You are not alone.
Healing is possible.
I’m living proof of that.
— Tom Voss
Ojai, California
October 2019
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
— Khalil Gibran
On a warm, gray morning, as I lay in bed in my apartment, someone knocked at the door.
“I should get up and answer it,” I thought.
The thought hovered above me in the air before disintegrating to nothing.
Knock, knock, knock.
The pounding in my head thumped out of time with the pounding on the door, like a drummer who couldn’t catch the beat.
It couldn’t be Kimmy. The last time I’d seen her, I’d gone to visit her at work. A handsome, stone-faced marine glared at me from his barstool while Kimmy rearranged bottles of rail liquor behind the bar. She’d smiled at me, but that guy’s unblinking stare spoke for both of them — I’d been replaced. I took a step back, turned, and retreated out of her life.
Get up.
Get up and open the door.
It couldn’t be my mom. She was at work, teaching at a private school in the River Hills neighborhood of Milwaukee. My dad had retired from social work, but he kept a strict schedule that demanded his time and attention at particular hours of the day: breakfast from 8:00 to 8:30 AM, exercise till 9:15, guitar practice, gardening, lunch, and a postlunch nap that didn’t count as a nap because he took it sitting up in his favorite chair. Dad wouldn’t miss guitar practice to drive across town to my East Side apartment unannounced.
The weight of the furniture in the room seemed to press into me until it felt like my body was sinking through the bed. I imagined myself lying on the floor, pinned underneath the cracked feet of the hand-me-down dresser. The embroidered peacocks on the bright-green couch beneath the window stared at me with judging eyes. Get up, you worthless piece of shit.
Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock.
Was my sister in town? I couldn’t keep track anymore. Since graduating high school early, she’d moved from Milwaukee to Syracuse, then back to Milwaukee, then to Miami, then back to Milwaukee, then to Madison, then back to Milwaukee, then to Los Angeles, then back to Milwaukee, then back to Los Angeles, then to Taiwan, then to Evanston, Illinois, and then — you guessed it — back to Milwaukee again. She’d moved away and moved back to this town like home didn’t have what she was looking for, but neither did the world.
Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock.
I hoisted myself onto one side and tried to sit up. My head spun. My hand must have shaken as I reached for the water glass. I took a sip and my insides swayed. There was nothing to do but sleep it off. For some people, this would be one of those I’m-never-drinking-again-type hangovers. For me, it was Tuesday morning. Or was it Wednesday?
Get the door.
The knocks came faster, closer together, until they caught up to the pounding inside my head. I collapsed onto my back, waited for the nausea to settle, and let the dull, insistent rhythm lull me to the brink of sleep.
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound had moved. It was coming from the window now. But I was pretty sure I was dreaming. Or maybe I was still drunk.
“Tom?” a voice called.
Oh, man. It was her.
“Time to get up!” chirped the voice in the teasing, singsong way I remembered from childhood.
I kept my eyes sealed shut. I pictured a clear, still pond inside me. If I concentrated hard enough, I could block out her voice and keep the bad stuff down at the soft, muddy bottom of the pond, where it belonged.
Tap, tap, tap.
Focus. Forget the tapping and calling. Keep the bad stuff where it belongs so the few relationships you have left don’t blow up in your face. So your hands stay down at your sides instead of wrapping around someone’s throat. So you don’t explode in rage or start to cry and never stop.
There. Pond secured. Crisis averted.
Somewhere between asleep and awake, the tapping grew dim, and my thoughts drifted back twenty years, to a blue house that stood on top of a sloping hill on a leafy, tree-lined street. In the back of the house was a wooden deck. Because the house was built on a hill, the rise of the deck created a three-foot opening beneath it. It was filled with smooth gray and white stones, like a secret landscaping project someone had started and then abandoned. I’d crouch down and crawl beneath the slats of the deck, searching for the best stones. I’d pick up the smooth ones and rub their cool, flat surfaces across my cheek like my dad showed me to do during trips to the beach in Door County. Gliding those smooth stones across my cheek was a way to commune with nature, to become one with the elements. When I nuzzled my cheek with those stones, I became smooth and cool, too. When I breathed in the fresh breeze, I became light as air. When I was outside, in nature, I felt free.
Sometimes I’d get so absorbed in my imagination, I’d forget I was beneath the deck. I’d stand up suddenly and whack my head on the wooden planks above. My head would throb and I’d wail and scream until someone came to acknowledge my pain. And that’s how I started to become an American man. Suck it up, buttercup, said the grown-up. You’re fine. Real men don’t cry. Real men don’t feel. Real men bear the pain with dry faces and raised chins, their emotions broken and corralled like horses. Maybe that’s why the tears still hadn’t come. Not since that day, somewhere on the outskirts of Mosul, when a series of 7.62-caliber rounds exploded skull bone into a golf-ball-size crater, and my squad leader, Sergeant Diaz, was suddenly gone forever.
“Hey, Tombo. Wake up. We gotta go.”
My sister, Beck, was standing outside my window with her forearms pressed between the sill and the frame. She spoke softly, like she knew about the bad stuff at the bottom of the pond and didn’t want to stir it up. She was saying something about a doctor’s appointment. Something about therapy. Something about how today was the day, and that I’d promised her I’d finally go talk to someone. Talk about what, I didn’t know. I was fine.
I survived the war, got outta the army, and like my grandfather before me, I hit the ground running. Bampa had used the GI Bill to go to law school and start a family. I’d rented an apartment, gotten a job, and used mine to enroll in firefighting school. It was all going well. I was really happy about it. Overall, that is. I mean, sure, you couldn’t expect most employers to understand how military experience translated to civilian experience, right? So maybe the jobs I’d had since getting out of the army weren’t quite the right fit. But you gotta start somewhere.
I’d been trained to make split-second, life-and-death decisions that determined whether or not other human beings lived or died. So what