inside. But you don't think logically like that, you're not remembering how the last month we lived together was silent treatment and accusations and you living in the basement [hell.] You just think about the way my hair smells and when we hug you breathe it in, dream about the way that things could be if only you provide enough wanting. And it doesn't even have a thing to do with me. It is the hope that someone besides you can help you figure out how to do this right.

I'm so so sorry. A 130 pound weight on my back. God forgive me. Our present position in life is a direct result of the choices we have made to get us here. Nothing is easy; nothing is easy.

I am sorry for what you're going to have to endure to get yourself to where you want to be. It's a journey that I just simply cannot be a part of. It isn't in me anymore. Something in March died and slowly it has been replaced with something else, something that says four years was enough and making further sacrifices would be foolish on my part. Ryan, I am so sorry. But I can't walk your road with you anymore.

I arise today through a mighty strength

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . . hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . . joy

Precipatum, Lupi.

2008-05-12T08:35:00.002-04:00

I don't think that you understand.

You sink down into it, a little more every day. You try to stay busy so you don't have to think about it but that voice on the phone "I just wanted to hear your voice" makes you feel the futility of that deep down-going and yet somehow you can't avoid it. I wish we could erase all of this, everything that has passed between us. How different my life would be.

It still can be, just don't lose sight. A dark night, a night of stones and branches obscuring your way.

Saint John of the Cross, in the darkness of your worst moments, when you were alone and persecuted, you found God. Help me to have faith that God is there especially in the times when God seems absent and far away. Amen

Friggin Sweet

2008-05-08T15:11:00.001-04:00

The Dream.

2008-05-06T18:34:00.002-04:00

"Everything you need," he said, "I have already given to you."

We were walking on the golf course looking up and I wanted desperately to know how to soar like that. Overhead and about 200 feet up there were five humongous winged creatures, ragged wings like paper, so graceful. They were gliding so majestically and though their appearance should have been frightening for how dark and prehistoric they were, I wasn't afraid. I knew I could be up there with them but the series of steps that I was repeating that I thought would get me up there wasn't working. I looked back to my right but the man was gone. I closed my eyes. In my mind I was next to them, soaring, and when I opened them it was so. Instead of looking down I started asking questions. Somehow I knew that looking down would put me back on the earth.

"Don't you ever have self-doubt?"

The answer was a smile that radiated out and instantly made me feel the absence of anything like self-doubt.

"We need to make a stop here." It wasn't one of them who said it to me, it was a non-verbal communique that seemed to come from all of them. We were in front of a church and all of a sudden I was alone again. "My father's house," is what I keep hearing echoing around in my head, in someone else's voice. I looked to the top of the church and there was a huge hand overhead, open, golden, palm down. Protection.

All of a sudden I was under a cobblestone bridge with a terrified young boy who was my servant. I wanted him to apply the same amount of care and compassion to his own life that he was trying to apply to mine. He was bringing me a clay vessel full of water but his own thirst was causing him to fall. "Drink without passion," I said to him. "Drink because you need to, because it has to be a part of you." He drank the vessel down and wept, and looked both terrified and full of joy. Some water spilled from the vessel and caused the river to surge up next to him but it didn't threaten him. He opened his mouth to speak,

and my alarm went off.

He is always with us, always. I feel so strongly about it now. And I want desperatly to return the favor.

Not Even Wild Elephants

2008-05-06T09:41:00.002-04:00

I had the most amazing dream last night. I will write about it when I get home because I have it all written down there and I'm losing the details.

Yesterday I went to the station to talk to the chief about doing my EMT schooling early, since I have the summer off. I took him the paperwork for the class I found and said, "I know this is outside the realm of normalcy, but I'd really like to get this knocked out during the summer when I have so much time. I am willing to pay for it myself, or wait to be paid for it until I prove that I'm going to be sticking around here for awhile."

He looked at me and laughed. "I have a pretty strong feeling that wild horses couldn't drag you away at this point."

