GI Joe

Joe sat down and couldn’t lift his eyes from the floor beneath his feet. His short breaths had the tell tale rhythm of anxiety, and the muddled words spoke more of his doubt in any of help I could provide than of the release that sometimes comes with telling one’s story. I inquired as to his hopes, his worries, his dreams and his nightmares. How he felt about his wife, what his daughter and he could still share, what time he went to sleep at night, and if he slept at all. The question about his tobacco use set of a stream of vitriol about how nothing was coming between him and his reds and they had nothing to do with the side arm he carried in his truck anyhow. We talked about the thoughts that everyone in town judged him because he had stolen those pills. The pills that once provided a respite. How it didn’t matter how many criminals he’d put behind bars, or the number of self defense classes he taught that had prevented another woman or child from falling victim to violent crime, he was not the man he once was and he could never get that back. I agreed with him. Things were different now. It was not that the man he once was suddenly never existed, or the things that man did never happened or mattered, rather all of that was still true and would continue to influence who he was today, but so would that night at sea when he had to rescue the downed pilots in the straight of Yemen, or the afternoon the school bus was taken out by the mudslide on the highway and he couldn’t revive the bus driver whose heart had given out in all the chaos. Joe’s arms still ached from trying to start that man’s heart again. We talked about anxiety and how it is a mountain that no one wants to climb, but how the view from the other side makes the trip all the more worth it. That once we’ve seen that sight it gets easier to brave the climb, and each time we make the climb it gets easier until it’s not a climb at all, rather we seem to start at the top of the mountain. This thought made him stop and he began talking about the boys in the boat and how together they would do the most amazing things. That if he was just back there everything would be fine, because out there, floating in the middle of the great blue sea he knew the what, the why, and the how of the moment, but now, back in the town of his birth, nothing was safe…