Bodie

I shove the last brown box under my truck bed's shell and slam the liftgate. Perfect fit. I’ve gotten good at vagabond's Tetris over the years—keep physics in mind, and more importantly, keep only what space allows. They say moving is one of the most stressful life events a person can endure, right up there with divorce and disease, but that’s because most people own too much shit.

I settle into the driver’s seat and fish keys out of my duffle. "That's it. On the road again."

"And again, and again, and again... every road's a race track, far as you're concerned, champ."

I snap my head up to find Bodie in the passenger seat, swamp-brown snakeskin boots propped up on my dusty dash. He forms his words around the nicotine toothpick he's chewing; a whiff of spearmint drifts my way. Consonants get all squished up in his teeth when he adds, "Thought you'd know that by now."

His dark hair, greasy and tousled, frames the sharp lines of his jaw and softens his five o'clock shadow. His eyes have that perma-smile that could charm the pants off of anyone.

Except me.

"Go piss in someone else’s Cheerios," I grumble as I fire up the old engine on my Toyota. He just laughs out this big hearty bubble of joy, like my contempt is a punchline and we’re both in on it.

I drop my duffle onto the middle seat, even though I know the passenger seat is empty. I know what I’m seeing can't be real. Doesn’t stop it from feeling that way.

"Not if you're just gonna keep runnin' away from all your problems. Someone's gotta spit some sense into ya."

"I'm not running. I'm rolling with life's changes. This is what living looks like, Bodie. Have you forgotten already?"

"Ha! Sick burn," he holds out his clenched knuckles for a fist-bump, but I'm preoccupied by the little thrill that fizzes in my stomach as I back out of my ex's driveway for the last time. I can't reciprocate his gesture, anyway. My fist would just plow right through the empty air.

Acknowledging this seems to make Bodie's presence fade away. I let the silence settle until I'm out of the neighborhood and driving at a faster clip, enveloped by the comfort of solitude. Only then do I plug my iPod into the cigarette lighter jack and turn up the volume, rev myself up on Linkin Park's scratchy vocals and moody synth as I navigate towards the interstate. I make it a point to flick off every boring, familiar haunt I drive past. A parting gesture.

Bye forever, shitty H-E-B. I won't miss your stained cement floors and pitifully scant variety of produce. Sayanora Hoot N' Holler, oh ye archetypal strip-mall dive of cheap dart boards and bad attitudes.

I don't even stop at the 7-11 where I normally get gas, even though I'm riding at a quarter tank. I'll pull off at a truck stop later. Right now, I just want to drink in the honeyed cocktail of a new adventure—a recipe I know well:

• 1 part self-righteous anger at what I'm finally leaving behind (Fuck you Jenny, you two-timing asshole)
• 2 parts waves of giddiness over what lies ahead (Next stop, New Orleans—land of mardi gras, jazz, and jambalaya)
• topped off with the warm, gooey freedom of the moment (I'll listen to whatever I want to, go wherever I want to, say whatever I want to, thank you very much)

I try not to notice the rancid aftertaste.

"Feels different this time, don't it?" Bodie's voice shocks me like a gunshot. I jolt and jerk the steering wheel. Coffee spurts out of my tumbler onto the folded Mapquest print-out in the adjacent cup holder. My truck careens into the next lane over, and the driver of a zippy little sports car shrieks their horn at me as they whizz past.

"Jesus champ," he yelps and braces himself like a melodramatic rollercoaster passenger, "are you tryin' to kill me?"

"Ha-ha," I retort flatly, turning the music off in an attempt to regain some control over the moment. I mask my skittering pulse by teasing my features into a neutral droop.

"Why do you always do that?"

"I don't always do that. I'm a good driver. You just scared the shit out of me."

"Nah, not the whole drivin'-like-an-amateur thing. That thing you did after. Where you try not to feel what you're feelin'."

"Don't you go trying to be my therapist, Bodie. You're not exactly qualified." I prop my elbow against the hot plastic window molding and dig my fingers into my hair, giving the limp tresses a firm tug.

Bodie holds his hands up in open retreat, but he presses on, "I'm just sayin' what I see, and what I'm seein' is a pattern. The runnin', the repressin', don't you think it's all tied up together? Just seems to all be pointin' to the same condition..."

"I don't think anyone would fault me for leaving a cheater," I grumble.

