5:00 am

I placed myself back on the front lines of the war this morning. Turning on my computer and clicking on that first file was probably one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I was sure that Eyes Only had died in the ambush along with Peter and my legs. But now as I review everything that has come over the informant net in the last three months I know that I will never abandon my responsibilities again.

I am still alive and being alive I am still involved in this world. The thugs and the powerbrokers didn’t take a break while I wasted these last three months getting my head on straight. They were hard at it carving out pieces of the world for themselves. Evil does flourish when good men do nothing. I’ve had enough of doing nothing, of nursing my own wounds, of hiding from the world.

Yet even as late as last night I didn’t think I could do this. Bling asked me again why I didn’t bring Eyes Only back as he has asked me every day since I revealed it to him.

I answered with a lame excuse about not having the energy for it anymore, about being an idiot to think I could change the world. I told him sarcastically that I did manage to change something. I made a mess of a lot of people’s lives including my own.

What a load of crap!

Bling essentially told me as much. I could see the frustration in his face as he pulled out the full-length mirror from the bathroom and asked me to look in it. I took a quick glance at myself and looked away in shame; shame at what I had done and shame at what I was doing now.

Bling insisted that I look again. "Really look," he said "and tell me what you see."

Did he really want to know? Then I would tell him. That would get him off my back. The crap flowed out of my mouth easily enough.

"I see a man who screwed up his life and the lives of those that relied on him. I screwed up the one thing I thought I was good at and it cost my friends’ lives. I’m working so hard to gain some freedom from this chair but sometimes I feel I deserve this steel trap that I’m in, that I’m being punished for my arrogance in thinking that I could change the world."

Bling didn’t buy it at all. "Let me tell you what I see." He said, then he described a person I barely knew. He described a man with courage and determination, a man who was willing to fight battles against impossible odds, a man who had paid a heavy price for freedom. He said he would follow, fight for and die with that man. As he said this he was looking directly at me as if I was that man.

I used to think that I was a person like that, but now all I was seeing was a damaged shell. I stared in that mirror for hours searching inside myself for the man I used to be, the man I wanted to be.

So today I decided I will be that man. I will do whatever it takes. I will stay engaged in the war. If my legs are a casualty so be it. If I lose more friends who want to fight, so be it. If I die, so be it.

I will never give up the fight.

Never again.