The Day That Dreaming Ends

I remember this night. A night that was the fulcrum turning my life and my mind into the direction I’ve come since. Everything building up to this moment has finally crushed down on me. My return from Iraq, my divorce, my fractured mind, my hate for my left eye, and my constant increasing drinking to numb myself from the world finally culminates in one night of utter hopelessness and despair. This was the night the light went out of my soul. This was the night I died.

When I returned from Iraq in 2003 I was greeted by a wife who seemed genuinely happy to see me but something was wrong. Not just with her but with me too. A couple weeks pass and she says that she’s no longer in love with me. Whatever right? It happens at least I’m not getting shot at anymore. That was the first inkling I had that I really wasn’t the same anymore. So my wife leaves me and we part on what I thought okay terms considering she raped me of my car and the support I needed coming back from that hell.

I went back home for leave and hung out with friends and got ready to go to Germany. I hit the booze pretty hard but nothing near to what I would in later months. When I arrived in Germany I was alone. No friends or family around and I knew no one in this strange new land. The unit I was in was still in Iraq so I was on Rear Detachment. Rear D was pretty much a ridiculous game of finding bullshit to do for us all day and when after a few months when we had everything done they started us over again. It was needless to say not the best environment for us who had just come home from Iraq to get readjusted. It was here though that I met such key players in the up coming chapters of my life like Domenico Carbone and Cody Brock. It was also the time when I realized that good ol’ Biff Calhoon, my drunken ego who helped me rationalize the things I did and saw was a little more difficult to get rid of after coming home. It was like the part of me that was him wanted to just be him and the part of me that wanted to go back to the way I was before was helplessly being overtaken and buried.

Every night we would go drinking in downtown Friedberg. At one of the bars I met a girl named Carol who had just been through a divorce of sorts when her American husband abandoned her to go back to the states. For a couple of hazy drunken months her and I comforted each other and bought some peace of mind for a few minutes each day. It was around this time that I found out that the ex had slept with my best friend Dragon while I was in Iraq. I know it sounds like a bad play. Only it really happened, to me. Well now the totality of my ex's abandonment and betrayal was clear to me and it sent my mind reeling. Not only that but I had become obsessed with my left eye and would set to planning it’s removal to rid myself of it’s evil influence on my life. Then there was the booze. It flowed all night on weeknights and all weekend long. For nine months I drank to die. I drank to rid myself of the feelings, the hurts, and the loss of my innocence, in that dessert land. Before all this I had the divine spark. I created art. I drew and sang and I loved. Now I had nothing no art, no song, and most of all no love. I couldn’t even remember what it felt like to love and the loss of that more then the loss of whom it was I loved was the worse.

So it was on this dateless night, for they all run together when you’re constantly inebriated, that I sat alone in my barracks room watching the Moulin Rouge as had become my habit of late because of it’s theme of love enduring above all things. A half empty case, which had been full when I started the movie, of Hornsby’s Hard Cider sat next to me on my bed. I had moved my tv as close as I could get it to the bed. I watched. I drank. I yearned. Then, I cried. I wept for I felt it for the first time. The mental internal wounds that were ripping open in me. The chasm that was devoid of all emotion. My soul tainted by what I had been through. The light that was dim till that night went out entirely. Dead, numb, nothingness an under layer at the core of my being that keeps me from ever truly experiencing those now long forgotten emotions.

What are on the surface now, the feelings I have for my new baby Kati Rae Lanzer are all built on top of that dead spot on my soul. I experience no joy at all in the things and people that are around me no matter how hard I try and it's been that way since that night. There is always numbness and an apathetic stain that can’t be erased or scrubbed out. A blackhole that helped me do what I needed to do over in Iraq but can’t and mustn’t ever go away lest I be driven mad by the things I’ve seen and done. No one can ever understand what it’s like unless they have experienced it too.

See you all further down the road.

Mike