So May 27th I'll be in EMT school! Also, we had a call last night to an MVA that really wasn't too bad, we cleared in around 15 minutes. When we got back to the station we all milled around for awhile (9 A-shifters showed up to the call, it was sweet) and as people were leaving one of my LTs told me to stick around because he had something for me. I followed him out of the bay to his truck and he reached in on the passenger's side. He pulled out a pair of extrication gloves and told me to try them on. They fit perfectly and he told me that they were mine. "Put 'em in your bunker pants. It'll make next monday a lot easier."

I work on the greatest department in the world.

Mutual Aid.

2008-05-02T17:25:00.002-04:00

I was sitting in the back room in a meeting when I got a single text from Rob. "Get ready." Instinctively I turned up my pager and sure enough in a matter of seconds I heard Sue's voice over the wire.

"All Oberlin firefighters report to the station for mutual aid."

I got the squirrely eyed look and looked up at William. "Can I go??!!" Without even looking up from his computer he said, "go save the world, girl." I jumped up for my car keys and flew out the door. I took Pleasant street all the way to Hamilton and of course every slow driver in Oberlin decided to get in front of me. The drives to the station always seem to happen in slow motion. I pulled up to a red light at Hamilton and 58 just in time to see our back up engine pulling out of the station. Too late! I cursed the fates as I pulled into the station lot, hopeful that I might get to see a little action, that they'd be sending the rescue truck too.

Sue was waiting in the bay, and the other rookie, Kevin, was there too. "You guys wouldn't have been able to go anyway. Not til you're through the 36. It's good to come to the station though, we might get a call in Oberlin. You're welcome to stay if you like."

I went into the main room and sat at the conference table with a cup of coffee. I had an hour's leave from school and I was going to be at the station for every second of it! Kevin didn't follow me and and I assumed he left. After five minutes of reading the paper at the table, the 911 buzzer went off again. My heart palpitated. I jumped up and ran to the control room where the chief was on the phone with LC 911. Sue was there too. He hung up the phone and looked up at Sue.

"They want our tanker. Who do we got?"

Sue looked over at me and looked back at the chief. "Well, it's either me or you driving!" The chief laughed in his derisive way and looked up at me. "Wanna ride in the tanker?"

I could not believe what I was hearing. My eyes got as big as saucers. "YES SIR!" I ran into the bay and jumped into my gear in record time, and I was latching my last hook the chief appeared in the bay in his bunker coat. Kevin was standing there with no gear on and asked me why I got to go. The chief just looked at him and as I was running over to the tanker I yelled over my shoulder, "I'm geared up!"

We pulled out of the bay and I was still total disbelief that it was just me and the chief taking the tanker to a mutual aid structure fire. "We can do this because you won't actually be going in. You might have to pull hose but I think you'll be all right."

"My heart is in my throat, sir!"

He laughed at this and just said, "give it a few hundred times, it'll wear off."

He joked with me the whole way, answering my questions, me trying as hard as I could to not be totally geeking out the entire way. As we approached the scene the chief called out that we were close, and I heard Mike come back on the radio with, "glad you've got a rookie with you!" I have no idea how he even knew I was in the truck but it made me feel so welcome.

We arrived on scene and it was clear that the fire was under control. "We probably won't even have to get out," the chief told me, almost apologetically. "I can see the fire!" I shot back without even thinking about it. "This is so awesome!" He smiled, I think appreciating my rookie excitement.

We sat in the tanker for about ten minutes watching all of the nomex-clad firefighters scurry around and my heart swelled with pride to see so many coats emblazoned with Oberlin on the back going in and out of the structure. We are a family, I remember Joe telling me one afternoon in the truck bay. We are as good as any of the full time departments around here. All we need is pride and I think you guys will help bring some of that back.

The Incident Commander radioed that the scene was under control, and for all mutual aid tankers to return to their stations. "Oh well," I thought. I got to see my first fire, and I got to go on a mutual aid run with the chief even though it's against the SOP before I'm done with the academy.

As we backed down the narrow street I watched the house and I saw an Oberlin firefighter that I recognized to be Rob climbing way up on the roof with an axe in hand. The grin on my face came back ten-fold. This is a guy who, a couple of nights ago, told me that in no time I'd be telling him how to do stuff, and here he was up on a roof ladder with an axe ready to go to work!

