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There’s been things I haven’t mentioned, or haven’t bothered to bring up.  Like the seizure, and it’s commensurate dislocated shoulder which happened at the end of September.  Like my best friend getting violently fired from the job where we both worked, the job I am now at a loss to hate as much as I would like.  Like this hole a surgeon left in my tongue that makes everything oral an agony, every taste a wincing sting, every effort to swallow a risk of gagging suffocation, every spoken word a rasp against raw flesh.  And before last week most things oral were ecstasy for me, so that’s a big hit to take, even with the OraJel and the Vicodin. 

But speak here of these things, I did not. 

There’s friends I don’t call, whose calls I do not take, or return.  There’s the young man I love—and have for twenty years—who is in jail right now, and despite his almost daily tomes, I fail to produce a letter for him any more than once every two weeks.  He wants me to come and visit him, so he can show me how big he’s gotten.  But I dread it.  For a long, long time he’s been far too big for me.  Once it felt good to need him, it was such a comfort to have him close.  We grew apart, and now I feel my need for him more acutely than I ever did before.  It’s become uncomfortable.  Not only that, but I do not leave my solitude except on essential errands which require only brief excursion out of isolation.  He would always come to visit me, just to say hello, to talk, to remind me that’s he’s my friend.  I dread to venture out on quests to visit others, even to visit others whom I cannot live without. 

In the end, nothing positive can be tolerated, for compassion is infectious.  It spreads from minor sympathies and emotional insignificances, from negligible events of kindness and seeks to meet ever greater needs, calling out of its hiding place the pain within.  Compassion’s desire to confront agonies is cumulative, it demands to meet the next more deeply buried demon.  It draws into the open—to itself—the horrors from which I prefer to hide.  It uncovers the seething, stinking, rotted-death, baby-eating, heart-chomping, bone-crunching monsters from which I think my hiding has made me safe.  Compassion calls these vicious killers into light, not to their defeat, but to their healing. 

Am I myself cold and cruel for evading compassion and keeping it from healing such tortured wounds?  Or am I just a tiny child too terrified to ever see those magnificent wounds again?