Love in Fall

Soaking up the last of the autumn sun, she laid supine, her hair pooling atop the green grass behind her head. I watched as leaves, painted by time, made their way down to join her. She had her hands in her pockets, wearing just the corners of a smile. Her eyes were gently shut against the sun as if she was dreaming of something beautiful.

I stood there quiet amongst the tattered leaves blowing at my feet. Too inspired to move. She made me want to be a painter. To fight my whole life to recreate moments that photos fail. I felt disappointed with words for not living up to her. She offered more than they could afford. So, instead, I just waited, listening to the leaves whisper over the sidewalk and the street. I don’t know how long it was before she noticed me, only the feeling when she did.

When I was young my family drove 6 hours to spend Christmas with my extended family. Snow and ice on our way meant that we didn’t arrive until late in the night. I was too young to have expectations, but I think my parents were expecting to quietly slip into my grandparents house and sleep off the drive. Instead, we found the whole family there to greet us. The cheers and the smiles, that feeling of arriving somewhere you belong, that’s how it felt when she looked at me.

The smell of the sun in her hair when she hugged me. The smile in her eyes. The little laugh we both found to fill the silence before either of us knew what to say. She felt like home, no matter where we were, no matter how far apart the years had taken us. Something in her face said she knew it too, and when we hugged again we held it longer and closer than the last.

We talked over tea while the rain turned into snow. She was bundled up in a blanket from the house and I buried myself down deeper into my coat. There was enough to catch up on that the silence didn’t find us until the sun went down. Even that felt like a comfortable old friend, and we sat with it for a few minutes before either of us found cause to break it.

We were made in different worlds, her and I, and we found different worlds to settle into in our middle age, but our peices always fit. Considering all that time had changed, I think it shocked us both that it hadn’t found that too. There was something undeniably timeless about her and I, and maybe we’d always known it, but the last few years had only made it more obvious.

Shortly after we first broke up, back in high school, I discovered this David Gray song, “The Other Side.” The whole song is amazing, but the line that always got me was, “honey, now if I’m honest, I still don’t know what love is.” Everything about that hit so deeply. As someone who was kind of obsessed with the concept of love, it felt like an  incredibly profound admission.

Watching her stare into the distance, the moon reflected on her eyes, the gulf between when we last sat like that over a decade large, I realized that I knew now, and part of me did all along. Do I wish we had held on? of course. But realizing that had nothing to do with whether I loved her or not was how I knew. I didn’t love her for what she was to me, I just love who she is.

It’s why it hurt so much when she left, I knew that unless she came back, I’d always feel like something was missing. The hole she left was her shaped, and nothing else would ever fill it. Girlfriends, fiance’s, wives, they’re all readily replaceable titles, but there is only one “her” and knowing I’d have to live the rest of my life without that was devastating.

I’ve been around long enough now to appreciate the pride of that devastation, though. The slow return to the surface, and the depth of understanding that came along with the eventual acceptance. The love I found hiding under the rubble; the fear, the anger, and all of that sadness, proves I wasn’t just crazy, or infatuated, or both; love is real.

It transcends distance and time, setting and situation, presence and contact. They become part of who you are rather than just part of how you define yourself. That night, amongst the swirling autumn leaves, we were there because, in truth, we’d been there for years. Staring up at the moon crossing the sky and wondering where, and who, the other one was.

Back in the hotel, over bourbon, I realized that I’d never really imagined my life without her. Even hypothetically, after the fact. She seemed so elementary to my life, and I never really questioned why. I believed from the moment I saw her and never looked back. I’m glad I had the chance to do that. Not just to meet someone, but to have so many great years to love them like that. I don’t take it for granted.

I had a brush with death this year. I reacted in some unexpected ways, that, in retrospect, make sense, but I’m disappointed with myself for never the less. I dove face first, after just a few dates, into a “relationship” because I knew she couldn’t come back and I felt like I had to accept that. I had to try to make good on my promise to move on. To give someone else a shot to be the one.