"Yeah but you ain't even sad about it. You knew right off that Jenny was just another pit stop. You only sign up for somethin' if it's temporary."

"We're really committing to that race track metaphor, aren't we?"

"There's that avoidance again. Come on. Go deeper. You know what you're really runnin' from."

I pinch my lips together. I'm still a little trembly from the near-collision, and I’m really not trying to dredge up my past with my dead brother. My conviction be damned, the ensuing silence only lasts a few minutes before I hear, "Psst. Brenda."

I keep on ignoring him, so he sings my name, "Bren-daaa... Hey. Brenda. You can outrun your ex. Hell, you can even outrun Texas. But you can't outrun yourself. You should think about that."

“Ironic, coming from you.”

But he's gone again, and he doesn't come back for the rest of the drive.

⧖⧖⧖

My motel is barely ten blocks out of New Orleans' trendy French Quarter, but its dingy lobby is like a time capsule from the 1970's. Then again, compared to sleeping in my truck, or that summer month I spent camping on BLM land in Arizona, or even that backoffice cot I crashed on for a while at that bar back in Tulsa, this is basically a Ritz-Carlton.

Behind the unmanned concierge desk, a television the size of a cereal box is tuned into a local news station. An anchor with a plastic smile informs the residents of New Orleans that their city is officially under hurricane watch.

A head attached to a neck tattoo and gauged ears pops out of a cracked door behind the desk. "Checking in?"

"Yup."

I give the kid my name for the reservation. Underneath all that ink and jewelry, he doesn't look a day older than eighteen, so I'm not surprised when he skips the pleasantries and goes straight to punching away at the keyboard. I can feel the monolithic computer overheating from four feet away. The news anchor's voice fills the momentary silence between us, "...President Bush has activated the United States Coast Guard as Hurricane Katrina has rapidly strengthened into a category two this evening over the Gulf of Mexico, placing New Orleans in the dead center of its cone..."

"Will you be shutting down the motel for this?"

"Oh, the hurricane? Nah, I don't think so. The boss is from Florida," he offers, as if this should be all the information I need.

I crinkle my eyebrows and jut my chin in the universal nonverbal 'And?', so he adds, "When a hurricane heads towards Florida, they just buy out all the liquor stores and hunker down."

I grin and take the offered plastic roomkey. "Sounds like my kind of party."

⧖⧖⧖

By the time I've settled into my room, it's almost midnight. I've never been an early riser, and I don't mind driving at night, but my growling stomach laments the fact that my chosen travel hours have limited my options for take-out.

I decide to phone in some pizza and poppers from a nationwide chain that's still open, according to the motel's 'Nearby Attractions' brochure. Tomorrow I'll explore the city—gnosh on some beignets, suck the heads out of crawfish, tip some street musicians. Hell, maybe I'll try to pick up a bartending gig at one of the tourist traps.

I'm by the door, checking pockets for my roomkey and slipping my feet into stained Ugg slippers when the motel's AM/FM clock radio switches on. Across the room. At full volume. All by itself. It blares the intro to a newer pop song, the type of music I don't normally listen to—a harmony of male and female vocals chant a heart-pounding ascent:

"And runnin', runnin', and runnin', runnin', and runnin', runnin'..."

I freeze and bristle like a wolf raising her hackles.

"GET. THE. HELL. OUT, BODIE!"

I don't see him this time. I don't even really feel him—I just feel intruded on by the paranormal psychoanalytical bullshit, the obscenely loud rap track that follows, the sudden sensation of being watched. I hurl myself at the bedside table and yank the radio's power cord out of the socket. Then, I collapse onto the edge of the bed and fight my lungs for air. It only feels like a few passing minutes, but when I gather my wits and finally make it to the pizza joint down the road, it's closed and vacant.

Looks like tonight my only dinner options will be green chile dusted peanuts, boiling resentment, or possibly ectoplasm.

⧖⧖⧖

"Have you been feeling haunted by something from your past?"

I snort and lick my teeth. Under the velvet tablecloth, my sandalled foot is tapping faster than a Benny Bennasi beat.

