Repairs While You Wait

the pain and ache

a heart can take

no one really knows

— Michael McDonald

Songs, books, movies, fables, memoirs, poetry, graffiti, headstones:

In all of these, there are stories of broken hearts.

I have had my own broken heart, and I have been the cause of broken hearts. One of my solutions to accommodate the pain was to seek out addiction and eventually clinical depression. Suicidal ideation was a constant companion on that journey.

This is not the life I'm living now. My broken heart has been in the shop. Repairs were made. It will never be in factory condition, looking like it just rolled off the assembly line. My heart is more like a favorite book that's been lent out too many times.

Corners of the cover are bent and torn, and the entire cover hasn't lain flat for a decade. Coffee, tea, pizza sauce, and tears stain the pages. You have to take it off the shelf to know what it's about, because the binding is long gone. Magic tape holds the table of contents together. Extra care needs to be taken, or else the twelve pages in the center of the book will fall out, and confusion will win the day.

That is my heart. I don't think it's worse than it sounds, and I don't think it sounds worse than it is. This heart just has a lot of miles on it.

What is also true is that it remains a great read.

I lived in Bali for a little over eight years. My wife and I leased a hotel on the beach on the north side of the island. We had a restaurant. We had housekeepers. We had someone to take care of the plunge pools that sat in front of each room. We had an in-house masseuse. We had a great guy who kept everything working. IWe belonged to a tennis club. There was a reef just off the beach where we could swim with neon-bright tropical fish. We had it made.

It was in this setting that I faded. It happened over time, and the journey followed an arc.

I wasn't in very good shape when we got there. There had been a car accident and an accompanying traumatic brain injury. My marriage was suffering. I spent a lot of time being scared of where I was. When I wasn't scared, I was disturbed.

Slowly, over a year or more, I acclimated and found a life where I could be alive and have purpose. We put together a band, and I had a small recording studio. I was writing songs. I was riding the top of the arc.

In the last two years I was there, I faded away. I became increasingly depressed. For a brief period, I was taking synthetic narcotics. I would have taken actual narcotics, but I wasn't resourceful enough to find any.

In the last six months, I became a shell. It was brutal for my wife. She was running the hotel all by herself, and I wasn't contributing to that enterprise at all. I'd like to think I was still involved with my ten-year-old daughter's life, but at sixteen, she remembers enough from that time to tell me I was not present. As it turns out, this is absolutely true.

In the last days, I felt completely disconnected. One night, I fell down in our restaurant and wept hysterically.

The decision was made that I should leave Bali, return to the United States, and hopefully find the help that wasn't available in this tropical paradise.

Broken Heart.

What is worse than a broken heart?

A heart that has been taken out back, had the shit kicked out of it, and thrown into the dumpster along with all the leftovers from the seafood place next door.

There is no single person to blame, and I am at the top of any list.

The decision was made. A date was set, and airline tickets were purchased. On the morning of departure, I woke up early, took my packed bags out to our parking lot, and the man who was going to drive me across the island helped me load them into the car.

For months, I had been getting around on a rented scooter. It was "My" scooter. When I left, it stayed in the parking lot. Gede would send someone from his shop, and they would bring it back so the next person in line could rent it and roam the island.

My daughter was ten years old.

The idea that parents are going to somehow, cleverly, keep their children away from "Adult" problems is a pipe dream. And probably bullshit.

My daughter knew I was going away. She knew I was leaving that morning. I left early, probably around 4:00 or something. I remember I had an early flight.

My daughter woke up an hour after I left, came out to the parking lot, and saw the scooter.

This is the story I have been told by her.

She saw the scooter and was so happy because that told her that I hadn't gone to the airport. That I was still there, and as distant as I was, as depressed as I was, I was a least still there. I could still go to the beach and look for shells with her. I could still draw in the coloring books with her. I could still go across the street and buy an icy-pop with her. I could still hug her, kiss her, and tell her that I loved her. She looked all around the hotel, hoping to find me.

I'm not sure who broke the news to her that I was gone. Probably her pembantu (nanny). She wept. When I think about this today, if I'm alone, I weep.

It still hurts. I still want all of that not to have happened. I try to be careful now not to break, bruise, maim, or otherwise cause distress to the hearts I hold dear.

My daughter and I have gone to some lengths to heal our hearts and our love for each other. She has told me repeatedly that I am her favorite person. She is definitely mine.

She turned sixteen in May, earned her driver's license, and took over one of the family cars. She has a few very good friends. She has a boyfriend. She has a full-time summer job.

This is all as it should be. This is a seminal stage in life, a giant step towards the full independence that is not far away. It also means that we don't see each other as much as we have in the past.

I have a few emotions around that. I'm sad because I love spending time with her, and I miss her. I'm over the moon because she is happy most of the time, and she is growing in a way I never did. I think she has an outside chance of becoming a functioning adult, which was not a lock with me as her father.

And I am profoundly grateful that even with our bruised and battered hearts, we were able to spend enough time, as rough as it was in the beginning, to grow close again. To regain trust. To laugh and play. To become each other's favorite person.