“Damaged people are dangerous: they know they will survive.”

I’m still lost in the dance of the lost man. Everyday my bitterness eats away at my insides, making me more and more mad at the world. Coughing up blood-flecked phlegm at work only confirms the amount of damage I’ve sustained physically from this summer as do the nosebleeds. Whatever psychological and emotional damage I have, however, remains unearthed and under-excavated like the skeletons of 12th century monks under the cathedral in Lutsk, Ukraine. I wait for proper burial, knowing full well that my only function is as a money-making tourist attraction: “Step right up!” I want to bark at the crowd. The only, albeit ironic, justification for my life is that they’ll probably erect some massive church dedicated to my goodness and mercy atop my grave after I’m dead. I’m after all no less a sexual deviant than those monks who, though holy holy in their deaths, still are nothing but bones encrusted in dirt in a cold church basement under where real iniquity is practiced and preached.

My first week back in Texas I heard a report on NPR about how abused people have a different chemical makeup in their brains. Hearing that again made me want to die.