Healing

So, night before last, I had a good night. I got a lot of writing done, I was in relatively little pain, my chest didn't feel tight for the first time since the heart attack, things were good.

So last night, as I started to realize the implications of my impending good health, I had a meltdown.

Fear and I don't have a complex relationship. In fact, we have a fairly simple one. Fear hangs out, a small kitten mewling at me from behind the door, and I ignore it (and occasionally trip over it as I am ignoring it, but I ignore that too). Now, unfortunately this kitten can occasionally (like, once or twice a decade) inflate itself into a giant, angry lion capable of ripping my fucking head right off, eating and digesting it, with a cheshire-cat grin before crapping it out onto my lifeless corpse and then turning back into a kitten, peeing on the remaining mess, and skittering off.

That happened last night.

You take the good with the bad.

I have been, while recuperating from my near-death heart experience, missing enormous chunks of my son's life.

My son really likes me, he likes doing things with me, he likes hanging out with me. He likes doing the things I like doing, and he likes doing them with me. He likes almost everything about me.

Last night, for the first time since he discovered talking, I realized how important I was to him, and it knocked me on my ass. While I have been bitching and moaning about how fucking sick I am and how lousy I feel, he has been relentlessly growing, learning and imitating ME.

I have never been as responsible for something, not even me myself, as I am for him, and last night, I broke. The whole thing. Tears, feelings of complete helplessness before overwhelming responsibility, feelings of complete incompetence.

99.999% of the time, I DEFINE arrogance. Look it up in the dictionary and my sneering face should be staring back at you. I LIKE it that way. I am the smartest person I know. I present, as well as I am able, the image of somebody who, in time of need, could easily kick YOUR ass, rip your heart out of your chest with my bare hands and eat a big chunk of it, cholesterol be damned. I take a perverse pride in having almost no formal education at all, yet still knowing more about any subject I care to than the experts, and making them KNOW it with ease in the first thirty seconds of our meeting. I LIKE it that way, even tho it is almost all a cleverly constructed exaggeration.

Ending up quivering on the bed, crying, hugging a pillow and wishing for nothing more than a big-ass hug from somebody who can make it all better is humiliating to the extreme.

And, as it happens, quite necessary. Writing it down and publishing it where it can be read by close friends and complete strangers alike is humbling, to put it mildly, but also quite necessary.

Hey, world. I am mortal, small, insignificant and terrified. Like everybody else.

And, as it happens, healing. Slowly, perversely and painfully, but healing indeed.

I suppose, in a wierd and weird way both, last night was a good night too.