Getting Off the Crutches and Getting My Strength Back

After a fall and following time to recover, you gotta get up offa yer ass and get back to fighting weight.

I found the perfect apartment this week.

I’ve lived in a lot of apartments and I’ve always sort of fantasized about the loft idea. Super high ceilings, long and spacious, one big room with a kitchen and windows. Like a tiny art gallery.

I don’t have a bed. Instead, I have what has long ago been dubbed the Gaybed. I thought I was buying a couch. My gay assistant in Chicago came over and started laughing.

“You have a day bed?”

“Huh? No. It’s a couch.”

“That’s a day bed, Don. Like what little girls get for their bedrooms.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s dark navy blue so it’s a manly day bed.”

“It’s a Gaybed!”

It is incredibly comfortable and I’ve slept on it more than a few times. It’s perfect for this new loft apartment.

Since moving in with my parents in September all my stuff—furniture, paintings, dishes, stuff—has been in a big cube sitting in a lot somewhere. When I packed it in the cube I was conscious that I’d open it back up, like a time capsule, and was maybe a little overly cautious to get rid of things that would remind me of The Life That Was a Lie and She Who Fucked for Money Whilst Married. Inside are the remnants of who I was and I, in some fundamental way, need those things again.

The smart move would be to continue to take advantage of living with my folks, save some money, get my stuff out of the cube in a few months. It wouldn’t be the right move, however.

The best analogy that springs to mind is that when the rug gets pulled out so dramatically it feels like being tossed off a three-story building and landing on your back, breaking bones and tearing muscle. If you live, you require time for your bones to stitch back up. You require convalescence. There comes a point during this healing when you can feel the bones are solid but it still hurts to get up and walk. That’s when you either continue to lay there or get up offa yer ass and start building up your strength.

While my mom and dad needed me to come here to help them I also desperately needed some of that convalescence. I needed to lay up in the tiny, well decorated bedroom and hide some from the world. I needed home-cooked meals. I needed time with people who love me and care for me. I needed help. I could continue this but I’m now at that point in the game that I either get up and walk without crutches or stay in isolation and get emotional bed sores.

My mom recognizes that I’m more of my old self. I’m enthusiastic about my new job, I’m writing like a mad fiend, I’m mostly healed but like Wesley in The Princess Bride I still can’t quite lift my sword so I have to fake it some. I still have lengthy arguments with my ex despite blocking any and all communication with her since I left Vegas. In my head I list my grievances, I demand to know why, I try to coax some sense of remorse out her. I know this is fruitless but it sort of just happens.

Like someone who lived through a car crash I’m still anxious every time I get behind the wheel. My confidence is growing back as is my optimism but I’m perpetually looking for that next shoe to drop, that next thing to go wrong.

The only solution I see is to get back out in the world, on my own to some degree, and build back the muscle lost in the crash. My own place with my stuff. The cost of delay is time to get back in the ring and stand on my own two feet again.

This Friday, the calendar flips and I’ll be fifty-seven years old. I see that number and I don’t even remotely feel three years from sixty. Not even close. I feel much younger than that. No, age is not just a number, jags. It’s a real number of years on the planet. Fifty-seven is not the new forty. It’s fucking fifty-seven. My buddy Charlie is eighty and he still is as young as ever, as potent a force in the world as he decides. I see that number and say to myself “No way. I’m not that old.” I’m that led but I move through the world like I did when I was twenty-five (except I’m not quite as stupid and self-assured and I take a bit longer to get in the car).

I have a birthday this week and I’ll spend it with my family. Then I’ll move my stuff into a new place and start walking again without crutches. I’m sure I’ll have some pains in the process. The pain this time around indicates growing strength but it still hurts. Did I mention the Sky Lounge about twenty steps from my new place?

It doesn’t hurt that it is the perfect apartment.