I get paid to do this! What an amazing day.

You Gotta Be In It To Win It

2008-04-29T07:21:00.004-04:00

I was eager when I got there. There were rumors that we were either going to the burn trailer or to Sugar Ridge to practice vehicle extrication, and whichever way it went for A Shift was fine with me because I'd finally be responsible for doing real firefighter duties.

We sat around the classroom joking while the Chief and Mike were in the back planning what we'd be doing. I was trying to visualize how I'd use the spreaders to pop a door, trying to remember how heavy that tool was when Rob took me out on 44 that day in the winter, trying to guess which other tools we might use. I was psyching myself into a cracked-out-ferret level of anxiety when finally Mike called my name, the names of the two other rookies, and Shawn's name, and told us all to go gear up. He sent a few more out and we loaded onto 44, the four of us riding in the back together. I was sitting next to Shawn and I noticed that he kept looking at my gear. He yanked on the nomex hood that I had tucked under the collar of my turn-out coat as if to make sure it was really my hood, and then leaned forward to address the other rookies.

"Rookies, gear up all the way. Neither of you two have your hoods on. When we go out on drills, we wear all our gear." One of them was still trying to get his coat on. The guy next to me asked how to put the hood on, how to wear it. That I had done it right and that they had to ask me for help was the ego stroke I needed to go into the evening's exercises and from the corner of the eye I could tell that I had climbed up a peg in Shawn's estimation.

We arrived and climbed out of the truck. Carlisle Twp. was at the junk yard doing the same drills we were going to be doing, there were probably 15 of them. You don't wear your helmet on the truck, so when I climbed out my head was uncovered and it's pretty obvious that I'm a girl when I don't have anything covering my head. I could see the Carlisle guys looking at me, and though I don't know for sure what they were thinking the general impression I got was "what's that girl gonna do?" Maybe I am just really aggro and always assume the worst, I don't know. I puffed up pretty good and donned my best 50 foot tall routine. Shawn told me to grab the halligan and flat head axe, and by the time I was back around the other side of the truck with the tools, he had the jaws set up.

The first exercise he had us do was bust the windows out. To do that one person had to hold the pointy side of the halligan against the window, and the other person takes the flat side of the axe and hits the halligan so that the halligan is the tool that actually breaks the glass. This way you don't have an axe crashing through the window and striking a patient. Mark and Kevin (the two other rookies) went first, with Mark using the axe. It took him three tries to do it because Mark wasn't bracing the halligan tight enough and it kept slipping. Shawn told him he was swinging like a girl to which I of course began yelling every manner of obscenity and asking for my turn. Before I got it they switched positions on the next window and Mark put the axe right through the glass. It was finally my turn. Kevin held the halligan tight against the window, I took a breath in, swung the axe back, swung it forward, hit the halligan right in the sweet spot and watched the window shatter. I thanked my mom and dad for all the years of softball as Shawn let out a "perfect," to my right. Shawn didn't say anymore jokes about doing things like a girl for the rest of the night.

We went around the van learning techniques and the proper way to do things and I tried to soak up as much as I could. The three of us took turns using the jaws on the doors, and by the time we got done with the passenger side we were really functioning as a team. We used the cutters to sever the A and B posts. We used the reciprocating saw to make relief cuts. Shawn wanted us to roll the roof back and I got under it and heaved with all I had and watched it peel back like a tuna can. We rolled it as high as it would go and Shawn got on my side to see if it would budge anymore and he couldn't move it. He got up into the driver's seat and put his back into and it still wouldn't budge. He looked at me and said, "Well Emily, since you're using your man muscles tonight, grab that axe and give me a dent." I made him the dent he wanted and he peeled the rough back a few more inches. I was keeping up my end of the physical just as well as the guys, and Kevin kept patting me on the back and saying, "You're doing awesome!"