In ways I’m glad that I did. I learned that the direction I was approaching my loneliness was all wrong. I wasn’t lonely because I didnt have anyone, I was lonely because I didnt have “her.” And maybe there are more “her”s out there, I’m absolutely willing to accept that possibility. I have to, if I’m going to assume she’s as happy as I hope she is. But I’m not going to settle for less.

I’m learning to be as happy on my own as I was with her. So if I ever meet some other “her,” or somehow she comes back, I’ll be able to be more than just the person they’re with. And if neither of those things happen, well, I’ll still be busy living a life that makes me smile. I always believed I was made to be in love, to build a life together, to be something that made someone else strong, but I think I was wrong.

I was built to love, like any of us were. Like all of us are. I just so happened to meet the first person to truly offer me that when I was 15. Maybe it was luck, maybe a curse, either way or both, it showed me that we’re more than these faulty cellular clocks, ticking away until their inevitable deconstruction. We’re more than we were, more than we are, more than what we think we may become.

We are built with pieces that fit together, beyond anything physical, but we’re whole, all on our own. Puzzle peices with full films on every one, every addition another perspective on a picture too expansive to imagine. It’s about finding the films that compliment one another, that paint a picture together, that feel bigger with each other. And if we only ever get one, I’m glad it was her. Even if we’re never together again. To have fit with someone like that is a feeling I’d never trade.

I watched the leaves fall from the trees outside my hotel window over coffee while I waited to head home. I thought about calling, but decided to wait until I was on the road. I had a thousand different visions of our future and none of them included this, but being fairly recently acquainted with the nearness of death had, in a round a bout way, encouraged me to appreciate the power and beauty of what I had.

I imagined her sitting down to her sewing machine, or toiling away at some persistent weeds in her garden. I saw her cooking breakfast, lounging on the couch with a coffee, or watching the sunrise from her porch. We were kids when we met, and we taught each other what love was by realizing that we had it. And I was proud to see, after all this time and growing up, that also hadn’t changed.

Some Mornings

Some mornings I wake up and dream I see her smiling next to me. Lying on her side atop a bathtub of sheets. The pride in her smile is so striking that for a minute I don’t notice that she isn’t really smiling at me. She’s smiling at him, and I had dreamt myself into his skin. It’s how I stumbled upon the painful revelation that she was probably too busy falling in love to wonder what it might mean to me. It reminds me of a Lumineers lyric, “the opposite of love’s indifference.”

I’ve rarely thought about it, honestly. What it actually took to do it, and what it took to keep it secret for all that time. To quietly pull the rug and abscond off into the horizon with someone new. She knew me better than I knew myself and she chose a stranger instead. The idea that the best of the best of me had come up short just cut too deep. Said too much.

Had she ever thought about calling? Wondered if my number was the same? Quietly convinced herself that I’d never forgive her and put the phone away. Did she stare a little longer into the rear view when they finally left town together? When she looked at that white dress the day before The Day did she wonder what ever happened to me?

I forgave her for all of it. Hid all those pesky questions beneath blaming myself and never really got mad. I had gotten that second chance to love her and failed to keep her. Now, all these years later, some mornings I find myself waking up in his skin, haunted by the smile she wore that first morning she woke up next to him.

Tonight, alone in my single bedroom apartment I wonder if she ever wakes up with me. Supine with her body draped across one side of mine. Adrift in the familiar curves the puzzle pieces of our bodies find. How long did it take before she let herself think of me. How long before she accidentally wished I was there?

I know the answers don’t really matter, but I think that some part of me sometimes still believes it might somehow work out. That Love really is something bigger than place and time, coincidence and chance. But even in the petrichor of these early pre-spring mornings the truth is an empty pillow and a quiet I’ve failed for years to fill.

Some mornings I wake up weightless. Untethered to the iron anchors I quietly forged with all those moments I knew I’d never see. Aisle walking. Baby holding. That moment when you look around the kitchen astonished by the life you somehow wound up growing into. Some mornings it’s just coffee and coat, office then home. Maybe I’d rather wake up with ghosts than wake up alone, though.