I don't know how I got suckered into this. One minute I was sitting at a high-top in the dimly lit and totally deserted Bar Noir, waiting to speak to a manager about an open position, and the next 'Madame Lune' was upon me, coaxing me with her tinkling bangles and hypnotic head scarf to a partitioned table in the back. I followed her because I'm a masochist, obviously—since she just turned over all these cards with blood, blindfolds and swords on them. I don't know squat about Tarot, but none of these pictures exactly convey that I will have a long and prosperous life with a beachside mansion, two-and-a-half kids, and an endlessly fulfilling dream career. Isn't that the feel-good drivel that psychics are supposed to espouse?

"You could say that."

She hums a sympathetic, assenting sound and turns over a card.

"Ah... Page of Cups. A sensitive man, perhaps creative, and..." She turns over another card, one that depicts a smiling guy carrying a knapsack and looking happy as hell, but he's about to jump off a cliff anyway, and it's so Bodie that I have to laugh to spite the darkness that washes over me. "Innocent, if not a bit naive. Joyful, adventurous. Does that sound like anyone important to you?"

I'm reluctant to confirm anything. I don't have any first-hand experience with psychics, but I know a con. This is how they draw you in, by building stories on the scraps you feed them. Except, a part of me wants to hear that Bodie's visits aren't just the hallucinations of a crazy person, and before I know it I'm telling this costumed stranger all about my dead brother, the guy who was always cracking jokes and calling you out on your shit with so much tenderness. How he was my safehaven all throughout our fucked up childhoods, and most of all, how all of this made his suicide two years ago that much more confusing and unbearable.

"You're a medium," she proclaims, with the firm credence of a person who believes in such things, "That's a gift."

"A medium. Right." I just want to know that Bodie's ghost is really him. I don't need an honorary title to go with it.

She seems to be waiting for me to say more. Sure enough, there's more I need to say.

"Even if that is true, seeing him now doesn't change all those times I screened his calls, or didn't visit even though I could've, or avoided giving him my new address because—" A pain I've been ignoring crashes into me like a tidal wave, "talking to him was just loaded with too much of the stuff I was always trying to forget. You know, from when we were kids."

I realize my voice has shrunk to a near-whisper, and I clear my throat. Saying this outloud feels less like a release, and more like being bludgeoned in the ribcage by a baseball bat. Because Bodie's right, and I know it, and it hurts. I was always running away, even from him. All that time I thought that he was trying to change me, my head was too far up my ass to realize he just needed me. And I wasn't there.

"Seeing his ghost doesn't bring him back," I finish, more assertively.

"But he's not really gone. He's lingered for two years! That's a long time... He must have an important message for you. What does he say when he visits?"

Oof, yeah. The bludgeoning. It smarts. My ego thrashes like an angry teenager, but I manage to pry an answer out of my gritted teeth, "To stop running from the past."

And what do you know, there's Bodie, standing in the far corner. He leans against the wood-paneled wall, hat dipped low, arms loosely folded, and beams at me like I just gave a six-word Oscar acceptance speech and he couldn't be more proud.

Then Madame Lune says, "What if instead of running from it, you could run towards it?"

I jerk my gaze away from Bodie. I didn't notice before—it's so dark in here—but the psychic's eyes are an astonishing shade of green. They almost have a light of their own, like I'm gazing through a stained glass window.

"I'm not following."

"What if you could go back?"

Bodie's lackadaisical slouch turns rigid as a two-by-four. Behind Madame Lune, he shakes his head with wide, urgent eyes.

"Go back where? Go back in time, like to when he was alive?"

"Mmhm. Or, to any other time you want."

Madame Lune reaches both hands to her neck and unfastens a circular brooch that was pinning her tasseled shawl together. When she hands it to me, I see that the round, hallowed shape depicts a silver snake chewing on its own tail. The trinket is unusually cold and heavy in my palm, and although the metalwork is rudimentary—with wobbly curves and unnatural proportions—something about it is mesmerizing.

"Are you saying this could change what happened to him? This could bring him back?"

But before she can answer, a man's voice behind me breaks the spell, "Were you the one asking about our open spot behind the bar?"

I turn to see a guy with a mustache that covers a third of his face. This must be the bar manager—I almost forgot I came here looking for a job. He's wearing a black vest pinned with a haphazard mosaic of round, colorful buttons. Good to know that if I do get the gig, my uniform will be so slick. His tired eyes flit over the cards on the table before returning to me, looking none too impressed to find me back here.

"Oh—yeah. Brenda. Nice to meet you."