Then we moved over to the driver's side. Shawn looked at the three of us and asked, what's the first thing we need to do? "Check and see if the doors are unlocked," I shot back. They were locked. "Now what?" he asked. I picked up the halligan and said, "we make a purchase point." The purchase point is a hole you pry into the door with the halligan so that the jaws operator can fit the tip of the jaws in between to door and the post. I wedged the halligan in, pryed up and down and up again, and pulled the halligan out, happy with the hole I had made. Shawn looked at the hole and looked at me. "Do you think that's a good purchase point?" he asked me. "Yeah," I said back with confidence, "you could definitely start from there." He looked at Kevin, who would be operating the jaws. "Do you think that's something you can work with?" Kevin just looked at him. Shawn looked back at me. "All right Emily, if you're so sure of your purchase point, get the jaws in there."

I picked up the jaws, wedged them into the opening, and started prying. The door started to give. It opened wide enough so that I could see the latch. I closed the jaws up, pulled them out, and repositioned them so that they were right under the latch. I started opening the jaws back up and within a minute I had the door open. Without skipping a beat I stepped forward and found a good point to start at the hinge side. I wanted to take the door completely off, and I didn't want anyone else to have a hand in it. I popped the top hinge and moved the jaws down to the bottom hinge. I could feel that I had the right spot. I started opening the jaws and called out a "watch out!" two seconds before the door came completely off the car. I stepped back, put the jaws down, and thought to myself "and that's how you do that."

The best part was that not only was my shift LT watching the whole thing, but the heavy rescue instructor/full-time LT was watching too. We finished tearing up the van and the drill was over, time to clean up. "Grab some brooms and shovels rookies!" Mark and Kevin asked him where to get them and I told them to follow me. We reappeared within a minute with all the clean up tools and I heard Shawn say to the full-time LT, "now see? You don’t have to tell her twice." We cleaned up everything, went back to the truck and finally were able to take off our goggles and helmets and unbutton our coats. I could see steam eminating from every open spot on my gear, and I looked around at the guys and saw the same thing happening to them. We were walking steam vents. Everyone was dripping sweat but we all had huge smiles on our faces. Shawn assembled all of us into a semi circle and asked us what we learned. No one said anything so I chimed in.

"We learned to check door handles first. Where, why, and how to make relief cuts. The proper way to open a window. How to make a purchase point that the jaws can really get into. Not to skin the door and why. Scene safety."

"Well ok," Shawn uttered slowly with his hillbilly drawl. "All I learned on my first day of extrication was that I was going to get a huge bruise the size of my entire thigh!"

Pat, one of the guys who’s been on for a little over a year, looked at me while talking to Shawn and said, "She’s smart as hell! She’s constantly rattling off shit that’s right."

I rode back with the biggest grin on my face, feeling pride in all 50 feet of me. And that grin was still on my face this morning when I woke, and got even bigger when I checked my thighs and saw no bruises to speak of.

Hollow As Bone

2008-04-23T07:37:00.002-04:00

It can't really be like this. Can't last.

When he comes over there's a tornado that blows through, rips my flesh down to the bone and cuts my spirit. When he leaves I am tear stained, angry, but still think somewhere down in that deep dark that there is something more I could have done to help him. Soft spot that I try to bulldoze over, this is definitely damaging my ability to be in love with myself.

Things will get better. I wish I could just catapult my head out of this. I am not a bad person and my dreams don't fall short of anything. Also, I am a decent shot. So.... yeah. Don't come around here no more.

Don't You Forget.

2008-04-22T07:42:00.006-04:00

Cool evening air passing through the open aerial tower window grazed my face and played with the hairs on my neck. I was sitting directly across from Eric as we rode through town to the training drill. We were both silent, the churning effort of the diesel engine curtailing any chance at conversation before it could even start, and I wondered if he was maybe as full of apprehension as I was. We passed some of the high school kids and they spotted me in the window, their feverish waving was the jolt I needed to swallow down the fear I felt rising up in my chest. "We're going to go up on the tower." I remembered the snowy day in December and climbing up that 100 foot ladder. My heart beat faster but I thought about Orion and all the effort that's gotten me here, I thought about Anne and let her strength fill me.

