It took another four years before I finally made it to Afghanistan. But the Afghanistan I arrived in was not the same Afghanistan he had died in. Countries and cultures change, just like people do, and in Afghanistan eight years had brought a lot of change. As much as I had studied to learn the field, by the time I got there, most of the players and even the game itself had significantly changed. But at the time I lacked the proper perspective to acknowledge it.
War has a high turnover rate, it's simply the nature of a business based on killing. I was chasing ghosts, pursuing vengeance against those who had quite likely died not much later nor more meaningfully than he had. And because I was still trying to operate in the past, I couldn't pay attention to the present moment as I should have. And in war, as in life, everything that truly matters happens in the present moment.
For eight years I had excelled because I operated under the orders of those who operated in the present moment; though they knew how the past had shaped it, they kept their eyes directed forward at all times. In Afghanistan, I hit the ground running backward; my eyes constantly searching the past, I was blind to the future as it snuck up behind me. My ability as an operative suffered, but there was a formal inertia that allowed me the latitude to drift too far out of the present moment without anyone recognizing just how far I had gone; when the present moment eventually snapped back into place for me, I was not the only one who paid the price, nor the one who paid most dearly.
***
PTSD. Post-traumatic-stress disorder. That's the new official clinical term used today, but it's nothing new; it's been around at least as long as war, probably much longer. You can change the name, but the effects on the human soul are universal, timeless, even somewhat predictable. Long ago they gave it a much more honest name: Hell.
Four simple letters in each, but within those four letters, an infinite span of suffering.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Vale of Tears, the Long-Dark-Night of the Soul; everyone who goes thru it has their own unique experience of it, their personal story, but those who have been through it share something the uninitiated will never know.
I had walked so deep into that darkness before I even realized where I was that I didn't even know there was a way out of it. The incident in Afghanistan that broke me down was not even the beginning of it; it went at least as far back as that day he had arrived there. His death had been my trailhead; I followed his footsteps as far as I could, but his death had spared him the journey through the darkness that enshrouds the survivors.
I returned from Afghanistan a much different person than I had been when I arrived. In just over a year there, the purpose that I had built my life around for the previous eight years had been perfectly rigged for demolition; in a single moment it was detonated and in less than a day it was left in smoldering ruins that had destroyed innocent lives. I had survived with the burden of the knowledge of my ultimate responsibility.
***
Saturn return. That's what astrology calls it. Saturn fucking return. I was just shy of 28 years old, and for all intents and purposes my life had reached a dead end. Everything I had lived for had been ripped away from me and and consumed in a pillar of fire. If I was going to move forward from this devastation, all my old ways had to be abandoned; holding onto them would be a swift and merciless death or a long agonizing disintegration, either way there was nothing to look forward too. If I was going to pursue my life rather than my death (for a while it was not an entirely clear decision) I would have to learn an entirely new way of being.
Fortunately I still had my GI Bill, and a well stocked financial cushion. I had some breathing room to heal and rebuild myself anew; the hardest part was remembering how to breath. I enrolled at Miskatonic U and meandered thru a purposefully random selection of courses, just sampling anything I thought might provide a way to take an edge off of the aching emptiness inside and the emotional volatility of fight or flight, both of which I excelled at. Psychology, sociology, philosophy, humanities, divinities; I combed thru them like a madwoman sifting the desert sand in search of jewels, but always the answers to the deepest questions that tormented my waking life evaded me, and alone in the dark of night, the terrors would return again and again with a vengeance of their own.
I'd never learned to interact comfortably with other people outside of the formal relationship structures of the military and covert government agencies and the devious dictates of international espionage. Most of my classmates were close to a generation younger and could not even begin to fathom the depth of the experiences I had been thru, still self-absorbed in their petty personal pursuits, seeking license to indulge in their creature comforts and conveniences with the same zeal with which I had pursued the latitude to indulge in my vendetta at their age. I could not fault them their path, but I could find no meaningful way to relate to their world of parties, fashions, empty entertainments, and petty social intrigues.
