hey-its-fahl-blog

[hey-its-fahl-blog]

The Universe Speaks in Whispers And Explosions.

All things have a voice.

You and I.

The child speaks in hushed, low tones in the womb.

The scuttle of a spider too small to be noticed. He weaves a net of gossamer and secrets in the corner of our bedroom where the shadows never leave. We know he's there. Even though we've never seen him. We've never noticed him, nor his nest of silk, nor his shadows, and certainly not  his secrets.

But there he is. And somehow, in some way we cannot find the right words to describe or believe in, we know.

Because we hear his voice.

Spiders in corners have voices.

So do Worlds.

So do the cells in our bodies.

The particles in our atoms, moving and colliding and vibrating as they come together and break away without end. Positives and negatives. Theirs are small voices.

They're deafening sometimes.

We, you and I, are the atoms of the Universe.

The smallest and most insignificant of building blocks with all the worth of the most unnoticed and undervalued proton and electron.

Cogs and spokes in a machine so big and constantly upgrading and updating that no plans or blueprints were ever conceived that could encompass it all.

Don't blink. The system will update. The software and hardware evolves itself.

Boom.

Too late.

We're obsolete.

Strange, then, how the Universe still speaks to us. The smallest of its pieces. Still it lends us it's voice and it's guidance.

If we only listen.

And accept.

It's spoken to me. I know this without question. Sometimes I am desperately listening, searching, seeking any hint of a whisper.

Sometimes I have my ears closed. And so the Universe roars.

Laying in a hotel room with you in my arms for the first time while you sleep. Everything about this, and us, and what we are choosing is doomed to failure. Will tear both our world's down. But I hear the Universe whispering. Speaking through the beat of your heart, and mine.

This is right. This is supposed to be.

The Universe speaks.

This is a gift.

Be grateful.

The world explodes around me. For a time, my existence is thrown into chaos. My brain is scrambled and sight is tangled up with smell, taste is rooted to my fingertips. Glass shards sprinkle against my skin. They taste sharp and cool like ice chips. Gray overcast skies are a dull contrast against black asphalt. I smell the rain outside, and now inside, the truck. There the heavy, acrid scent of rubber and chrome mashing into a ball of hurt and uncompromising force.

Above all of it, the voice of the Universe. Roaring this time. The sound so rushing and loud that my teeth hurt. I can't make out the words.

I've been in accidents before. This wreck is the worst. The truck is fucked. My seatbelt malfunctions. It doesn't even secure me. I should be mangled and twisted, like the truck.

I quite literally walk away with nothing but a few scratches and a bruise. I go to train that night. Wrestle trained professionals and choke people and get punched in the face and all the things that make me feel normal. And I'm fine. Not even sore.

But the deafening voice stays ringing in my ears. It doesn't fade. Still hasn't.

The Universe speaks.

This is a gift.

Be grateful.

Our finances are bad after the accident. My work hours are cut and it's been very hard for you to find work since we no longer have a vehicle. We are getting by. But only just. The budget is so tight there is zero wiggle room. We live in a very humble place right now. We manage to pay our bills, keep mostly on top of food, and that's it.

It's not the life I want for us. I take the provider and protector part of my role seriously. It hurts my pride that we live so close to the edge. It feels like failing on my part that you cannot have the nice things and comforts in life you deserve.

But you never complain. And your smile doesn't fade. Nor does the love in your eyes.

Your laughter is as beautiful and free as ever. I feel it in my bones and my being. Speaking to the truth that is me and you and us that I have built as a foundation within.

We have a roof overhead. We have good, healthy food. We have each other.

I have your laughter.

The Universe speaks.

This is a gift.

Be grateful.

Two weeks ago, I was beaten for the first time. A loss is devastating to me. I am passionate about fighting. Another foundation piece. Even though I know that everyone must lose sometime and a loss is a lesson, in that moment, in my heart, it feels like failure.

And for a moment, I doubt. And it feels like I'm going to crumble in on myself. I'm still in the cage. There are all these people. If I break here and now,  I don't know what will come next. Some cracks can't be mended.

My coach is there. He looks me in the eye.