We pulled onto Artino Street and everything started happening so quickly. The Lt. in charge of the drill started barking out assignments, people were jumping off the truck and springing into action and I was doing my best to not be in the way and not look totally insecure about what I was doing there. "Why did Mike ask me to come to this," I wondered to myself. "I have no idea how to do any of this stuff." As soon as I felt the fear start to creep back up I heard Mike's voice barreling in my direction.

"Emily, get the plate down on the back and get up on the platform, get ready to take it up with Rob."

I had no idea what the plate was. This is 95% of what my training has been so far: looking around and seeing what everyone else is doing, playing a little monkey see monkey do, and praying that no one sees through the cracks of your cool exterior. It worked and before I knew it I was standing on the lowered platform with Rob. "Well, at least I didn't have to climb this time." Within the next few moments we were 100 feet up in the air and it was taking my best effort to not stand there mouth-breathing, in awe of how the hell any of them could have learned and retained all of this. We started flowing water and the mist against the woods and setting sun made a beautiful moment that I etched into memory. I looked to the South and saw a dozen golden sun beams streaming through some far-off clouds, and it felt like we were level with them. Just as I started to feel like I might be able to get the hang of all this I heard something come over the radio that stopped me in my tracks.

"Emily, how do you feel about coming down? Eric needs to get up there and see what to do."

I looked at Rob. I looked down the 100 feet of extension. I looked at Rob. Without keying my mic, I said, "uhhhhh....." Rob, without breaking eye contact, keyed his mic and said, "she's good to go. She'll be down in a minute." I laughed. There is no reason to be afraid of something that you know with certainty you have to do. You just resign yourself to the fact and get on with it. I unfastened my harness, took off my headset. Readjusted my helmet. Put my glove strap in my pocket. Rob looked at me sheepishly. "You ok with this?"

"Cmonnnnn," I said smiling out of the side of my mouth, doing my best billy bad a$$ act. "I'm fine. I'll be down in a sec."

Rob knows me too well and he didn't buy it, but he played along. "Go as slow as you need to. You'll never need to rush on this thing. Keep three points of contact and if you have any problems at all, just look up at me and I'll be down in a second." I was already starting the descent as he finished the last sentence. The hardest part about climbing down the aerial is the first step. By far. You're 100 feet into the sky, and that first step requires you to step backward over an opening that's about 9 inches. Straight down. Not nearly big enough to let a firefighter in turnouts slip through, but more than big enough to scare the hell out of you. The second scariest part is how unbelievably narrow it is at the top. The facemask in my side pocket kept catching on the sides. My coat kept catching on the sides! After the fifth time freeing myself being on the aerial that high was a piece of cake. I made it down and Joe slapped me on the back, handed me the headset to the turntable, and from then on I was at the helm at the bottom of the tower.

It was absolutely trial by fire. The rest of the night was like that; being told to do things that you really have no idea how to do and faking it like you are in the swing of things. Honestly, this was my worst fear for how the learning would be, but also kind of what I had expected. I'm glad that I'm a fast learner. I don't know how half of these people are still on the department. It gets so intimidating.

After the end of the second drill we started disconnecting the 5 inch supply line and Joe asked me to drag a section uphill so that it could drain properly. I hoisted it up over my shoulder and moved it like any one of the guys. I felt pretty good about my abilities for the first time of the night, and it was further vindicated by Shawn later telling me that he would never again question my physical ability. It was dark, 9:30 in the evening, and I was rolling 5 inch supply line down Artino Street, on my knees. Despite all of the blows to my ego of the evening, in that moment in the water watching my bunker pants get dirtier and dirtier and seeing the guys up ahead me all completing their assigned tasks, I really felt like a firefighter. Like eventually I'll actually be responsible for more than just showing up.

I rode back in the open compartment of 42, cool evening air drying the sweat on my face and neck. I heard the guys joking in the cab through the headset on my ears, but I was in a different world. I was taking that first nine inch step over and over again, in every situation of my life that has a gaping hole straight down like that. You just take a deep breath in, keep your hands on the rungs, and start moving. You don't stop and you don't go back. What I need to learn is patience. To not get down on myself for not knowing things that I haven't learned yet.