I spent as much time in the gym as I did in the lecture and study halls, trying to subdue my demons thru intense physical exertion that kept me strong and left me exhausted. I would always be the last one dragging out the door as the custodians locked up. Sometimes it would be enough to allow me to collapse into a mildly restless sleep. After the best nights, I would be one of the first at they gym in the morning. After the really bad ones, I might barricade myself in my room all day long with the curtains drawn and my sound-system blasting to fill the void in my head and hide my anguished cries from my neighbors, or take off running the trails thru the eerie woods behind the campus until I passed out on the ground in the bushes, surrendering into the solace of the sleep that had evaded me the previous night.
After the worst nights, I would lock myself in my bathroom and clean Betsy, my Colt m1911 service-pistol, for hours while I imagined filling the tub with hot water and using a razor blade to open every major vein and artery I could reach before loosing consciousness. Once Betsy was spotless and reassembled, I'd pop a couple sleeping pills and crawl into bed after tucking her in next to my vibrator in the nightstand drawer, magazine out but with a single round in the chamber, just in case it ever got so bad that I needed to make it stop for good.
Somehow I was smart enough to avoid drinking and drugs thruout this period, aside from the occasional sleeping pills; I'd seen too many strong folks slide down that slippery slope and I knew that if I was going to head in that direction, I'd sooner take the bullet train, make it quicker and cleaner for everyone.
It wasn't until I'd pissed away most of my GI Bill and a sizable portion of my savings treading water and swimming in circles that I discovered the martial arts and a new possibility for a bright future began to emerge. It was a constant battle inside to keep from berating myself for not finding my way to it sooner, but I finally acknowledged that it would not have been healthy for me to have engaged in it without first making a total break from anything that carried the slightest hint of aggression or combativeness; the preceding years had been a great purge of my old ways of being, and I'd needed to claim that distance in order to gain a proper perspective on it. But even that did not guarantee that I would be able to keep the spirits that had tormented me at bay.
It was an easy enough transition into the culture; my body and reflexes already honed by over a dozen years of intense physical training and plenty of practice with hand-to-hand combat techniques. The other folks who gravitated to it tended to bear a familiar hardness, the traces of scars from whatever battles they had survived with the demons of their own life experience. Their quiet intensity reassured me; it was comforting to once again belong within a warrior society, and they similarly recognized and validated me and my own indomitable will to survive.
***
It was in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class that I first met my ex-husband; he was an advanced student and volunteered to help train the lower-level classes. After intensely grappling each other on the mats on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nites for three weeks, I had a huge lapse in judgement involving the celebration of Cinco de Mayo with tequila shots; the following morning I woke up groggy, sore, and thoroughly inseminated in a strange apartment, my future ex-husband proffering 'hair of the dog'. I was soon kneeling in supplication at the great porcelain alter, a firm hand holding my hair back and swabbing my face with cool damp terrycloth. An hour later I was kneeling again, screaming in ecstasy as his thick nine-incher plowed my tight long-neglected snatch with extreme prejudice. I reassured myself that I wasn't in love, but my body was convinced it had been deprived far too long of this variety of sizzling, toe-curling pleasure.
He did stunts. He got me on a set as an extra in a battle scene in some 'wizards and warriors' tripe, and I found that the goofy glamor of it held an allure that I was eager to repeat. We got together for extra practice and sparring, practicing artful falls and rolls. Repeatedly falling on my back on the mat with him atop me made it far too easy to surrender to carnal temptations.
He also did blow, quite a bit of it, and convinced me to try it, just a couple little bumps before we'd drive ourselves to sweaty peaks of well-orchestrated frustrated desires with a seemingly unlimited well of energy, the whole world sharpened, crystalline, humming. My prior sexual mistakes with him became repetitive enough that they began to form a pattern that could be labeled habitual, though the swirling alphabet soup of chemical enhancements he introduced me to kept things novel: MDMA, LSD, DMT, GHB, DXM,...ad nauseum.
He also introduced me to swordplay, and for this one thing I will eternally give thanks to him. Blades were a true passion for him, and he taught me basics of a few sword-fighting styles that were commonly employed in cinematographic battles. While our sexual combat remained, for me, no more than the rather impressive servicing of a primal physiological directive, devoid of any romance, in the clashing whirl of sharpened steel, I found the most profound passion I'd ever known; no doubt about it, I was falling in love, a love that felt safe enough to commit to, free from the entanglements of human emotion and dependency.