I've never seen his eyes so clear. He's exposed, raw. I never realized before that moment just how many filters he keeps in place. Just how much he protects himself.

In that moment I'm looking into him, unguarded. And it's my own eyes I stare into.

"You did good."

"You're a fucking warrior. This doesn't change a thing."

"You've got nothing to be ashamed of. None of us are ashamed of you."

"You came out here and fought a great fight. Learn and grow from this."

"Win or lose, you're a fucking fighter. Nothing will ever take that away from you."

I hear the same from my team mates and my family. By my friends and everyone I know. And every single bit of that support was and is valued and needed.

But in that moment, when I teetered on the edge of ruin, questioning the unquestionable,

The Universe spoke.

This is a gift.

Be grateful.

Last night on the ride home, they were arguing.

Sort of.

She had too much to drink and was unfilteredly bitter and belligerent. She wasn't outright attacking him. It was more backhanded and sideways. A great many  complaints and passive aggressive statements she made as if she were speaking to herself out loud. She gets caustic like that when she drinks too much. Like she doesn't really want to fight but can't keep her misery and venom dammed up anymore. She lets it seep like poison from the cracks the liquor opens.

He was trying to ignore it. Because I was there, I think. But I saw what it cost him. The white of his knuckles against the steering wheel. Under the glare of oncoming headlights, his face aged under her scorn and the strain of the storm he kept barely caged inside him.

I heard the voice of the Universe there, too.

Heard it in the acid of her damning monologue.

Heard it in the roar of his silence.

More than anything though, I heard it in the way I never hear either between you and I.

The Universe speaks.

You are a gift.

I am grateful.

[hey-its-fahl-blog]

So if things fall out of your head do these things fall out of the rear too? #buttsforfahl

Depends. If the thing in question is good it fell outta my head. If it’s bad...well.

[hey-its-fahl-blog]

House Three

House Three.

House of Hormones.

The House Of Shrieking Madness.

It was a special place of laughter laced tantrums.

Back packs and Bubble Gum.

Bottles of nail polish rolling around underfoot. Leaking, sometimes. Neon sparkle trails of turquoise and peppermint weaving its way across the coldly sanitized floors. Shook loose from the table by the vibrating of hip hop base dialed up to whatever number ruptures eardrums.

Uncoordinated feet dance. They make up for their lack of grace with freedom and the pure, untainted joy of movement for movements sake.

House Three was built on Effervescence and Evanescence  and Estrogen.

I had a distinct love/hate relationship with House Three. It was the Girl House. By the very nature of my gender I was set apart from those wild, wild females. And they knew it all too well.

Male aids were not allowed in House Three you see. But being a nurse, I had to be there. Meds and treatments and assessments and all that. Those took priority over keeping the genders separate, and nurses were in too high a demand for the facility to be picky. Especially at the Center, where male nurses somehow impossibly ended up making up a huge chunk of the nursing personnel.

House Three was always an adventure. Sometimes the kind of adventure that was elating and energizing, sometimes the kind that left you harrowed and with a head full of ache and a scalp lighter of hair than it was when you went in.

But it was never boring.

"There's my man!" Crystal shrieks as soon as I enter. She rushes over. Her lips are Kool-Aid Red. She has on winter boots in the middle of May and a tank top that reads "Hot Stu" in smudged and faded glitter. She's 14 years old and she wants to hug me, but she knows she can't. She's been here long enough to know the rules when it comes to touching too much.

If she hugged me, I would probably hug her back. I'm grateful that she does not.

A hug is dangerous if you're a male in House Three. In more ways than one.

Crystal has laid claim to me. I don't feel special; Crystal has claimed most of the male nurses. The ones she likes, anyway. Which is most of them. She doesn't feel special in claiming me either.

Most of them have.

"Jay! Jay! Jay Jay Jay Jay..." Kaitlin screams. I'm amazed, as I am every day, how such a small girl can fill the entire common room with her little voice. Her hair is cut brutal-short again. I saw a picture of her once with her hair grown out and flowing dark and free. It was a year or two back. She was ten, I think.