I stand up and in a split-second decision, tuck the brooch into the back pocket of my jeans.

"Jim." He shakes my hand, firm and brief. "Listen, I'm closing up shop. I've got to board up these windows so I can drive my wife and kids up to the in-laws' place in Birmingham. That monster's headed right for us—can you believe it?" He rubs the back of his neck, and I decide that since he's looking at the ground instead of at me, the question is probably rhetorical. After a far-away pause, he jerks himself back to planet Earth, "Anyway. Why don't you drop in, oh, I don't know, sometime late next week for an interview? When all of this hurricane stuff is behind us."

"Yeah, sure. I'll just get out of your hair then," A poor choice of words for the bald man stood before me, "Good luck with everything."

Jim's walking away before I'm even finished speaking, and when I turn back to the table, Madame Lune is nowhere to be seen. Only Bodie remains, staring me down with a glare that could spark a forest fire.

I think I'll take a page out of the Floridian handbook and swing by a liquor store on the way back to my motel.

⧖⧖⧖

Someone is pounding on the door.

Ow, something is pounding on my head.

I squint at the thin crack of light framing the black-out curtains. What time is it?

"Maybe If I could plug the damn clock in without it going all Ghostbusters up in here," I mumble blearily, in case Bodie's around. In no particular hurry, I worm my way out of bed, snatch an oversized T-shirt off the ground—A cherished Pearl Jam tee of Bodie's, from the only time they played Red Rocks, back in '95—and wrestle my arms into it.

"Miss Duncan?" Someone calls from the other side of the door and knocks again.

"Yeah, coming." I take a nip from the bottle of Jack Daniels I tore into last night—a little hair of the dog—then open the door to the oppressive light of day. On the other side of the threshold is the tattooed concierge.

"Hey. I tried to phone your room, but the line was dead." Unplugged. All of the electronics, unplugged. "I just wanted to let you know, in case you didn't see on the news, the city's under a mandatory evacuation order as of this morning. So uh," He looks a little sheepish, "All the staff are actually heading out of town. Like, now. If you have no place to go, they're sheltering folks at the Superdome."

"Shiiiit. You're closing on me, kid?"

"Yeah, sorry. You can stay a little while longer if you need to. Just, if you're gonna get out of New Orleans before the storm hits tomorrow, you might want to hurry. Traffic's bumper-to-bumper."

"Sure thing. Thanks."

I shut the door, open the curtains to let some light in, turn around and voila, Bodie appears. I haven't seen him since Bar Noir; I never see him when I'm drunk. I used to think that was because booze dulled my imagination, but after talking to the psychic, I'm not sure what to believe.

"Where will you go?" He asks.

I retrieve yesterday's jeans from a heap in the corner and root around in the pockets. "Not where. When."

"You don't even know how to use that thing."

We both stare down at the brooch in my hands. The silver is dull, and now that I'm looking at it in the light of day, I realize that it's not reflective like a metal should be. It seems more like it absorbs the light, if anything. I don't know if I believe any of Madame Lune's claims, and yet... This thing still feels weirdly cold, like I'm holding ice that won't melt, but it feels like something else, too. Like something that shouldn't exist.

"Should be easy enough. It's got this little pin here, so I just fix it to my shirt and... Say a date, right?"

I smile tauntingly at him as I slide the pointed edge of the pin through the fabric.

"Brenda. No." Bodie moves like he's trying to stop me, but he's just a flimsy apparition in a neighboring dimension who, in the astute words of the esteemed MC Hammer, can't touch this. I flick my head to shake a tangle of hair out of my eyes and fiddle the brooch's clasp closed.

"Brenda, stop! Aw c'mon," he's practically whining now, "aren't you even gonna put on pants? Hey—is that my Pearl Jam shirt?"

Brooch in place, I stick out my tongue then say out loud, "March twenty-second, two-thousand and three," which is a date that's burned in my memory because it's when I received my very last voicemail from him. For the last two years, all I've thought about is how I wish I had answered that call.