So do you have a boyfriend or something?

2008-04-16T22:26:00.003-04:00

In front of everyone he asked me a question that probably felt benign, but my answer cut short the joviality like a hammer strike, she said what?? He just looked at me. "How the hell old are you?" I love my lieutenant. Of all the questions he could have asked.

The jokes picked back up and later in the garage I found myself being ushered into one of the many one-on-ones with him of the evening. "So can ask what happened between you guys?" I went into it because, of all of them, he is the most like a brother to me. There are certain people you meet in this life that you just instantly trust, and know that they will always guide you in the right direction. I told him my not-too-short, not-too-long version, and he looked at me for a moment, as if trying to picture the person on the other side of the story.

"Men just ain't men anymore." He looked at me, shaking his head, eyes expressing both sympathy and understanding. And that was all he said about that.

The knowing, once you are a part of the brotherhood, that you will never be alone. The camaraderie that transcends any attempt at explanation. Amidst all of this stress and drama, I am so very thankful.

And in two Mondays I get to cut up cars and put water on fire :)

Late Monday.

2008-04-15T13:13:00.003-04:00

I'm sick of you calling me out every single day. "Did you call the counselor back yet? I have to keep going until you decide because once I'm done, I'm done, and I can't go back."

Yeah, well, no. I haven't called her back yet. I don't really want to. I don't feel it's a priority item. Editing all of the photos from the jobs you abandoned is a priority because there are kids hounding me every day for their proofs. Paying the bills you left behind is a priority. Making it to calls and training. Squeezing in time to just frigging vedge by myself is a priority. Don't put that decision on me. I don't even want to see your face. So much blame. And on the phone you told me that you can't talk to me because I'm defensive, and because of the insecurity I carry. And I laughed. My problems are not your problems. Here is what you have, finally, run into:

If you are hard on yourself, life will be easy. If you are easy on yourself, life will be very hard.

Tired of making it easy for you, hard for me. Tired of so much, tired in my bones. After the late night with my brothers we headed to Rick's for a fast cold one, and we sat around debriefing. There were nine of us and it's 2:30 in the morning and I feel truly that these are my brothers, and I feel more accepted by them than I have by anyone in so long a time. After about thirty minutes Shawn was talking just to me, extolling the nuggets of wisdom he has picked up in his unique way that had me laughing so hard I was crying. And when we all left he followed me home to make sure I was ok since it was 3:00 in the morning by then and Chapman was out! To go from that to the phone call with all the duress in his voice, "when are you going to call I can't keep going unless you do when when when...."

You do not bend because to bend is to die slowly, horribly. To languish into something that eventually you won't recognize as yourself. So you snap. Break. And you grow stronger at the broken places. Or try to. There is no going back, not now.

Zero Love.

2008-04-08T08:52:00.002-04:00

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for power equal to your tasks.

To be a great champion, you must believe you are the best. If you're not, pretend you are.

Please Believe Me.

2008-04-01T21:33:00.002-04:00

All things to all people. It is 945 on a Tuesday and I wanted to write that in military time just to show that I could. Show who? Emily, where will you be when you read this? And who. Remember me when you read it, and remember exactly what it felt like right now, what you are about to endure. Have gone through. 945 and getting colder again outside, the only thing I want to do is go for a run. Beat my body. There is no good reason to feel the way that I do. That is the entire problem. Too logical, I have nearly forgotten what to do with emotions as they pertain to me, to my own situation. Too used to safeguarding somebody else's.

Fierce. You are faking it.

You think it's the only commodity that you have to offer. He said on the phone, "you have been trying to have a relationship with a 14 year old." You can get better from that. You can do something with the 14 year old. What do I do with it? You can become someone new, and I am the same Emily. The one who feels like an idiot for this thing she doesn't recognize as her life. Watch it fall, all around you. It pisses me off that you are calling the shots and my exposed emotions are forcing rash decisions.

