As I sit here procrastinating, irrationally hoping that I can somehow, someday figure out how to stop time, it occurred to me that I will probably never be whole again.

Strangely, I don’t remember being formally taught about wound healing in medical school, and I only remember having one didactic session during residency. I’m sure we must have covered it somewhere, probably in pathology during the second year of medical school, when we learned about inflammation, but my memories of those days are pretty faint.

All I seem to remember is what I wrote when my brother managed to tear every single ligament in his knee back in the day.

From the things that I’ve seen in the past 6 years, it occurs to me that wound healing only really closes things up. It rarely if ever actually reverses things to where it used to be. In other words, all wounds have permanent effects. What is gone is gone.

I think about my dad, and his damaged heart, and while he is in particularly good shape for someone who threw a clot down their LAD, there’s always going to be scar tissue there. A section of his heart has died, and it’s never going to come back.

And while the Romanticists waxed poetic about the heart as the seat of emotion, it’s ultimately really just a muscle. But we are starting to understand that emotional wounds are just as real was physical wounds. Hence, the diagnosis of PTSD, but that’s another rant entirely.

I’m not entirely sure what precipitated this thought. I’ve been interrupted five or six times now since I started this post, and I’ve forgotten what I originally meant to write. But I was just packing up to get ready to head back to S.D., and it occurred to me how I still haven’t recovered from something I realized about 10 years ago. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried to change, she would never feel the same way about me the way I felt about her.

I have to admit, for the most part, I’ve gotten what I’ve wanted out of life. Now, granted, I haven’t really wanted many things. I mean, really wanted it, where it felt like I would die if I didn’t get it. Even though I’ve spent lots of sleepless nights agonizing about my convoluted career path that nearly didn’t materialize, and even though I’ve worked pretty damn hard to achieve what I have, I remember having given up, and accepting the possibility that it was never going to happen, and being OK with that. Well, mostly OK.

And I’ve certainly had my little heartaches from time to time to time, fantasizing about things that were never going to happen. But they never lasted as long, and were never as painful, as that original wound. In a lot of ways every incident since then has merely been a reiteration, a repetition, of that time. It’s like my own personal Groundhog Day. Every day is exactly the same.

A lot of it is plain old stubbornness, maybe. Although it’s more like learned helplessness. Once I realized that it didn’t matter what I did, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t even bother trying. If it’s never going to happen, then there’s no point.

So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I don’t try, then of course it’s never going to happen, but I guess I just never want to get to that point again, to that point of wanting someone so much, and yet realizing that I don’t have a chance.

Bn will always ask me, how do I know for sure? Of course I never know for sure. But I can guess pretty damn well. And, practically speaking, an infinitesimal probability is pretty much the same thing as no chance.

I talk a lot about the probability of dying alone. I have to admit, it’s a terrible feeling to believe that no one will really miss you when you’re gone. But it’s not going to kill me.