I Do Not Ask Your Armies Or Your Kisses Or Your Death I Have My Own

We're entering the month mark of post-breakup RHT.  Overall, it's been ... alright.  I haven't been sleeping so well, hence my current state of consciousness, but I suppose that's to be expected.  I also seem to be harboring some resentment towards the Ex, much more than expected or even fully realized.  Hence my completely hostile response to a text he sent me late Friday night

He wrote, "Hey.  I hope everything is well in DC.  Miss hanging out with you.  Hopefully we can catch up soon."

To someone coming from a truly mutual place... or, fuck, even a sober place - which I was not ... it would have been a polite attempt to reconnect.  Yeah, maybe it sounds like the text-message equivalent of a postcard -- "Weather is beautiful, wish you were here," but nothing worth getting angry about.  But from where I am now, where it turns out I am - I apparently take any kind of communication that isn't tears, remorse and straight from the gut emotional responses as a personal attack.  I write back something along the lines that he is being "fake as shit" and if he keeps it up, friendship isn't an option.

Wrote back apologizing when I sobered up the next morning, but probably not a good idea to be friends right now regardless.  Who knew that something I felt almost apathetic about ending could provoke such an extreme gut reaction?  Surprised myself.

But it's been an interesting few weeks.  It's amazing how many possibilities open themselves up once you're suddenly available again.  There are the short-term options, and then the options that present themselves now but that you're in no way ready for.  Ya know, "the people you date."  Trying to play those a little cooler than last time, so far I'm surprising myself.  It's nice to know that I'm a little more self-aware and adept at dealing with the post-break-up hot mess than I was a year ago when I started this.

Either way, even though in general the starting-over-life-story debacle still intimidates and exhausts me, did have a rare exception a few weeks ago.  Met a friend-of-a-friend, we'll call him The Tall One (oh-so-very-tall).  Randomly met up with a few of us that were grabbing drinks a few weekends ago.  Finds out I did Peace Corps and actually asked follow-up questions.  Intelligent, articulate ones.  I honestly can't remember the last time someone took that much interest in what I did for over 2 years.  He's persistent but patient, especially when I realize I can't talk about it without a beer in front of me (lush, yeah).

It occurred to me how much I really didn't deal with, and kind of locked away and suppressed instead.  Mostly my work in the institutions in Romania.  When Romania entered the EU, it was technically supposed to close all of the institutions for people with disabilities (usually on the edge of town) and find alternative services for them.  Instead, they moved all of the children to the hospitals and used this new location as a loophole from actually having to find new places for them.

I assisted and finally led projects through the Red Cross where we taught highschoolers from the community to work with these children in the institutions.  The first summer we did it, we worked (my perhaps poor decision, give the lack of experience on the part of the volunteers) mainly with the children with physical disabilities, most of whom couldn't walk.  It turned out that the institution had moved in 2007 when the EU regulations took effect, and since then none of these physically-disabled kids had been outside.  Or, more than likely, hadn't been moved out of their beds.  Often when we would work with them, there would still be food on their clothes because they fed them in bed rather than move them.

I worked with one child who I was sure was 12, only to find out weeks later he was 18.  It was almost like his ribs had continued to grow while the rest of him stopped... which sounded gruesome, and almost looked it - at the very least, it looked painful.  He may have had untreated cerebral palsy... by that, I mean his limbs were extremely atrophied.  I can almost only hope he had cerebral palsy, to give some kind of cause to the atrophy.

Then there were the kids that they tied up.  Something I had seen myself on various TV new shows before I left for Romania and thought "how horrible."  Turns out, not so black and white.  Which I learned first-hand one day when I was working with the child with atrophy.  A nurse came in and untied a child who was pretty much tied spread eagle to his bed.  Re-tied him to a chair and left the room, apparently to cater to us since we might find the bed tying distasteful?  However, the tying wasn't the same kind of restraint he was used to, and he loses it.  Finds the bone in his chin and his collarbone and starts slamming his head against his collarbone.  Blood starts pouring from his mouth and I have to stop working with my kid to restrain him until we can get a nurse to retie him to his bed.

That's the thing, nothing is black and white.  Maybe it was originally, back under Communism when these practices started being put into effect due to short-staffing and overall neglect and disinterest.  But now -- you can't tie a kid up for his entire life and then suddenly free him and expect that to be your solution.  Things aren't that simple.

It surprised me, talking about this in a bar, how choked up I got.  It stayed with me, all that night and into the next day.  It makes sense though - when I think about how many things that happened before Peace Corps that I suppressed, only to deal with them under the circumstances of extreme solitude and isolation that Peace Corps brought on.  Same with Peace Corps itself - I never really wrote about the institution, and wasn't allowed to take pictures due to a BBC scandal that had happened years before.  In some ways, it's like it never happened.  In some ways, I forget how fucking lucky the kids I work with now are for the services they're provided with.

But I need to remember.  No time like the present.