She's kept her hair short ever since one of the other girls set it on fire with a candle someone managed to get in without the aids realizing.

Kaitlin knows my name is not Jay. At least, I think she does. Maybe she forgets every day. It's possible. She forgets a lot of things. But I think it's more likely she just likes thinking of me as Jay.

Kaitlin has a sailors mouth. When confronted with bad behavior or something she shouldn't be doing, or butting heads with one of the other girls, Kaitlin spits verbal venom to devastating effect.

I blushed once. No lie.

She is also the first one to help one of the more profoundly physically disabled girls with their daily needs. She smiles and laughs without reservation. More often than not, Kaitlin had a broom or a mop in her hand without direction or prompting, cleaning and tidying. It was a calming thing for her. An anchor. Something familiar.

I knew without being told that Kaitlin had done a lot of cleaning and tidying in her life before the Center.

I never could decide if this was a positive pattern for her or one born of someone taking advantage of her.

Kaitlin knew she wasn't supposed to hug me, too. But sometimes she did. I shouldn't have hugged her back.

It was dangerous.

Sometimes I did anyway.

Theresa motions me over with a shaking hand. Mother Theresa. The patron saint of House Three. She is tied with Sarah as the oldest girl in House Three. But Sarah doesn't talk. Theresa cannot seem to stop.

She's a wiley one, Theresa. She sees much. She knows the goings on in the Center. I hear that years ago, Theresa used to trade secrets and news about the clients and staff in equal measures for favors and treats and special treatment.

Mother Theresa, Patron Saint of House Three. The GodMother. Bearer Of Secrets for The Center. I always pictured her with staff and clients surrounding her while she made them all kiss her ring lest she tell the wrong people the right things or the right people the wrong things.

These days, though, Mother Theresa traded less in secrets and more in attention.

"I can't breath, Doc."

"My chest hurts, Doc."

"I think I have food poisoning, Doc."

"I'm not a doctor, Mama T," I told her for the umpteenth time. She knew it. I was Doc like I was Jay. Some days I was even Doc Jay.

Doctor Jay, if I felt fancy.

Mother Theresa had been around long enough that she knew which buttons to push. She knew what things to complain about that we absolutely had to spend time checking out. No matter that she'd been having a heart attack every day for the past seven months. No matter that Food poisoning was a daily occurrence. She had difficulty breathing starting at precisely 5:27PM every Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday like it was a scheduled religious event. Didn't matter. She knew which string of words we couldn't ignore. And she reveled in the attention it brought.

House Three was funny like that. One girl got attention. That meant all girls got attention. It was a chain reaction of woes and complaints. Itchy backs and skinned knees and does this look red and she pulled my hair and I think I might have ripped the nail out.

Oh, wait, yeah, that's bleeding. No, it's okay, I've got a dressing for that.

No, not that dressing. It's not going to hurt. I promise.

Okay okay, fine, I'll get another kind of dressing. It's not a big deal. Just sit down and...yeah. Yeah, we'll get someone to clean that up.

You should probably go back to your room now.

Yes, sweetie. I love ya'll too.

I need a drink.

House Three.

It was never boring.

[hey-its-fahl-blog]

Velociraptors

On his 23rd birthday Chris had a birthday party with his family where he headbutted his mother in the face and broke her nose in two places.

It wasn't his fault. Not really.

He was being a velociraptor, you see.

And his psychotropic meds had been reduced.

Again.

He returned home. His sister Angie kissed him on the cheek. She was afraid of him, and she loved him. Like everyone. I don't know if she was more afraid of what he would do if she kissed him or what it would mean for her if she didn't. What kind of person that could mean she was.

"Mama? Angie?"

Chris loved his Mama. He loved his Angie. He was excited whenever they came to see him.

"Mama? Angie?"

He would ask about them at least once a day. And that was fine. He loved them, after all. They were his world.

But when "Mama? Angie?" became "Mama Mama Mama, Angie Angie Angie", over and over again, it was a bad sign.

It meant he was about to be a velociraptor again.

Angie had gotten a dose of Chris when he was overly excited, too. He broke her arm once. That was a long time ago.