But nothing happens, unless you count Bodie shouting some highly original profanities that I would find impressive under any other circumstances. Instead, the more I notice how much I'm still here, and the more I see just how anxious he is, the more my rage boils up, sequestering all of my hope until the resentments erupt out of me like I'm a ripe supervolcano:

"You left me here alone, with no one else. It was so selfish! And what are you so scared of now, Bodie? That I'll actually go back and save your life?! Jesus, you've stuck around this long, would it really be so bad to be back here for real? And, hey, here's a head-scratcher, why didn't you at least tell me what you were really going through? Ask for some fucking help, for once? Instead you just saddled me with all this guilt and grief and bailed. Every time I remember you laughing, now, it feels like it was a fucking lie. You were just a coward, and you're still a coward."

By the time I'm done, he looks like a used up candle. Wax melted and burned away, wick snuffed—lightless, hallowed out. I've seen him diminished like this before, when we were kids. Every time our dad came after him. Even moreso when he came after me. But somehow enduring ten lifetime's worth of bruises and breaks, and living through an infinity of mean and belittling and frightening words, never whittled away his innocence. Instead, all that cruelty just bred an inward-facing darkness that he buried so deep inside of him, not even I could see it there. And it festered until it killed him.

"...I'm sorry, Bodie. Shit."

"Don't be sorry for tellin' the truth." His voice is small, sad.

"It's not the whole truth... You had every right to harbor all that hurt. I just wish I'd known. I thought you were the one who turned out OK. Hell, I was even jealous of that, sometimes."

He hasn't moved in the room, but he's more distant somehow. The longer either of us goes without saying anything, the farther away he feels. Through the silence, Madame Lune's words echo in my mind: What if instead of running from it, you could run towards it?

"What if I went back further? To dad's draft day—Change the dates somehow, or, I don't know, break his foot, so he never goes to 'Nam and gets so fucked in the head."

"Change the course of history from before we were born? Are you kiddin' me?"

"Yeah. What do you care—is there even a difference between being dead and never being born?"

He doesn't answer. Instead, he looks at me like he's seeing me for the first time, but it's in this half-smiley, half-catatonic way that seems entirely inappropriate after what has just transpired, so I snap my fingers in front of his face to make sure this isn't some weird out-of-ghost-body thing happening, and then the bastard actually starts laughing. A wheezy, gasping-for-air sort of laugh that would send tears streaming down his face if he wasn't zero percent water, and when he finally regains some composure, he claps his hand over his open mouth with eyes so filled with unabashed glee, he could be posing for a cheesy stock photoshoot.

"Seriously. What. The. Fuck?"

"You can't go back to that, either."

"Don't tell me what I can't—"

"No, I mean," he's still chuckling, and I don't think I've ever been more infuriated in my life, but then he says, "I know where you're headed. I knew somethin' was weird about you that night..."

"Wait, what?" My hand comes to rest over the circular brooch at my breast. It starts out as a defensive gesture, but that icy feeling spreads from my palm to the tips of my fingers, hinting its way up my arm to my elbow. I keep my hand on the brooch until I think I might die of hypothermia. Every line, edge and corner of my motel room starts melting away, and instead of Bodie's laughter, or the A/C unit's humming white noise, I hear the distinct sound of... applause? My body is being jostled around in a crowd... but there's an outside breeze, and I look up to see the fading gloam of an infant night sky, and... Bodie?

⧖⧖⧖

"Brenda? What are you doing here?" My brother's hair is short. He's clean shaven, and he's standing next to me—like really standing next to me—pulling me in for a big bear hug. "I thought you weren't gonna make it... You came to surprise me?"

"Um..."

"Oh sick, you got merch? And already spilled shit all over it, you hog."

He tugs at the sleeve of the stained and tattered shirt I'm wearing, his old shirt, and the dots connect in my mind.

We're surrounded by big sandstone outcroppings glowing orange under hundreds of spotlights, and even in the pressing crowd, I can see the Denver skyline glittering like scattered jewels beyond the empty stage below. Red Rocks Amphitheater. Pearl Jam. 1995.

The brooch brought me back to the time and place on my shirt.

And Bodie knew.

For him, this was already a memory.

I grab the beer he's holding and take several giant gulps. Time travel has done nothing to assuage my hangover, and although it's early summer, I'm still freezing.

"Where are your pants? Hey, is everything OK? You look..."

Like I'm ten years older and just rolled out of bed with last night's whiskey pulverizing my liver?

"Everything's great, Bodie. Perfect. Happy birthday."

