Dark Night

I know something is wrong when the words fail me like they did last week. When I find I have nothing to say, when the characters are flat and the prose dull and the story just won’t get out of my head and onto the page, I know the depression is setting in. It’s honestly a little comforting. For a long time, before therapy, the depression would catch me off guard. I’d be fine and then I’d be far from fucking fine and I’d have no idea why or how or even when. At least now I can sense it coming. The words, or the lack of words, give me warning.

It still ends the same though. I lay nearly comatose on the couch in the daylight, unable to accomplish anything but the most basic and necessary of tasks. Then I lay awake at night and stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep. I know I’m not alone in this. Millions of folks suffer from depression and PTSD like I do, and the world isn’t a happy place at the moment. It seems like everyday we’re all forced to witness a car crash. It seems like everyday we’re bombarded with new horrors. I’ve been through a lot in life. I’ve faced the darkness before. I fought death once and fucking won and if I’m scared and anxious and depressed and feeling like I’m drowning and unable to get my head far enough above water to grab a quick breath I’m betting a lot of you are too.

Still, even knowing I’m not alone doesn’t make it easy. Last night was genuinely painful. It was too light and too dark and too cold and too hot and too loud and too quiet and my head hurt. It was somehow both boring and scary. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and drift off to sleep but that reel kept playing in my head, not just the new horrors but my own failures, all the people I hurt, all the broken promises, all the lies, all the times I tried to do right and failed. Worse, I could see the things I did that led all of us, the entire United States, to where we are. My support of the Iraq War, my vote against gay marriage in Louisiana, the money I gave to the NRA, the decade I spent wearing a badge and carrying a gun. Marley’s ghost is nothing compared to a late night wallowing in regret. There was a moment where it all felt like a weight on my chest. Like every failure was piling on top of me, slowly crushing me, and I would suffocate under an avalanche of fear and anger and regret. For a moment I didn’t think I could go on.

But my wife was laying right there beside me.

And here is where I run into a problem. I need to transition from this awful moment to something better and I need to take you there, but it’s hard to explain… Actually, scratch that, it’s not hard to explain I’ve just been raised up and trained to keep these little things to myself. I’ve been taught by 46 years of life as a southern man, a barracks rat soldier, a night shift patrol cop, that I can talk about the anger, even the fear, but I have to keep certain things bottled up and tucked away so the world doesn’t see and take it as weakness. I’m not supposed to talk about happiness, joy, or love, that’s what the world taught me, but that shit doesn’t work for me anymore. That shit is why sometimes I lie in the bed well after midnight, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I’m going to drown in my comforter.

My wife was laying right there beside me. I could feel her moving and hear her breathing and somehow, by some miracle, I stopped thinking about everything I’d fucked up that day and I remembered what it was like when we were young. It’s funny, because I know we went through hard times. I met her after a dressing change, while I was bleeding and still had the hated and painful suprapubic catheter crammed in my bladder and I could barely leave my parents home. We dated long distance while she was in college and I was in the hospital, and then Fort Johnson back when it was still named for the traitor Polk, and then discharged from the Army. Just when we thought things were getting better we suffered through Hurricane Katrina. Then there were night shifts and mandatory overtime and my dad’s cancer and graduate school and career changes and waaaaaaay too much family drama. Then there was the 2016 election and Massachusetts and Covid and Crohns disease. Now Donald Trump’s fucking back again and shit’s getting worse by the day. We lived through some tough times, but laying there beside her, thinking back, I saw it almost like a movie.

Our inciting incident was the moment I stumbled out of the bedroom after a painful and humiliating dressing change to find a pretty brunette sitting on my mother’s couch. She was a third wheel, tagging along as her cousin dated my brother who was home on leave. Our meet cute came later that week, as we sat alone at the far end of an Applebees table talking shit about my brother, her cousin, and their weirdo friends. I was supposed to drive home after, shit I was halfway there, but I turned around and went to her cousins house and sat watching a Russel Crowe movie just so I could spend a little more time with her. I wasn’t going to call her. I was hurt and afraid and the future was uncertain and scary but my brother is an asshole. He wanted her out of the way so he could try and get laid, so he forced my hand and made the call for me. Then the motherfucker proposed to her cousin on our first date.

