Guilt or Grief: Inside the Box
Continued from Just Guilty
Inside the Box
Tonight is one of those increasingly rare quiet nights where Vegas seems, at least for the moment, to be taking time out to catch its own breath. It is a night that finds me hold up in my office yet once again avidly trying to avoid everyone and everything. Something I seem to be doing more and more often these days.
Lately, my own version of occupational therapy has lost some of its ability to keep my fears at bay.
For more than twenty-four years now, I have made a profession out of living my life on intimate terms with that which I fear the most. And that is not counting all the years before I got paid to do it, nor those times so long ago when I was just a boy who liked to dissect the dead things that washed up on the beach with the tides. It has taken me a long time to realize that I have done all of this in hopes of diminishing the power of that one fear over me.
I remember once speaking about the job as having chosen me, as if fate had marked the path and way out for me on that one hot afternoon when everything as I knew it changed. But the truth is, that I have lived and breathed and dealt with death ever since then thinking that in doing so, it would somehow make it easier to face.
I used science as a ways and means to control and filter the world, to categorize it all into ways and means that had order and sense to them, even an elegance of sorts. Ultimately, the practice of forensics as a science rather than just a manifestation of law enforcement, became yet another method of cataloging death in such a way that it could somehow make sense. One where you didn’t need to know the why. The what and how were more than enough, telling enough.
So the science allowed for there to be this protective barrier between myself and the rest of the world, particularly between myself and the rest of humanity. The dead became bodies; living survivors, victims, as part of an every growing lexicon full of long Latin sounding words for some of the simplest of things. But then things, evidence, they were always knowable to some extent. People, in all their complex behaviors and psychologies, not so much.
It was just easier that way.
So I spent my whole life trying to know everything, so that I didn’t have to ever deal with the why. I thought that if I could just work out the who and what and where and when and how, then the why didn’t really have to matter.
These days, however, the whys seem to be what matter most. Natalie’s whys, your whys, my whys.
Why Natalie felt she had to do all of this. Why you felt you couldn’t stay. And perhaps most of all, why I couldn’t just make that decision.
I meant it, I did, when I said I wanted to know if people who are damaged can change.
I want to know if it is possible, more for myself than anything, or anyone else.
I want to know if I can change. If I can still be fixed and mended; become something more, instead of just something less. If I can step outside the box I have been living in for so long, move beyond my own whys and let go of life as I know it.
But I don’t know. I don’t.
I want to believe that there is still hope, for me - for you - for us - for a future - for our future.
I am trying to believe.
Part of me needs to believe.
But I am afraid. Afraid I can’t. Afraid I don’t know how. Afraid that it is too late, like it was almost too late to have had that chance to freely love you in the first place. Like I was almost too late to find you in the desert.
Sara, am I too late now?
Though it isn’t the questions that really haunt me now, but the answer, the only answer my mind can make to any of this.
I don’t know.
I just don’t know.
Inside the Box
Tonight is one of those increasingly rare quiet nights where Vegas seems, at least for the moment, to be taking time out to catch its own breath. It is a night that finds me hold up in my office yet once again avidly trying to avoid everyone and everything. Something I seem to be doing more and more often these days.
Lately, my own version of occupational therapy has lost some of its ability to keep my fears at bay.
For more than twenty-four years now, I have made a profession out of living my life on intimate terms with that which I fear the most. And that is not counting all the years before I got paid to do it, nor those times so long ago when I was just a boy who liked to dissect the dead things that washed up on the beach with the tides. It has taken me a long time to realize that I have done all of this in hopes of diminishing the power of that one fear over me.
I remember once speaking about the job as having chosen me, as if fate had marked the path and way out for me on that one hot afternoon when everything as I knew it changed. But the truth is, that I have lived and breathed and dealt with death ever since then thinking that in doing so, it would somehow make it easier to face.
I used science as a ways and means to control and filter the world, to categorize it all into ways and means that had order and sense to them, even an elegance of sorts. Ultimately, the practice of forensics as a science rather than just a manifestation of law enforcement, became yet another method of cataloging death in such a way that it could somehow make sense. One where you didn’t need to know the why. The what and how were more than enough, telling enough.
So the science allowed for there to be this protective barrier between myself and the rest of the world, particularly between myself and the rest of humanity. The dead became bodies; living survivors, victims, as part of an every growing lexicon full of long Latin sounding words for some of the simplest of things. But then things, evidence, they were always knowable to some extent. People, in all their complex behaviors and psychologies, not so much.
It was just easier that way.
So I spent my whole life trying to know everything, so that I didn’t have to ever deal with the why. I thought that if I could just work out the who and what and where and when and how, then the why didn’t really have to matter.
These days, however, the whys seem to be what matter most. Natalie’s whys, your whys, my whys.
Why Natalie felt she had to do all of this. Why you felt you couldn’t stay. And perhaps most of all, why I couldn’t just make that decision.
I meant it, I did, when I said I wanted to know if people who are damaged can change.
I want to know if it is possible, more for myself than anything, or anyone else.
I want to know if I can change. If I can still be fixed and mended; become something more, instead of just something less. If I can step outside the box I have been living in for so long, move beyond my own whys and let go of life as I know it.
But I don’t know. I don’t.
I want to believe that there is still hope, for me - for you - for us - for a future - for our future.
I am trying to believe.
Part of me needs to believe.
But I am afraid. Afraid I can’t. Afraid I don’t know how. Afraid that it is too late, like it was almost too late to have had that chance to freely love you in the first place. Like I was almost too late to find you in the desert.
Sara, am I too late now?
Though it isn’t the questions that really haunt me now, but the answer, the only answer my mind can make to any of this.
I don’t know.
I just don’t know.