Afterword: Our New Beginning. So Close Yet So Far.

Frequently in the last four months, I've looked to this space and considered writing. Documenting unique experiences, exploiting some small opinion or observation, placing cool pics, you name it. And each time, I've balked, too pressured by more urgent needs. It's been a busy time.

I just called my wife to tell her I love her. But not that I miss her for fear it would uncover in her a longing you take strides not to feel when one you love is far away living a life encompassed with the total strangeness of blank faces and new geography. I roused her from some point in deep sleep that left her incoherent and confused. My guilt flooded and I took the unselfish route of letting her drift back, uaware of the burden I feel from leaving her to live her life unsupported, and to handle the one I've left behind as well. She sweetly said, "Bye", and then deadness. Between you and me, anonymous reader, I sure do miss her.

So I figured I had done enough depressing reading from "House of God", the book all medical students are instructed ad nauseum to read for perspective. I find it antiquated and negative at best, misleading and just plain wrong at worst. Perhaps it's recommended by doctors to show inclusiveness to some club. Or whatever. This isn't a book review.

So I decided maybe I'd write in here for awhile.

San Mateo is nice. Palo Alto is northern Cal suburban paradise. I could live here. We could live here. The program is unbelievable. Small, elitist, competitive, thoroughly nonacademic. Located in a county with such abundant tax dollars that there is a fully integrated, multidimensional network of mental health resources available to a patient population that is largely friendly, and often previously known and remembered. If you are a sick resident, they will pay someone to cover you instead of forcing work on another resident. If you are hungry, meals are free. No weekends. No overnight calls. Abundant teaching. I would thrive here. And I am. The craziness of urban psych training in a disjointed system makes this cake. Really, it's all too easy so far. And that is my next three weeks, coupled with slipping into the city to take pics or to a bar to watch football.

At night, I close my eyes and go back to Napa. The heat on my forehead. Cabernet Sauvignon grape between my teeth, exploding tartness onto my tongue. Wine buzzed.

Or to the city. Wind whipping like people of New York; different directions, yet en masse and with purpose. The trolley bell clanging in the distance. Blue water downhill. Way downhill.

Things are slowing down. I am older. I feel older. Beaten on, nowhere near beaten down. It has been a long few months.

Above all, though, I feel thankful. I go to these places just behind my eyes and think of my good fortune, most of which is in Baltimore, or Virginia, or elsewhere near there and far far away from here. So these blessings in my life, though very real, are so distant and inaccessible that it is as if they may not exist. After all, if you leave a room, does that room still exist? This very question an odd recollection in itself of a time in Baltimore that no one knows but me and Neil. A time of "chickfillah" and "this is the point in the story where you draw a little screw". Good times. Again, I digress. So the very existence of these blessings, most assuredly await my return, and without them gives me the opportunity of exploring a new life. Everywhere I go, I know no one. I have become the guy eating at restaurants alone, but managing not to appear sad. I go to new places and am forced to bear with my thoughts alone or brave the obstacle of making new friends, temporary friends that will last an hour or two before pleasantly going back to being faceless strangers. It is weird and it is wonderful. It is my new, and perhaps appropriately, temporary life. The one true thing that follows me is this concept of wife. The one that perhaps has great meaning to a new temporary friend, with inspection of my finger finding a scratched, seemingly well-worn (already) symbol of this faithful, lifelong merger with some unknown being that likely fits into a preconceived mold in these new temporary friends' minds, much as they (still) do when I look at the very same symbols placed on their own fingers. Yet to me, this ring is foreign; an accesory, a fashion statement, seemingly a new purchase. And Christine is still my love without alteration. (Sidebar: "For love is not love that alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to the removed"). I ramble.

So for those who have inquired, this is me now. I am happy. I am excited. I continue to try and cover up that previously noted place which occurs with the unnecessary absence of a loved one; and to stave off my guilt for causing it, but otherwise, man, is life here sweet.

If I could only grab my wife and very closest of friends, then I perhaps would truly have it all.

Enjoy the pics.