No sooner did we hit it off than she left for school fifteen hours away in Illinois. For months we talked on the phone, wrote letters and the occasional email. We were good at long distance. She was the hippie coed, an over achiever and eager student and I was a dirtbag redneck. During fall and spring semester I could throw my razor out and skip haircuts and go fishing with my beer drinking buddies, and on winter break and summer vacation I’d shower and shave just before her plane landed at MSY and for a few months I’d be boyfriend.

After my surgeries and I’d recovered as well as I was ever going to and the Army called me back to duty at Fort Johnson, I took leave and drove up to visit her for spring break. We went to the Art Institute of Chicago and saw “American Gothic.” On the drive home I stopped in Shreveport to see my grandmothers and they both fed me and I couldn’t tell either of them “No” so I ended up eating two whole dinners back to back and drove an hour from Shreveport to Leesville feeling like I was going to explode.

Junior and Senior year I drove up to help her move her things down for the summer and I remember we were standing on the side of a sun lit, tree lined street on a college campus in small town Illinois, with her dorm room mini-fridge sitting on the sidewalk arguing because she thought laying a fridge on it’s back would break it, but I knew it was the only way the fridge would fit in the back of a Jeep Cherokee. This was in the day before smart phones and Google in the palm of your hand so in the end she called her mom who told her the exact same thing I’d said an hour before. So we loaded the damn thing into my Jeep sideways and left an hour behind schedule and I was pissed about it until we turned South in Peoria.

I remember that trip because it was late May and hot and the clouds rolled in thick as we were driving South on I-55 through Southern Illinois. We couldn’t see the tornado, but the sky to our right was black and green like a bruise and the Illinois state police were parked on the overpasses with their lights on, staring nervously toward the west. We stopped in Memphis, I don’t remember if it was that trip or the next, but we stayed the night and had BBQ sandwiches and the next day we went to Graceland on our way out of town. I miss that little red Jeep and her sitting in the passenger seat with her feet up on the dash. We were always arguing. Everything from Stones vs Beatles to George W. Bush’s Iraq policy, we debated endlessly in the front seat of that Jeep.

We broke up for three days after I got out of the Army. For the life of me I don’t remember why. It was a stressful time, we were a thousand miles apart, and I'm sure I was being an asshole. What I remember was how miserably long those seventy-two hours were and how I knew, even as I hung up the phone, that I’d fucked up somehow and the relief I felt when she answered my phone call and took me back. That summer we were maid of honor and best man when my brother married her cousin. I wore dress blues, the last time I’d ever wear an Army uniform. She wore a maroon dress and hands down looked better in it than I did in blues. She was just home for summer break, so we left the reception as early as we possibly could.

The next summer Hurricane Katrina took us by surprise. It started out such a weak storm, nothing to worry about, so on Friday night I went out with friends and she hung out with buddies and we woke up the next day to this monster bearing down on us. In under twelve hours we coordinated our evacuation. She had this God awful beater of a car, a real piece of shit that wouldn’t make the trip from St Tammany Parish to Shreveport but it was insured. So we parked it under the pine trees in the hopes that it would be flattened. When I got back down to my parents place weeks after the storm passed I discovered a tornado had dropped trees on my childhood bedroom and done severe damage to the house. There was a wall of pine trees around that shitty car like a Lincoln Log fort. It took Steve and I a full day to cut the trees around the car only to discover there wasn't a scratch on it. Not a one. Somehow the trunk had popped open and rain got in and the damn thing smelled like mildew from then until she finally sold it.

After graduation we moved to Metairie and I got a job with the Sheriff’s Department. We were so afraid of our mothers that we didn’t dare move in together. She rented an efficiency apartment less than a mile from mine and now that the statute of limitations are up I’ll admit publicly that we essentially paid for the most expensive walk in closet in the New Orleans metro area and slept at my place whenever I wasn’t working. We were never good at being performative. There was no romantic wedding proposal and no big announcement. We just kind of agreed between ourselves that it was time to get married.

We found a small house, a duplex, camel back shotgun in old Metairie just a few blocks from Bonnabel and Metairie road. It had gorgeous hardwood floors and arched entry ways and a kitchen that was like stepping back into 1955. It was a block from a Lee’s Hamburger and a block from a Snowball stand and a block from a Chinese place and a block from a neighborhood bar and it’s still my favorite house we ever lived in. I’d cut a body part off to live in a neighborhood like that again.

