The Story.

"All of these lines across my face,
Tell you the story of who I am..."

I am alive again.

Aware.

It is funny how one minute you can be in a hole, wondering if you simply have to accept and take up residency in the ditch, and the next there is so much light and things are not quite so dire.

Sitting in this airport in Charlottetown after a morning where I was engaged, laughing with colleagues and for once seeing everything basked in the sunshine, I realize how long it has been since I have truly felt like a living being.

These past two and a half years (well, two years and three months if we are being exact) have been torture.

Hellish.

I have simply existed.

I have woken, breathed, worked, carried myself through - but not lived.

It sure is something to wake every morning and the only thought in your head is getting through to go to sleep and do it all again tomorrow.

And for two years and god knows how many days, that is what I did.

Everything in splinters.

"But these stories don't mean anything,
If you've got no one to tell them to,
It's true..."

I have said for many years that hockey is therapy, hockey has saved me and without my hockey family I do not know how I would have pushed through so much.

And so, how fitting that it is hockey that has brought me the reason to live again?

The reason to breathe?

The reason to find myself daydreaming while looking at a picture and getting absolutely lost in the happiness and absolute ridiculousness that has brought me, us, here?

It sure is something, that fate.

It is quite a feeling when you emerge from the wreckage of what was your life and survey the landscape that is left.

"You see the smile that's on my mouth,
It's hiding the words that don't come out..."

For so long I stared at the rubble and did not have the energy to drag myself, my way, through it in an attempt to find whatever was on the other side.

For so long I did not want to.

To be honest, it is very easy to sit amongst the damage and just be.

The difficulty lies in movement -

Movement forward.

Movement progresses and movement leaves something behind.

I did not, do not, want to leave my previous life behind.

But, I have realized that I can move and carry it with me, like callouses and scars, evidence of hard work.

And I will not leave it all behind - I will leave claw marks on it all as I go.

Because, as difficult as it all has been, as hellish and cruel as this life and world are, it all has made me - this.

And my god if I am not feeling damn good about moving into this next phase of this living.

With him.

He who accepts all of my scars and complications. I find all of his beautiful, too.

And though there are times when I look at myself and wonder how and why anyone would ever want to crack me open and see what I am, who I am, exactly what has poisoned everything for me to the point where I never felt I would live again - I am accepting that this beautiful soul has done just that.

And he is still around despite knowing and seeing the ugliness of it all.

Every time I take a breath now I am more conscious than ever that I am alive and there is more to every day than just making it to the time to close my eyes.

"And it's true,
That I was made for you..."