Frontiers and Dust Covered Stories

We talked through the orange dying of a day, poking at pachyderms to see where they’d run. There couldn’t be anyone less likely to be there than us and it’s easier to admit than we thought.

We’re enough of who we used to be that it’s easier than we imagined. Neither of us really knows what to make of that so we don’t. We just talk like the friends we’ve always been.

We’re older now, though, and so much different that it seems strange that it feels so much the same. The ache of that realization is only dulled by how good it feels to talk to one another again.

I know no roads in the frontier we’ve found ourselves in. Occasionally I wonder how many have ever even ventured into territory like this. For me to know, though, I would have to know where ‘this’ actually is.

Does either of us really want to know that? Time and life have stripped us of most of what we have to give to one another, but the specter of what could have been sings showtunes in the room next door and we pretend to only occasionally notice.

We share a dust covered story. One that ended abruptly when she found a new one to write. The story she wound up making her life. For whatever reason, neither one of us could stop wondering how ours played out, though. Which is how we wound up here printing pages with no idea where the story goes.

Of all the elephants we chased away, this is one that stayed. The intermittently inflating question of what in the fuck are we doing? There’s no roads here. No maps. No songs to sing along with or stories to relate to. There’s just blank page after blank page and our pens in our hands.

Plus, the ghost singing showtunes in a closet. Proverbially.

A Sense of Self

I’ve never been particularly good at being me. It’s one of the reasons I am still so heartbroken over the one that got away. The more over-riding reason being that she is the one that got away. However, I gotta admit that I used her to define myself.

Which isn’t to say that my definition was intrinsically linked to her, but that my connection with her allowed me to feel like I belonged, that I was wanted. I tested it more than I should have. Looking back at those cries for help, so many of them were really just putting the thermometer into the pool to make sure she still thought I was valuable.

When she broke up with me, I hadn’t internalized that definition of self yet. I didn’t believe that I could be what I was without her. She gave me a space to feel confident where ordinarily I’d be nervous and shy. She helped me find my artistic side, encouraging terrible song after terrible song. She was always my biggest fan. Even to this day.

Timing-wise, I can’t really decide if it was good or bad. Maybe nothing about this kind of stuff is ever that black and white. At any rate, I was fresh into college. The time when most folks look to redefine themselves. I did pretty well there. I was someone I’m still proud of, despite all his/my faults.

I started that old habit again, though. Defining myself by those around me. The IRV house and all its madness is the most salient example of that. Some assimilations were positive, like the publishing company. Then I met a woman and immediately started making her my personality.

She recognized that, and kept it mostly at bay, but it wasn’t pretty. And by all rights, neither of us should have been there. We were both looking for things we knew we wouldn’t find. When it finally imploded I was so sick of being lied to and cheated on that I just turned everything off.

I just kept my head down and went to work. Unbeknownst to me, I had begun the process of redefining myself. Which, it occurs to me only now, is pretty much exactly the same as how it looked in college. Absolute solitude, then a slow trickle back in of those that stuck around through the solitude phase and I come out the other side, more or less, with my shit together. For a while at least.

However, now that I’ve gotten some of my shit together. That’s just a part of who I am now I need to work towards a definition that isn’t such a tangible goal. Those have been cold and unfeeling. Efficient and purpose driven. I’m looking for the guy behind those goals. The version of me that doesn’t need to be busy.

I may have to start from scratch. It just takes time. Like all things do. Here’s hoping I figure it out. Something out. Maybe that’s my New Years resolution, figure out who I am when I’m not clamoring to figure myself out.

On Disappearing

Standing at arm’s length from the void, I spent the evening flipping wishes into the dark. I took to the night to retrain my perspective, remind my tired mind of what it means to be alone. A star in the firmament. The lone car on an asphalt river, where standing out feels like disappearing. Just a speck amongst a portrait of unknowable dimensions. Surrounded by troubles that towered like skyscrapers. Desperately reaching for ropes.