But the stories lingered.

So did the ones about the multiple people he'd put in the hospital.

The people who never came around again.

The first time I met Chris he grabbed hold of me by the wrist with a grip that didn't understand the finer points of how-to-not-break-things. He smiled at me. It would have been a grimace on anyone else. In his other hand he whipped around a crumpled sheet of paper he'd been scribbling on. His colors took the lines as suggestions and were pointedly ignoring them, choosing instead to run rampant wherever they pleased.

I'd already heard the stories by then. My first day in at the Center, a place to house and care for Developmentally Disabled individuals and I wasn't even through orientation yet, but already I'd heard the stories. They all told you, before you went to House Four, the boys' house. They told you like it was a warning.

To me, it felt more like a hazing, or a ghost story.

Tell them about Chris.

See who runs. They shouldn't be here to begin with. Even though he scares us, too.

I told myself before that moment that I didn't care. It didn't matter. He was a patient, a client, someone trusted into my care like any other. I'd had difficult clients before. Combative ones, even. I would not allow the stories to sway me.

That moment proved me wrong. I felt the grip Chris put on my wrist and the way he looked at me. To Chris, who was a foot taller than me and had at least 50 pounds on me, I appeared a child. He threw around people bigger than him without a care. His expression said he would try to do likewise to me. It would be fun.

A game.

Like playing Velociraptor,

I did not expect the struggle I went through in that moment, standing there staring into Chris's eyes. I was very still. My boss worked at disentangling him from me with firm words and calm hands. She knew how to handle him; a number of incidents wherein he hurt her had taught her well.

She got him in hand. Redirected him to other things. There were other pictures to draw, and look at these colors, you didn't use any of these. Paint me a picture, Chris. I'll put it in my office. With the others.

I did nothing.

For most of my days working at the Center my coworkers were under the impression I was afraid of Chris. An understandable assumption, given my passive Deer-In-Headlights reaction.

And they were right. Sort of.

It was not Chris I was scared of. Not exactly. Not in the way you would expect. Yes, I was aware of the possibility of him hurting me. Especially if I was caught off guard. But I can say without arrogance or ego that I am secure in my ability to handle myself in most forms of physical confrontations.

And that was the rub. That was what caused my fear.

See, in the moment Chris grabbed hold of my wrist, he became anyone else in the world to me. He became just a man like any other who grabbed my wrist with potential intent to harm me. He was not a client. He was not a patient.

He was not a child in a mans body, pretending he was a velociraptor.

He was a man who might headbutt me and break my nose in two places.

And in that instant, I had to sharply curb the urge to respond to that situation as I would have any other time. I saw it in my minds eye. What I would do if he pushed me.

And that frightened in ways I hadn't at all anticipated.

My stillness that followed was a gathering of will. A summoning of self control. A conscious reminder that that reaction was not right. This was not the same as every other situation I was prepared to fight against. His grip was the grip of an immensely strong, unknowing child.

He was not trying to hurt me.

But he could.

He would.

The child was still dangerous.

The moment passed. My orientation continued. I struggled to remain focused on the afternoon. New faces. Procedures and protocols, which house which clients stayed in, what shifts had what responsibilities. How the clients spent their days, where they went to learn the life skills they'd never end up using.

Charts.

Pills.

I was too busy turning inward. Sifting through the muck and grime inside that I didn't want to admit was there.

My initial reaction to being hurt by someone without his full mental faculties was to put him down so he couldn't hurt me.

That bit deep. The shame of it was a hard ball of cold mud in my gut. It made me feel dirty. It made me feel less. It went against everything I believed in, the foundation principles I built my character upon. I wanted it to be gone. I wanted to say it wasn't true. That I would never hurt someone like Chris, even if they hurt me.

That would have been a lie.

Chris never did attack me during my short time working at the Center. I consciously made sure he got the fullest care I could give. I never neglected my duties in caring for him and seeing to his well being. I grew to know him somewhat, and was able to share awkward smiles with him a few times.

But try as I might, as guilty as it made me feel, I never was able to be at ease with him.

Chris would always be a velociraptor to me.