Sympathy For The Devil

I started talking about the people who live in my memory last week. They inevitably bleed over into the characters in my novels. I know how people talk, how they act, from watching and interacting with these living characters.
Dr. Ken Bond is definitely one of them worth noting. If Dr. Neuenschwander taught me what genius looked like, Dr. Bond is my model of sanity/insanity, addiction, and recovery. He was my counselor, mentor, and friend. In a lot of ways, I have to be careful what I write, lest I break the sacred bonds of doctor-patient privilege.
I don't generally stick with counselors long. I've had a few where after a few sessions, I started to wonder who was providing therapy for who. I suppose that goes with the territory of having a degree in psychology and being a natural empath. I never had that issue with Dr. Bond. He was a consummate professional and immune to my endearing, but manipulative, charms.
He had alcohol issues from a past life, before he found his calling. His romantic life was rocky. I think he struggled in relationships for a lot of the reasons I struggle, too. We both had a deep academic interest in sex. Much of our non-counseling time was spent talking about the biological differences between the sexes, sex offenders, patterns of sexual development, and Robert Heinlein. (For those not familiar with the science fiction of Heinlein, he is largely inseparable from the sciences of love and sex.) His dissertation was on the effects of counseling sex offenders on the counselors and I am probably the only non-therapist, non-sex offender, to read it cover to cover. All that sex study starts to stew the brain and it's hard to enjoy a real relationship: you start analyzing and over-analyzing your every move, wondering whether it's hormones, addiction, trauma, or actual romance propelling your actions.
We did yoga together as well. I think that was how he kept his sanity: exercise and meditation to turn the noise off, to stop thinking. There are only so many thoughts that are possible from upward facing dog transitioning into plank position. Those that are tend to be inwardly focused on your own body or lost in the nebulous thoughts of the nature of the universe.
I haven't talked to him in a while. He changed jobs and got divorced again. He is perhaps one of the kindest souls I have ever met and I think that compassion for others drains the self over time. He could be sharp tongued when he was tired and had an unerring sense for where the other person's soft underbelly was. I'm sure that can't be easy in a marriage to a professional caregiver.
I wish he was still in my life, but our paths have gone our own ways and social media just isn't his thing. He still lives on in my novels. There are times when the light is just right that Colin Fisher starts to look more and more like Bond, Ken Bond.