I thought about chance, that constantly flipping coin. The moments that make us and the life we lead in between. I was petulant. Angry at my cards. Seeing clearly again that my fate is quiet. My destiny drifts off into the sunset. A selfish playing out of time. A star amongst a trillion, faintly fading out. Maybe that’s what it all winds up being, but I believed in a life that didn’t feel that way.

The world is filled with mufflers, sirens, and tires, sounds that usually pass as silence in the city. I can’t sleep, though. I tell myself the whiskey will help, but between me and you, we both know that’s not true. It may have been believable for shots one and two, but number three was just me building a bridge into the dark. And every drink after was looking to wallow in the answers I found there.

I wanted clarity. Some way to conceptualize this loss that had never left, just collected around me. Maybe to finally prove the bruises were truly so good they were worth never healing. I wished for some perspective. On the decades of recovery, the gradual crawl toward understanding, and the subsequent loss of all of that. To remember how it felt to throw it all to the wind that one time that it worked, knowing bone-deep that I won’t even get the chance this time.

When I went back inside there weren’t any lights on just the dancing of shadows from a lit candle in the middle of the room. The sound of the fridge droning quietly. A palpable stillness. I poured another drink over some ice and resisted the urge to fill the silence with something arbitrary. Just another quiet night, another calendar X, nearly another year down. Another evening cursing chance and wishing it mattered.

Also, my tattoo looks awesome.

Tattoo’s, Satellites, and Smiles

A little less than 20 years ago 4 or 5 friends of mine and I went out and got tattoos. I had sort of stumbled into this group of friends that had kind of changed my life without trying to. At the very least, were around to help while I changed it. I felt like I was breathing fresh air after spending years underground and wanted to have something to show for it.

I got “Veritas” on my arm. Truth in Latin, because I believed that it had found me again. Truth. Depression drowns you in lies. Lies about who you are. Lies about how other people see you. You can logically know they’re not true, but eventually the lies get to you. Eventually they start to convince you.

I used to cut my arms. I did it for years. I was pretty fresh to stopping by that point in my life and the idea of putting the word “truth” over all those scars felt fitting. I don’t know that I really accepted the truth that I set out to, not completely at least. What the tattoo did was to remind me to look for it when things got dark.

I got an astronaut tugging a satellite last week on the other arm. I had probably been thinking about it for a decade. The line “It’s a lifetime commitment, recovering the satellites…” from the title track of the Counting Crows album “Recovering the Satellites” was the initial inspiration. Though it means something different to me than I think the artist intended.

It became my metaphor for my fight with depression. When I was fighting to get better I was ‘recovering the satellites.’ As if I had found myself scattered into the dark void of space and I had to pull all those pieces back together to be whole again. I tried so many times and watched everything spin away again and again.

Over the last year or so now I feel like gravity around me has mostly stabilized. It’s not where I dreamed I’d be, but I’m not unhappy either. I’m well versed in retrieving myself from the dark, and I know that “truth” better than I ever have. I’m not fixed, but I’m not sick either. I’m really glad I got the tattoo and I’m already looking forward to the next one.

I wrote below while writing the above stuff. I’m happy to be dipping my toe into more creative stuff again.

Lying sideways and wearing nothing, the sheets draped the most elegant waterfalls across her body. Lines of sunlight crisscrossed the bed as fall rose in the window behind her. I wanted to wake her. Tell her one more time that I love her. I wanted disappear into tomorrow with this obvious mistake of fate, and just pray that no one ever caught on.

Dust, swirling in shafts of morning made her look like a movie, projected across the white sheets. A slow motion moment that no one else in the world would ever see. It was a little like witnessing history. Knowing you’re living through a moment that you’ll remember forever. Somewhere decades down the line this is a place I’ll find when I look back on our lives together.

When she opened her eyes I smiled so wide that I might have cried a little. When she smiled back it felt like the whole world waited for me to be done with that second. Like the universe would forever be a couple moments behind so that I could hold onto it for a little longer. I was too choked up to tell her, so I kissed her instead.

