My secret.

The coldness runs down my spine in the quiet moments when my mind conjures up memories of that last night, the walk down the gritty hallway, that cardboard box, and the solitary figure at the exit door, not a look back because what was there to see? I remember the drive in and telling myself over and over again that I was a cowboy, that I would walk the hundred odd yards to my locker with my best swagger, chest out and eyes burning blue. When I got to the door all the bravado drained from me as I fit the key into the lock, and I thanked God that I was an early car and didn't have to face the rest of my shift, not yet. Out on the road in less than five minutes. Driving the streets as if it was my last night on earth and I had to savor every second of it.

And the ghosts were everywhere. Passed a dark parking lot where I broke up my first fight, alone. Passed the gas station where the whole shift showed up to wrestle the drunk combatants inside. The burgled house where I took the lead even though my backup had 15 plus years of experience on me. The crummy apartment complex where I got the felon to own up to her crime, to the disbelief of my partner. The icy street where JD and I practiced "snow driving" which was really just playing. And the parks, cemeteries and remote parking lots where I met up with my true shift, one by one, so many times, where the war stories and real learning took place.

Early that last morning they took me out for breakfast after a flurry of activity and it was me cracking the jokes and reminding their somber faces of the good times. When we were all but done the four of us were called away to respond to an apparent burglary in progress. I was the first one out the door and on the street and I led the caravan of red and blue lights and sirens cutting through the dark and quiet early morning. Perfect. It was as if the entire eight hours had been scripted by some benevolent hand, to remind me of the calling in the trying days and months ahead.

After we cleared I returned, for the last time, and cleaned everything out of my faithful my car. I rounded the corner to my locker room and there was the cardboard box, empty, waiting to be filled, and my lieutenant clumsily standing over it. And with my gun, and Sam Browne, and radio and all the other equipment I had held and trusted and depended upon, I filled the box. And last of all, my badge.

And it almost broke me. Almost, but not quite. The one secret that I have kept, the one trump card that I have held back is the quiet prayer that I have said to myself in the times that I have needed the most help and guidance. The prayer has been with me since I was 18 and when I read the words I intuitively knew they had power. Mitakuye Oyasin... All my relatives. It is a Sioux prayer that I read in a book ten years ago and have carried it since. I said it like a mantra the day I got my letter. I chanted it underwater in the tank at OSP. I said it during police tests, and interviews and before walking up alone to cars I had pulled over on dimly lit streets who had no business to be there. And I said it all night and into the morning that last shift. Mitakuye Oyasin, I need your strength now more than ever. And I imagine both grandfathers just behind me, and all the Irish are there, ruddy-cheeked and devoted, and the Czechs who are always lined up with St. Michael, ready for battle. I say it and conjure up a limitless and unconditional well of support, self-confidence, strength and courage.

And I have found that it has never, ever failed me.

A reminder.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I sometimes wonder if it's a genetic predisposition to cling to the dreaded guilty feeling that potential energy is going to waste with each checking off of each day. I know that my doppelganger knows exactly what I mean. As if we were allotted some predetermined and finite amount of ability that has to be used up, invested, before a certain date (thirtieth birthday? thirty-fifth? tomorrow?) lest it turn into a pumpkin and be completely unusable forever after. How perfect though that I sit and type this in my new subterranean home, Tom Waits crooning between each line.

The only thing guilt is good for is letting go.

I am in debt only to myself, and the only account in the ledger book is my own happiness, which I try to pay off each time a car passes on the street, or I blink, or take in a long deep breath.

Enough with excoriating yourself with the assumption that the truth hides just under the next sloughing off. You do have to be good to yourself, kiddo.