She was raised Catholic. I was raised Baptist. Our house was right around the corner from a Methodist church, so we held our wedding there. We invited fourteen people and held the reception in the dining room of our little house. I wore a tan suit and she wore a red dress and once again she looked far better than I did. As small as it was we were still exhausted when it was over and fell asleep in our new bedroom suite the moment the last guest left. There was no honeymoon. I went back to work on Tuesday, my first night shift as a rookie patrol deputy. After training I worked evenings, 2-10pm. We got a puppy, a miniature dachshund that she named Huey Long. I kept using her towel when I took a shower. She applied for graduate school and I moved to the night shift 10pm-6am and I worked way too much. We babysat my Infant niece for one horrible Saturday and it put us off children for the next decade.

The room was still too bright and too hot and too loud and the world outside of it was still too dark, but laying there, thinking about the first act of our lives it felt like…man even now I don’t have the words…it felt worth it. The pain and the regret hadn’t gone anywhere. I could still remember every failure, fuck up and mistake, but they’d faded into the background, replaced with this sense that if nothing else I had this. She was still laying beside me and our kid was sleeping right down the hall. I knew she was awake, so I rolled over and I told her all of this and I told her I loved her.

I still had to stare at that ceiling a little longer before sleep came. I still woke groggy and tired. I got snippy with my kid and had to remind myself to dial it in and apologize, but I put them on the bus with a big hug and a smile and at the end of the day I got them off the bus with the same. Even now, days after that dark night, as I grind away on a third draft, trying to dial this in, I’m still a little overwhelmed with the warm, comfortable, miraculousness of it all. To think this pretty little brunette that I found one night sitting on my mother’s couch would still be laying beside me twenty-three years later. Unbelievable. I can’t help but be a little ashamed at myself that it took a long, hard, dark night to appreciate this.

More and more as I work on this blog I’ve found myself wondering why I give these stories away. I know why I write them. I write them because I need to remember so I have something to latch onto on the dark nights when it feels like I might drown in sorrow and fear. I write these stories because I have a kid now and I don’t always know how to say what needs to be said aloud so at least this way maybe they’ll have some kind of written record when I’m gone. I write these things because I want my friends and love ones to read them and know that even when I’m snarling and snapping and the rage gremlin is rattling his cage that I still love them deeply. That still doesn’t answer the question of why I give them away. Why do I let you read them?

Fuck if I know.

Maybe I’m clout chasing? After all, I started this blog to build an audience for a novel. Valentines day is past and mothers day is months away and neither one of us will remember our anniversary until her Aunt sends a card, so if this is clout chasing or marketing I ain’t worth a shit at it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent years as a southern man, soldier, and cop all the while pretending like I’m a tough guy and not a fucking romantic sap. Maybe someone smarter than me can make this mean something about toxic masculinity but today that feels above my fucking pay grade. Truth is one day I got tired of pretending that I don’t love folks, so I said the words out loud and it felt good to do. I’m learning that earnestness and truth are the closest thing I’ve got to a super power. At the same time I’m learning I don’t have to be ashamed or embarrassed about these feelings. Oh what? Some incel is gonna call me a simp for loving my wife? Some three time divorced dickbag is gonna mock me? I’m forty-six years old and I’ve already died once so they can kiss my ass. Even on the dark, heavy nights I sleep in a big boy bed with my wife who I love.

The world is hard right now. Shit’s dark. I’m betting that most of the folks reading this have had long, sleepless nights in recent weeks. That dark night was as bad as it gets for me, but at it’s height, at the moment I felt like I could be crushed by the weight of a duvet, I found something, someone to latch onto. Maybe, by sharing, I can remind you of something worth holding on to. I have a sick, sinking feeling that we’re all gonna need a life preserver in the coming months. We’re all going to need a warm and comfortable memory to cling to. Something to remind us that life isn’t all that bad, good days exist, and it’s the small things that make it all worth it.

I showed this essay to her before I published it. I felt like if I was going to use her so prominently I owed her a chance to suggest edits. She told me I should think about expanding it and talk about other people who helped me along the way, but I don’t think I have the space to do them all justice. I’ll try one day. We both agreed my original conclusion was a little weak. It just petered out. “Maybe just say it.” She suggested. “How do you reconcile your past mistakes with your current you?”

Fuck if I know babe, but I’m trying.

Music was one of the topics we debated endlessly in the front seat of that old red Jeep Cherokee. I like "Stranglehold" she doesn't, but we both agreed Ted Nugent is a piece of shit.