The Rest of the Story

by Tal Bauer

He was like a neon paint splatter in the middle of normal.

Combine a professional athlete’s metabolism with a teenager’s? You’ve created a new supervillain, Always Eats Man, attacking your wallet today.

I found my tongue and kick-started my frontal lobes. Put words in order. Breathe in and out. My standards for getting through the next few minutes were not high. I wasn’t sure I could meet them.

I was empty of thoughts. They were all gone, every neuron in my brain fucking off all at once.

And we won. How could we not when we were soaring that high? Each of us was a million miles off the ground, and we were all peaking together because of each other.

the windchill in Chicago was down in the fuck-off negative numbers.

If a duck had my brain, it would fly north for winter.

Right now, what I want to do is listen. My philosophy is, the more you try and push something away, the greater control it has over you. Pushing something away gives it power, and power sows the seeds of terror. So when you’re clenching around something awful, and when you’re holding on and holding on, trying desperately not think about the past or what happened, all of your pain magnifies, and that’s when both terror and shame are given free rein to grow. Eventually, that terror, and the shame, and the pain, all feel like they’re strangling you. But when you confront that terror, and when you turn around and say to the pain that you’re not afraid any longer, you begin to break the stranglehold that all that darkness has over you. Talking is the first step of that journey. So I’d like to listen, Brody, to what you’re willing to share with us this morning.”