INTRODUCTION

Seven days make a week, and even the ostrich knows that he has to pull his head out of the dirt before he can breathe.  Unfortunately, this was not innate to me and it took many years to learn what the ostrich knows from birth.  You can hide yourself and drown yourself in sand, but you cannot breathe or live that way.  Even microscopic organisms respire, oh why, oh why, can’t I?

Warning bells should have gone off when he was slurring his words on every phone call, got lost on his way to my apartment in the cozy and familiar Midwest town in which I was a student, and especially when he shit my bed, which occurred surprisingly early in our relationship.  I myself cannot adequately explain how a man you are just getting to know, no matter how charming, can shit your bed in the middle of the night in a drunken stupor and not have that be the end of the relationship.  I cannot explain how I could choose to marry a man that had less restraint with his bodily functions than a hemorrhagic EBOLA patient.  Some voice should have shouted “do not walk down this path,” but it merely whispered and stubbornly contested my mother’s reproach.  I should have immediately recognized that he was nothing more than a drunk in this town, and I was indeed something more.  I was a doctoral candidate and not a girl with nerd or future breast cancer survivor stamped all over her.  Why couldn’t I see that then?  Why did I think that I could save him like some lost puppy with his sad puppy dog face?  Christian or not, there is no glue or tape or lengths of string that could bind together and fix his brokenness.  Neither could I tie together my own hurt with my crusading love.  Eventually all that could stand between us would be a sucking vacuum filled with lies, hatred, and broken promises…a vacuum I might be too scared to climb out of because I no longer knew anything else, a vacuum that threatened to consume me and the ones I loved.  So I pray, give me this day my daily bread and Lord deliver from the swirling vortex…Amen.

There is no chronology to this story.  I may not have come unstuck in time, but nonetheless, I am telling a story that has no middle, no end, no beginning.  I am sure that all true stories are like this.  Yet as a scientist, the clock is my master.  I wear a watch, a cell phone, and a timer, and I check them all several times a day, and sometimes for no reason at all.  I put things in order of occurrence, date, and incubation time.  I record minute details that bore even me, and I make observations for everything, while attempting above all to be clever and insightful without sounding overly passionate and perhaps a little crazed.  Yet, I still wonder why there aren’t more shows about “real” scientists on television.  I think that I am hardwired this way, meaning I do not know how to behave otherwise.  I can sense time fairly well, and I can usually guess what time it is, unless I have become so absorbed that I loose track of time.  I am still not sure what it means to loose track of time, because time never looses track of me.  And yet when I peel off the lab coat, everything falls to hell and I cannot explain it.  I can critically analyze everything and everyone around me, but I am a vampire at home with no reflection and no way to gauge myself.