Sometimes you don’t know something, really know, until it slaps you in the face and knocks you down.  You might have suspicions, and fear, but not until reality’s grip tightens around your neck and shakes you with a mighty force are you sure of what the truth is.

     I'm terrified of losing my kids. The custody hearing which will decide the fate of my two children is only three days away.  My life seems to hover in slow motion, a limbo that I had hoped might end when I finally revealed the truth about myself, emerged from the cocoon of fear and shame that had silenced me for most of my precarious life.

     I’d worked my fingers to the bone to prove to the world, and I guess to myself, that I could be a winner.  But sacrifice came with that success.  I’d become a human sacrifice, relinquishing all honesty, my own identity, to be normal.   Somewhere in the course of the years, in the midst of the web of lies I’d spun, I lost myself.  A high price to pay. 

     Then, the burden had finally become too great, my conscience weary from carrying such a massive load.  I owed it to my wife and kids.  My God, I owed it to myself.  Instead of slowly seeping from my manufactured life, the truth burst from my lips, the cork no longer able to contain the secrets inside.  Blurted like an obscenity for all the world to hear, and fear, and run from.

     I’d been a prisoner of myself. 

     It should have been a relief, coming clean to the world, after all those painful years filled with secrets in the dark and the deception that had become all too easy.  Not hiding anymore; a prisoner released.

     Instead it’s been a nightmare.  I’d just moved from one set of shackles to another.

     Three days to D-Day – my court day.  Our court day.  Louise is suing me for sole custody, and I am countersuing for joint custody.  Happiness and agony both see-saw around November 1, battling for control, for victory.  I wait in a dark tunnel, looking at the date.  Feeling that I’ll never get there, but at the same time, being scared to get there.

     So I sit in my empty apartment with a glass of Jack Daniels in my hand, my loyal companion, looking into the brightness of the fire.  The scene of a good commercial.  I am once again trapped in the vicious circle of searching for who I am, and trying to figure out what will happen in my life.  Harvey Dunne, the successful accountant.  Harvey Dunne, the divorcee without his children. 

     Harvey Dunne, the successful failure.

     I'm losing it all.  Whoever said honesty was so great?

     Staring into the flames, I see the blurry rerun of my life, the sparks igniting all the pain and confusion of growing up.  I wonder who in the Master Plan chose which children would have to bear a burden such as mine, to grow up this way?  Surely it was a random selection, a careless game of Russian roulette played on a universal scale.  A careless mistake.  Surely no Loving Power would inflict this nightmare on a child intentionally?

     I know where my life has been. I not only see it but can still feel it, every morsel of anxiety and shame.  Hiding where I thought no one could find me; hiding for forty-two years. I’d spent the majority of my adult life trying to determine when I’d passed the point of no return.  But then one day it just dawned on me, like the light of elemental knowledge being plugged into my brain, shining a universal truth:  There was never a point in time I could have turned back.

      I just always was.