To run, tonight. I am not myself. Soft little baby. I like to watch my arms in the mirrors at the weight room. I like to catch people looking at my arms. I have Trogdor arms, and they are freakish. When I move the 45s around, my shoulders ripple. I want them to be bigger. Stronger. Kat said, "that is commitment to a goal, you have changed your body forever." I want to change all the rest with it, down to the inability to concentrate on anything but my waning sense of self worth.

A fraud. "What must it be like," you watch the fish go by, "to swim so resolutely?" Not myself.

Grace And Conviction

2008-03-26T17:18:00.002-04:00

What is the shame in folding? You knew the hand you were dealt would need work, and the work hasn't been up to par. Yet you continue to believe that a little more effort will make everything ok. It is not failure, Emily, to take yourself out of a situation that makes you miserable. It is not failure to have the feelings that you have.

No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity.

They kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. And that somehow cuts your mind off from clearness, and sanity, and self-control, and justice?

A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained.

To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring.

How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility.

To have been born into the family that I have. To have a father that, without being provoked, says that they will support me whatever I choose, and to know that he absolutely means it. Libby, and the strength of her conviction even in the face of a moron jabbing her with spikes for her decision. To have made a decision, and to stand by it because you know that it's right and because you are strong enough to do the right thing for yourself. Anne and the light that she casts upon everyone, every situation. To be that strong. To know that resolutely what life is, to laugh at a challenge, to be grateful for the opportunity to show your quality.

It is time, I think, to become strong at the broken places. Clarity of thought, forward momentum.

Late.

2008-03-18T08:35:00.003-04:00

I keep having these startling moments of clarity. Walking into work today and my stomach plummets just to be there and I start sinking into the negative thought patterns. Had a voicemail from your boss on my phone wanting to know when you'd be back. And last night when we talked you said "so should I try calling work tomorrow," your round-about way of asking me to do it for you. Like a storm cloud, it just overtakes you. Can't get it out of my head.

But then I realized all of a sudden like just choosing to be smarter than that, none of this is my creation. I want something more, so that's what I'm going to get. Simple as that. I'm not going to languish going down these old roads with you because I'm just not going to go. I don't really care that you want me to. I'm going... my way. And I don't want you to come with me. Sorry. There is something amazing just around the corner, and I'm almost there, and I'll arrive on my own. I did the best that I could for you, and now I'm going to be very selfish.

Tell Me,

2008-03-16T19:27:00.002-04:00

She had a big face and a poodle haircut, and a bright sparkley shirt that might have seen a bedazzler in its lifetime. She was asking him point-blank questions and he wasn't saying anything, and the silence made me strangely harried. Why am I even here. Everything. When I first walked through the doors he was standing there, and the look in his eyes made me feel fearful and repulsed at exactly the same time. And then shortly after, shameful.

So she said finally to both of us, "what needs to be worked on?" and my mind flashed to laying on the forest floor at Priest Point Park, seeing Anne's car pull up in Lakewood, the photo shoot in Coshocton when he walked around with that face like a corpse, here we go here we go. Words. What are the words?

And I just wanted it over with. It made me angry that she came into the room with a box full of kleenex. That she said I had pain embedded in my face. How do you go back? You don't. I told him, I have hardened my heart. It is a survival mechanism. You don't tell someone that you tried to kill yourself after you were unsuccessful and then expect them to not self-preserve. And he kept looking at me with hopeful eyes because I kept talking and she kept saying that I wouldn't have been there unless I cared, and I thought, some of us are sheepdogs. And I thought of Anne and I smiled. I do care. But my life isn't forfeit anymore.

I am too close to my own thoughts to see them in perspective! Shut them out. That's what you do, it's how you survive. It might be harsh but some of us, she said, have to be sheepdogs. You fake the strength til you really have it. And it's either that easy or it's not.