I don’t really remember what we talked about or even what we did that day. Only that moment when the wheels of time lost their grip against a smile.

Waiting for Sunrise

We had been on our backs staring up since sunset. The clouds lit on fire before turning to smoke snaking lazily across the sky. The fall cold descended on us until we were wearing all our layers and still shivering aloud occasionally. It would reoccur to one of us that we hadn’t planned well enough for this and for whatever reason it was a little funnier every time. We talked about space, my job, her kids, politics, her job, until we both just stopped for a while. Not for lack of material, we just hadn’t felt the need to fill in a space and let it linger.

I didn’t mind the silence with her. Being around her felt like the freedom of being by myself, while with someone else. Which, I suppose is the point to the whole thing, right? I guess I just hadn’t really imagined it was real. Add to that the fact that little old me had stumbled upon it and it got even more incredible. I never felt like it was my responsibility to entertain her. It isn’t that we didn’t fight, because we did, but that we had made ourselves a little world where we didn’t need to be anyone else.

When the moon came up we both smiled when we noticed it, appearing from behind a line of clouds. She pointed at it and smiled silently at me for a moment before turning back to it. Since we had spent so long so far apart it was the one thing we could look to when we really wished we could call the other. The one thing we could quietly believe that maybe, just maybe, the other was wistfully gazing towards it at the same time. Maybe wondering about the other.

I realized she was looking at me, I don’t know for how long, and when I turned her eyes shined with her tears reflecting the moonlight.

She said, “I’ve got to go,” and grimaced, as if the words hurt a little coming out.

“I know.” I replied and smiled my best smile at her.

I wanted her to know that it was okay. That I’d be okay. I was okay before her and I was okay after her. What I know I will probably never get over, is what I was when I was with her.

I slept in my car that night. I’m not sure why. I fell asleep for a while, but woke up in time to watch the sun rise. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but there was something more to that picture that morning. The clouds turned blue and the sky turned orange. I got out of the car and sat on the hood to watch, longing for a cup of coffee and a cigarette but I hadn’t smoked in years. I chuckled to myself when I caught myself wondering if she was looking at it too.

Across the field clouds were born from the wet grass and hung in trees, as if they had come down from the sky to rest for the night and got caught in the woods on their way back up. She would’ve liked that, I thought, and I let myself smile. I heard the world waking up around me and since I was in no condition for rush hour traffic I packed up and drove home. I knew it wasn’t the last time I’d see her but it didn’t make it any easier.

The trouble is that nearly everything had changed in our lives, we were strangers in a lot of ways, but we didn’t really change. Not that we’re the same people as we were, but that I know in my bones that I’d notice her cross a crowded room from 50 yards away even if I had never known her before. No doubt. I thought about the sunrise all the way home and how much I wished I could tell her about it. The fact that I knew she’d love to hear about it, also, didn’t make it any easier.

There was this poem in the liner notes of a Pearl Jam album back when music came in elaborate packaging. It ended with these two lines “should have stayed for the sunset, if not for me” that kept threading their way into my head. Failing to fall asleep on the couch with very few hours of sleep it suddenly made sense to me in this encompassing way that it never had before. I was sad she couldn’t stay for me, sure, but maybe more than that for the beautiful moment she missed. Maybe for all the ones we’d already missed and would continue to miss as the years wore on.

But maybe I was right about the sunrise like I was right about the moon, That somewhere out there she’s looking at it too. And maybe she can’t help wondering about me too.

1 more day until the tattoo.

Airplane Shadows

Leaning against my balcony railing it occurred to me that finding her was like getting caught in an airplane’s shadow. I started wondering about the likelihood of ever having that happen again and it made me wonder what it was like for her. That thing that I believe to have been different about her and I, did she find that again? I know it’s different, but does it fill that void we left in one another? She’s literally the only one who knows, but I can’t ask her and she can’t say. Even if she knew and I wasn’t afraid of the answer.

