The Mystery of the Hedgehog and the Silk Shirt

Nope. Not a post about Martin Freeman, although I do have to start with Sherlock. (It’s FOUR sentences. Deal with it.)

I watched “The Reichenbach Fall” again. I spent the entire hour and a half watching it from Sherlock’s perspective.It was probably more heartbreaking than watching it from John’s perspective. You finally realize how much John has changed Sherlock, and how much their friendship means to the man that doesn’t have friends.

For whatever reason, that made me think of someone: The Man with the Silk Shirt. (If you’re reading this, yeah, it’s YOU!)

Recently, an old friend decided to read all six years of crap that I’ve written here. Miraculously, he survived. Even more miraculously, he’s still speaking to me. I suppose that’s because he’s only mentioned once, and it was a nice thing.

Seriously, I wrote all this shit - I LIVED all this shit -and I still don’t want to go back and revisit half of it. I couldn’t imagine reading it without know what was going on at that point in time… some of these entries really need some context. This isn’t a blog full of stories that you could just breeze through. This is, and has always been, a cheese sandwich blog. I’m a cheese sandwich blogger. I was one long before the phrase was ever coined.

I went through the archives recently, just because. I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that reading this blog, man, is HARD WORK. And I applaud him, that crazy psycho.

So anyhoo… my point was…

He said that my entires about depression were very enlightening. That the blog itself explained a lot.

He and I. We have history. Our relationship was good. It was bad. It was terrible. It was awesome. And then it was gone. I wrote about him on That Other Blog. While I’m glad that he’ll probably never know what I talked about, or how openly it was discussed, I do want to drive the point home that even though he could have shattered me into a million pieces, he never did. No matter how bad it got, I never got mad at him… and I hoped that I never hurt him. I knew at one point that I was out of control. I just didn’t know why.

Back then, it was easy to make excuses. We had our thing when my mom died, so there was a lot of Ick going on. It was easy to blame her.

Little did I know that HE was responsible for planting the seeds of what would eventually become the overwhelming self-awareness I have developed since my official diagnosis.  Little did I know that a chance encounter with him would make me undescribably happy. I don’t want to/can’t/shouldn’t go into all the details… those are better shared in person, over burgers or something… but he made more of a difference than I thought he did. Than he’ll ever know he did.

(I had to confirm this by going through the paper journals I used to keep back them. I thought that over time, I had smoothed off all the rough edges, inflated the importance of blah, blah, blah, blahbiddity, blah, blah, blah. Nope.)

It was weird to look back on those depression entries today and try to read them through his eyes.

I have no idea what he saw in them.

I know what I see in them… but I have context.

He doesn’t.