As you slide back into that old skin, it just don’t fit the same as before.

“That’s the only skin you get” says the creator. “You’ve just got to fit in it as best you can.”

So, I’m a case of old skin for an old ceremony but it is a young head on old shoulders. It’s a whole new, empty head. a few memories of what went before, but still kind of empty, waiting to be filled with second life souvenirs

Eight months in recovery mode and tomorrow I am in work mode. I’ve been repaired, I am ready to function. Not as new, not as before.There’s not much of me from before, though people expect you to be as you were before. I can’t say that I’m empty, like a shell waiting for a soul, that’s full blown PTSD. I’ve met and worked with PTSD veterans. Those guys really are empty shells and even if a vestige of the past remains, it is infinitessmal, requiring painstaking detective work to find what larger part of the past it comes from.

I’m not a shell waiting for a soul, I’m kind of a box of bits. I’ve got bits that I can’t assemble and I don’t know where they go and I’m not even sure if I need all the bits. I’m not sure I need all that stuff I can remember. Not sure If I really need any family memories. Do I really want to remember dead parents? Why build a cult around the dead when I’m trying to rebuild a life? And why even bother with the living when some of them have been dead for years?

You don’t want any of the negatives that went before. You don’t want the people who have hurt you or have pushed you to the edge until you fall off – yes they didn’t push you, you fell, but sometimes falling into the unknown is far better than going back as before.

I’ve got ghosts of people living and dead that haunt around the periphery of this life. They can stay as ghosts, because I really don’t care.

It started when we all started talking. There was a month of “rehabilitation” at the local hospital for all us recently almost deceased cardiac types. A month of sport and half and advice on how to live well in this new life, and we all started talking about how we got where we were and

A heart attack isn’t just a heart attack, there’s years or months of crap that leads up to it. It’s the way you lived before and why you lived that way. A heart attack is your body, your brain, your soul, all screaming that everything is wrong and the best way to solve it is just die. But when you survive you’ve git to come to terms with your former life. It’s more than what you eat, drink or smoke, or how far you run or don’t . It’s about everything from the person you are and how that affects your life style.

When you survive, there’s a whole heap of psychological stuff to sort out. You try and ignore it, but you can’t start this second life as a sequel to the first life. The heart attack is a rupture and this second life is a new story.

I got no new skin. I’m back to work for a whole heap of old ceremony with people who expect me to be as I was before because they haven’t changed and therefore neither have I – so they think. Ghosts of the living that haunt my new life. They can stay as ghosts.

Even if this makes no sense to you, it makes sense to me, even though, when I see the world around me in this new life, I seem totally to have lost the plot. Finally, why the photo of the tree? Because it is exactly how I feel and it was one of the last places I went before I had my heart attack.