Baptism

I should have known it was coming. After all, it's about to rain.

It's an odd historically accurate fact. Whenever I set my heart aflame to see if I can destroy it, storms come. Not just gentle showers like some bad country song, but tropical depression-crack-the-lightening-pounding-downpour storm.

I've tried to think of it as some type of baptism, washing away the pain of the just passed sins and giving me a new start. But that's not me. I keep bits and pieces of everyone, good and bad. I have been fortunate enough over the last few years to use those keepsakes as learning tools, what to repeat and what to let go.

But most recently I went back to old reactive habits. I felt-acted-thought. That means if my feelings were irrational, I acted irrationally and only then thought through the realities. I had learned to rearrange, to feel-think-act. I guess somewhere inside me there's a real disorder that instinctively changes that.

It's hard for people outside to deal with the "act" in the middle instead of end. They don't understand what's coming at them. The more I try to explain, the more insane it turns. Sooner or later, their only remaining move is to just leave.

You'd think I'd recognize it in the middle of it. But I guess that's part of the insanity that grows. Internal blindness.

But the outcome is crystal clear. And is always followed by the storms. Maybe it's the storms that slap me in the head and make me pay attention. There was one time when I traveled to a coast and was caught in a storm of a century that turned angry at the coastline and traveled back up my path to flood my home area. It was immediately after I'd gone overwhelming.

I've spent the last weekend in that insanity. I've made a mess of something that was simple and important. It all went on when the first front gently came through, forced Texas summer to surrender its dominance and turned the air crisp for a few hours each morning and evening. But last night was when I set it all afire. And awoke to warnings a tropical storm was bearing down on me with buckets of rain.

For the next few days, I'll be trapped. Both in by the weather and my actions. They will be in my face. There will be nowhere to run. I'll try to use one to make me clean again. But there are some sins with which you just have to look in the eye and live.