Fall mostly stripped the trees, leaving vast carpets of orange and yellow leaves. Made that much more brilliant by rain. I was watching the last of the orange fade from the sky, breathing the last warm breeze we’d likely have until next year, and turning over the unlikeliness of it all. What we were, what we really had, what it all meant. What it was when we were living it, and what it means to us now.

I remember writing her that first letter from an old brown Lazy Boy of my Dad’s. I didn’t think she’d date me, but I liked her so much I had to ask her out or it would have driven me crazy. I thought about her so much that I was pretty sure I would never be able to concentrate fully on anything again if I didn’t. I guess I just want to know, in the end, did I grow out of that or just lose it. Did it leave with her, because of her, or just through the passing of days?

Some days I can’t help feeling like a bankrupt lottery winner. That age old question ringing in my ears that anyone who loses something beautiful asks, what’s worse? To have never experienced it? Or to suffer the absence of it? For how long? Would you even be able to see anything as that beautiful again if it were in front of you again? And if not, does that change the math on the first two options?

I get my tattoo in 7 days. Sorry it took so long for me to get this one out.

Pleasantly Painted Prisons

I fell asleep early last night and had this long troubling dream. Since I fell asleep early I also woke up really early and I used that time to really dig into the fact that my most significant relationships, most of the women I’ve loved, have ended when they cheated on me and left. At some point it’s hard not to wonder if maybe it’s me. My friend once remarked that I ‘have a type, women that cheat on you’ and I was mad at the time, but I couldn’t really argue with him. With a track record like mine it’s hard to. In fact the ones that didn’t cheat on me, I broke up with.

So, at some point it’s hard to refute that I’m playing a pretty big part in whatever it is that’s taking me down this overly familiar path. Everyone single, not widowed, can say they’ve never had a relationship that really stood the test of time. It’s like saying something was in the last place you looked. Of course it was. Otherwise why would you keep looking? I’m single because I never had a relationship last, sure, but it’s more than that in my head. It’s this pattern of loss. Failure maybe.

I’ve always referred to myself as a hopeless romantic, but I think I fit that definition now more than ever. I don’t have much real hope left that love’s going to work out for me in the end, however, I’m still this person fascinated by love and the extremes of human emotion and attachment. I still wish I had kids. I’m even kind of mad at the guy that broke what few hearts he did. Would I have been so willing to throw those relationships away if I had known?

I threw away some really caring relationships for this solitude. To make myself available for people that squandered what those I threw away cherished. It’s that Alanis Morissette brand of ironic. The kind that makes you wonder on those long quiet nights if maybe, just maybe, you fucked the whole thing up. Holding on too long, letting go too soon, I just never seemed to be on time to any of my relationships. Now I’m getting to the point where the sort of life I imagined has gone fading into the distance like a train disappearing into the horizon.

So, what am I now? I was once a guy who believed in all of it, love, fate, destiny. Now, I’m sure none of that is real. We’re animals atop a spinning rock in an ocean of nothingness. There’s no magic here. It’s so easy to believe we’re special, that we have a destiny somewhere out there and we’re just waiting for the moment it all makes sense. It doesn’t, though. It’s just us, and we’re clumsy, dumb, and scared. Sometimes all at once. I still believe I can love and be loved, but I don’t know how it’s ever going to happen again.

The betrayals built the walls. The solitude painted them pleasant colors. It’s still a prison I built myself. There’s no mistaking that. I am sure that I had my reasons. There was something I was looking to protect, but I’ve protected and hidden it so damn well that now I don’t even know what it was. The place it once had in my life has been filled in with this dark kind of cynicism, anger, desperation, and sadness. It makes me wonder if I’ll even be able to let someone in if they show up. Or did I brick up the doors now too?