When You've Got Family

2008-03-14T10:42:00.002-04:00

Irritations just under surface of skin. Constant analyzation and re-analyzation. Like looking around myself 360 to see why I'm a bad person, which part betrayed me, which part I need to flagellate and cast off. The phone makes a sound and my skin prickles. I go into the basement and my chest compresses. Pile of laundry on my closet floor, close my eyes to that room and everything that it entails. He made a jail cell for himself down there, and was sending me the last email from Alcatraz (final rites) when I came home early. I thought about sitting on that barstool in Olympia and how I was crying, how I felt like the loneliest person in the world. I need protection too.

He said to me on the phone, "i feel so lonely." His voice was small and wanted everything to be ok, like it always is. Just take take take.

And everyone looking at you like "just hold on a little longer," like I know my brother is troubled but I am so glad you're there for him. And it is a rock crushing down on me. And that first night I was thinking, "I could be a cop now!" and the walls around me revealed themselves, how can I be so willing to give up my deepest wants and desires.

The running shoes I customized had an ID name up the back: My Way. From now on. Just remind me.

Just A Little Push

2008-03-13T10:29:00.002-04:00

Keeping my mind on target. He came through yesterday early, voice full of sunshine and bellowing that deep bass. "How ya doin," to which he always replies, "Fabulous!" with a big smile and a wink in my direction. His response yesterday was met with complaint from the head honcho, and he just rolled into a great belly laugh. "Every morning when you wake up, you have a choice to make. How am I going to greet this day? What attitude will I chose to mark this day with?" It made me smile a deep, warm, to the bottom of my toes smile because I thought, this is truth. Small choices stacked together over time turn into the entire ocean plus contents.

And on Monday we clinked glasses and he said, "you only get one life. Might as well make it the most phenomenal thing you can."

Thankful for these little gift along the way, this road paved with broken glass and arrows.

My Way

2008-03-12T09:38:00.002-04:00

There was a varsity tennis match happening in the field house, so I was relegated to a treadmill for the run my body was screaming for. For beating out stress, nothing comes close to running. It was night and the overhead lights shone brightly upon me, turning the window before me partially into a mirror. I kept staring at the words on my tshirt, the one she gave me for the last birthday. I have the card she gave me with that gift on my desk at work and I have re-read it every day for the past week or so.

Veritas. Aequitas. I thought of the analogy he gave me, of being the blind kid in the middle giving it his all but in the end, everything being for nothing. The more I thought about it the more I realized that this situation is nothing like that at all and he only used the analogy because it was a weak spot in my armor. If you decide, before you start, that you're not going to be successful, guess what's going to happen? Life is pain. You figure out how to deal with it, or you spend your entire life in that nowhere land of self doubt. Maybe I'm an a-hole, but I won't go down with this ship.

And after the run I took in a deep breath of cold night air, dialed the number and put the phone to my ear. "He feels emasculated in the house, I think. Like he's not contributing." As though this is something that is up to me to remedy. As though I haven't already tried, a thousand and two times, to help light some kind of spark.

The voice that replied to him sounded like steel, and I was filled with pride to hear it. "Yeah, this has actually been going on for a lot longer than we've been in the new house." When I pulled into the driveway I gave him a gruff goodbye and hung up because I don't want anymore negativity in the Ponderosa. You know, I have spent a vast quantity of my life making sure that the people around me are fulfilled and happy, and when I try to apply the same care to my own life I feel guilty for doing it. It's a behavior that's up to me to change. We all are the keepers of our own happiness. She's right; I too have filled my heart with hate. He looked at me with those shark eyes and said, "no one has helped me" and I wanted to smash him.

But it also made me realize that there is some selfishness in my desire to help him. I am not a martyr. We each save ourselves.

Gone.

2008-03-11T22:06:00.002-04:00

Never mind hymns of thanksgiving: hold on to a step once taken. A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree! The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men; but the sight of justice is the pleasure of God.

Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.

Why did I talk about a friendly hand! My great advantage is that I can laugh at old love affairs full of falsehood, and stamp with shame such deceitful couples -- I went through women's Hell over there; and I will be able now to possess the truth within one body and soul.

A ranger in Prescott AZ who is only there if you look for him, and the will to protect and uphold all of those tears that were shed. You will make it, and together we will raise the banner.