I am back in the States now, sitting in my living room, looking at my new cat, or maybe it’s my new cat, and contemplating what has happened to my life in the past year and a half. This blog hasn’t been written to in close to 8 months, and frankly, I am glad for that. I haven’t even looked at it in that long, to be honest. I was sick of it, as little as I wrote in it at all, and I was sick of Belgium and sick of NATO and sick of a lot of things. Probably best I stopped when I did. This is all very public, of course.
Having said that, it is time to do my time in Belgium, and my six months back home, justice, and do it I will. I plan to start writing in this blog again, and pick up where I left off, though in a slightly different fashion. Now I will be writing after the fact, with a bit of wisdom that only hindsight may bring to one’s perspective.
I will start the effort off by saying that my last month and a half in Belgium was fairly chaotic, for many reasons. I had too much time on my hands for far too long, time alone, and that is not a good thing. I was out of sorts and homesick and ready to be done with my little expirement in living a more interesting life. I was done with Beglium, and I was done with Tibor, my Eastern European boss (of whom I will write more later). At the end, I was done with my big, cold apartment and I was done with my relationship with Gloria. I was done with many things, but, most of all, I was done with myself. I was sick of me and the weak and vulnerable person I had become. I was ready to come home, but Belgium wasn’t quite done with me.
As you have probably read, I had the living shit kicked out of me in Belgium, and woke up in the back of a car driven by two strangers who only laughed when I asked where I was, who they were and where I was going. That was my first week in. Plenty more happened in my time there, much of it sort of crappy. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong, who was to blame (mostly me, of course) and how I might have made things better. Belgium was, in many respects, not a good experience. I have come back from that place a less secure and confident man, and one left casting about for his place in the world. I wish it were different, but still I feel myself flailing a bit.
I need to write about my experiences there, I need to get them out of my head and onto this electronic tablet and shine the light of day on them. I am tired of them clanking about in my head, a collection of questions without any answers. I need expiation. I am not certain that this is the way to achieve that, but I hope that it is. Nothing else has quite worked, so why not try and see what happens? Most of all, I need to make sense of all that was me in Belgium, because six months of lonely reflection has not helped further that cause one little bit.
A teaser. I will start the recounting at the end, and work my way back and forth as I see fit. This will not follow any chronological order. It will flow as it flows, a coherent timeline be damned. It will start with me, laying in bed, alone, at 3 AM on the night of November 20th. It will start, in another post, with me staring wide eyed at the clock next to my bed, after three nights of no sleep. It will start with me wondering when I will sleep, and also wondering at one point I would finally break down completely. It will start with me, in a pool of sweat but freezing cold and shaking, and fearful of another night alone, and fearful of seizures and dying by myself.
Sounds dramatic, and to me, at the time, it was. Now, it makes me feel like a bit of a drama queen to write this, but I want to be faithful to what I was feeling and experiencing at the time, so I err on the side of purple prose. And, just so you know, at the time, I was going cold turkey from a short term Xanax addiction, by myself, in that cold, lonely apartment in Mons, Belgium. And I wasn’t sure I would make it back to my home in America, to my family and friends. I wasn’t quite sure if I would make it back to sanity. To be honest, sometimes I still feel that way today. Some things you can’t leave behind, I suppose. They stay with you, much as Belgium will be with me until the day that I die.
The rest of the story is for another post. If anyone is left reading this, don’t let it worry you too much. I am safe, sound and Xanax free now. I’ll try to keep as much of it as light as possible, but I cannot promise that it will all be sunshine and laughs. Not at all.