Again, faithful reader, I apologize for dumping on you. I’m just not as creative at spinning all of this into a meaningful metaphor just yet. I usually wait until it occurs to me, but per my promise to myself, I write whether I’m inspired or not. And don’t mistake all of this as lamenting or complaining about the status of my life. I’ve got it real good. There’s a difference between feeling sad and feeling empty. I used to feel sad, but I don’t really anymore. Not without cause, at least. Empty, though? I still feel empty. I thought it might pass when I fixed the sad part, but it hasn’t.

Here’s hoping I have something sunnier next time, more insightful maybe, or at the very least something with a little more panache.

Honorable mention: 17 days from now I will have my new tattoo and I’m still playing a shit ton of bass.

Chapter 37

I’m just a few occasionally lit windows these days. Watching fall fold quietly around my little part of the world I’m busy reading other people’s stories or tangentially plucking away on a bass guitar I desperately want to learn how to play. I constantly worry that I’m running out of time. That the memories that keep bubbling up in my mind from 15 or 20 years ago can’t just be the best of them. That somewhere down this, sometime race-track, sometime obstacle course, but always winding and dimly lit road, I’ll find moments as full as those.

Was it actually better when I was more willing to just run into things? To blindly bounce into adventure with no consideration of the potential outcomes. I won’t pretend I wasn’t a lost kid then. I was. It drips from the earlier pages of this thing. It’s just… what do you become after all that? After you sit amongst the flames of your own hopes and dreams, stinking of gasoline and carrying matches. After you’ve rebuilt. After you’ve put what’s left of them back together and find they don’t really look at all like you remember.

I never thought I’d be alone. I feared it sometimes, but I guess I never really thought it would happen. I think I kind of figured that if I made it past 27 then it had to have been on the back of someone I loved, otherwise there’s no way I would make it. I did, though. Only broken hearts to show for the love I made, but I survived. I made it out alive. I’m still here. I’m just not really sure what to do with myself now. I’m a row of occasionally lit windows. A passing shadow behind the blinds. Is that a life?

I used to talk to my future self in this thing. I don’t think I ever believed he’d hear me, but here we are. The kid that started this thing thought for sure he’d be dead 10 years ago. 10 years. They tell you that the years start going faster, but by the time you really notice for yourself you’re 37 and wondering if there’s any time left to make good on some of those promises you made to yourself a decade or more ago. Things you’d get around to just as soon as you had some time. I’ve got the time, but most of the promises are gone.

So, if you’re listening future me, I’m sorry. I wasted a lot of your time. I, honestly, didn’t know what to do. For a while there it felt like there were too many roads, then not enough, now it’s just this winding and dimly lit one, stretching off into the shrouded distance. The road never imagined, as it were. I suppose we’re probably all on one of those to differing degrees. And I don’t mean to sound sad about it, I don’t think I am. I feel more surprised, taken aback, at how the story turned out on chapter 37.

When I used to consider suicide in my younger more depressive days I warded it off by telling myself that I couldn’t quit until I found out if it ever got better. You know how in movies they always get the crap beat out of them before they finally win the big game or battle? Something like that. A lot of stuff really has gotten better. I’m happier with myself than I’ve probably been since she left in college. There’s a hole, though. I try to ignore it, but it’s there regardless, and it never stops feeling empty.

There’s this movie that plays sometimes when I sleep. Sometimes I’m glad to see it, other times it’s enough to drive me crazy. Things are different there. Some distant cosmic string with some different version of me brushes up against this one and I am utterly unrecognizable to myself. Either self. We are the same person, but complete strangers, and some part of both of me knows it. We’re both scared of each other. We both know that too. And we both think that’s a little ironic. Only one of us is jealous, though. Only one of us fears when that movie ends. Only one of us wakes up wishing, in a way that hurts, that they could watch it again.

I’m just a few occasionally lit windows these days. A bit of thunder, rolling through the rain. A rumbling in the distance like an early evening train. There’s no telling if it’s arriving or departing, but there’s something sort of soothing about it all the same. I’m what comes after what came before. The current sum to this ever more complicated equation that somehow equals me, but never any more. In this strange little story, that I’ve been written into and made, I’m chapter 37, and I guess I’m just wondering what’s left to say.