Whitney wants me to write about our baby, but I find it very hard to write about someone who I have not met, and about whom I, generally, have no reference point other than the knowledge we share at least a portion of some very superior genes.
I would think it comparable to writing a report of some sort about someone trapped in a cave in your neighborhood… (not as unlikely as it sounds in our area of Kentucky, due to our system of underground caves and the local peoples’ proclivity for doing stupid things in a dry/moist county).
There are several things that are clear concerning this trapped man in the cave:
-He’s definitely in there (a couple soil tests and an expensive cave specialist made that abundantly clear)
-It’s definitely a dude in there (we’ll leave the details of this knowledge out at this juncture).
-How he got in there is an unverifiable mystery, but not entirely a mistake.
-He may have memory loss, so it’s probably best no one ever tells him how he got in there… ever.
-Communication is kind of a one-way street.
-You hear and sometimes feel him poking around in there through the walls, but can't get to him.
-Although he is way down in there, you can pass him food and nourishment through a tunnel beginning at a massive opening at the north end that rarely closes up.
-He has to come out of there eventually (I would suggest the same way he got in there, but, remember, no one’s sure how that happened so we may have to look at alternate routes).
-There are going to be pain-killers involved in his exit.
-Everyone will be overwhelmed and happy when he finally escapes.
-Everyone hopes he emerges with all emotional, physical, and intellectual faculties completely and totally intact, because that’s the most important thing in a rescue of this nature.
As you can see, there’s not a ton to know about this constricted cave character until we actually get him out.
I mean, how do I know I’ll even like him once he does escape? How do I know he’ll like me? Will we have anything in common? Will he be a lot like me, and is that a good thing, necessarily? What if he starts yelling at me for no good reason, because he thinks it’s my fault he was trapped in there in the first place (it better be my fault, Whitney)? How am I going to react to the effects of his PTSD, all the screaming and the nightmares? I feel like he’ll want to live with us, at least for a little while, and I wonder how that’s going to go? How long is it going to be before this cave man gets a job and pulls his own weight around here? There are just so many variables and things up in the air that, until he’s actually here, in sight, it’s hard to know what to think about first.
All I know is that we can’t wait to get him out of there, clean him up, take him home, and love him like we’ve never loved any other stranger before.
And he can live with us for at least until he can take care of himself again… even if it takes ten years.
Oh, and I give him about four more months before we drop some serious cash and get that cave specialist to blast him out of there, because this is taking forever…
… time to go…
Joshua
Declan's Bed
28 weeks