Bodie drapes me in his big jean jacket. I'm not sure if it's because he's concerned for me, or because he's embarrassed to be seen with me like this. In the minutes before the headliner comes on stage, he introduces me to the new friends he dragged here—a couple of cowboys with dirty boots and tucked-in button-downs who look wildly out of place at a grunge show. I remember that he just started working on that cattle farm up in Broomfield. His voice hasn't adopted its growly rancher twang yet, and it kills me to think of the life he has ahead of him—all those years I thought he spent doing something he loved, only to learn that he didn't feel like it was worth sticking around for.

But I try not to think about that. Because he actually looks happy, and maybe his journey wasn't the black-and-white story I've reduced it to. So instead I try to occupy as much of this surreal moment in time as I possibly can—I dance with the crowd, I sing along with a young Eddie Vedder, and most of all, I make sure Bodie knows just how much I love him.

By the time the night's over, I wouldn't change a single thing about it.

⧖⧖⧖

Getting back from the past happened gently and without trying, like waking up from a dream. Getting out of New Orleans, on the other hand, has been a shit-show.

I'm at a standstill in an endless trail of cars headed northwest. It's not dark yet, and the wind hasn't picked up speed, but I'm starting to wonder if I'll still be staring out at a ribbon of red taillights when it does. Bodie is my passenger. I can't shake the feeling that it's for the last time.

"Now this is irony."

"What is?" Bodie asks me.

"All this time, you telling me I have to stop running away from my problems, only to end up here, with a whole city of people who have no choice but to run away."

"I don't think you're runnin', anymore."

"You have misplaced your faith in me, brother." I have no clue where I'll be stopping, and no intention of staying when I get there.

"Runnin' and ramblin' ain't the same thing."

Well that's a thinker. I let it simmer for a while, attempt to tease apart their differences in my mind, but it just feels like sorting grains of sand.

"Remember what you said earlier, about dad and Vietnam? I know it's dumb, but I never thought about the fact that it was that whole horrible experience that made him such an asshole. I mean I knew, but I didn't think about it. I didn't even try to. I just stayed mad. What I'm sayin' is, you overstand shit sometimes, Brenda. I think you could let go of all them old hurts for real, have a pretty good life, if you'd just slow down and let yourself be wherever you are. Even if you can't help but change the scenery every once in a while. You don't gotta have an escape plan, all the time."

I think I get what he's trying to say, and even if it sounds foreign to me, it doesn't sound like hell would have to freeze over before I could grasp the concept. That might be progress.

With a teasing tone, he adds, "You might actually have a shot at bein' a well-adjusted member of society."

"Now that sounds horrific."

Bodie laughs, "Or not! But spend a little time on healin', OK?"

"Is that your way of saying goodbye?"

"I think so, champ."

Bodie sticks around a while longer. He quiets and disappears, but I can still feel him beside me, warm and soothing. I try to hold him here as long as I can, but he's water slipping through my fingers, and then it's just me, crawling along a crowded highway with a million other people trying to figure out how to weather life's storms.

⧖⧖⧖

June 20, 2006

Dear Bodie,

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you... I really fucking miss you... Happy birthday to you.

I wish you were still here. That wishing never stops. I could really use your cheerleading right about now... You asked me to work on healing, but you didn't tell me it would be so much work. How come no one ever talks about how therapy is like an exorcism?

I still talk to you, but you don't talk back anymore. Was any of that even real? Dr. Perez says they were bereavement hallucinations, but I don't think I could've hallucinated an entire Pearl Jam concert with perfect accuracy. I found the setlist on a message board online. I was actually there with you, wasn't I? For your birthday, eleven years ago, last year. Wild.

I still have the snake brooch. I've thought about buying a vintage Woodstock t-shirt on eBay, you know, for science. But I don't know if it's a good idea to try and bend my reality even more, when I've been working so hard to put myself back together. Plus, you wouldn't be there. But shit, CCR would be. I'm still undecided.

I'm supposed to write you this letter as an exercise in expressing all the things I wanted to say to you but couldn't—burdening types of things, like anger or hurt. But writing this now, all I want to say is thank you.

Thanks for always being there, even when I wasn't. Thanks for understanding me, even when being 'me' meant being mean, sometimes. Thanks for loving me so much that you broke the laws of time, space and death to help me learn how to be happy.

I'm still learning. So far it's harder to heal shit than to avoid it. But supposedly you stay at this long enough and then one day, that changes. When that happens, I'll have another thanks for you.

'Til then.