Poetry: Finn.

Writing: The first page of a new chapter in the same story.

Listening To: “If I’m Jaded, You’re Naive…”

Contemplating: women, love, music.

Tomorrow, I turn 46. There’s a certain point in your late 30s when you suddenly start thinking that you very possibly might have lived past the halfway point of your life. When you’re in your 40s, conversely, every birthday brings new thoughts of modern medicine and average life spans and contemplating the joy of friends who beat life expectancies or cancer odds or walked away from freak accidents unscathed.  Every time I mark another year, it seems that it’s perfectly reasonable to think that 46 is the new 35; that it’s perfectly reasonable to expect to live to be 92; that it’s perfectly reasonable that the best days, months, years are left to come.

But I digress.

I played an old album today, one that includes a song that is closely attached to a past love.  She won’t read this, so those past loves who do read this, don’t kid yourselves: I’m not talking about any of you. (Could I possibly drip any more Rob Gordon douchiness than that?) Music is a thing of beauty. It anchors itself to memory and the soul, and quite often I find I can’t escape one without considering the other. Every woman I’ve ever been enamored with for more than an afternoon has at least one song that conjures up visions of past glory and emotions so thick I have to squeegee them right off my rose colored glasses. I’ve been in love a time or three, and I’ve also spent enough time in the so-called  “friend zone” to have my jersey retired.

Again, I digress.

A few months ago I was darting headlong into my future, into a new adventure, having mustered up every last speck of trust I could find in my soul in order to settle down with a woman I fully believed I’d make it into the final act with and hopefully take our final bows together.  Something shifted, not even overnight: no, in an instant.  There were many mitigating circumstances I’m sure, but, in the end, the best I can come up with is she simply changed her mind. In the past, this would have amounted to a significant amount of effort on my part spent proving her wrong. This time though, it was just so much more of the same, especially with her.  We had been here before.  Fool me once, yada yada yada.

I found myself thinking that maybe, just maybe, all the past failures had much more to do with me than I ever am willing to admit.  Oh, I’ve nuked plenty of situations full force and I have, eventually, owned every battle as my own undoing. This time was different, though.  Knowing her as well as I do, seeing her as clearly as I always have… and she would willingly acknowledge as much… I understood, maybe for the first time in my life, how little control I have over any of it.  See, I loved her endlessly.   I gave her honesty, integrity, and, perhaps most importantly, forgiveness and humility. I trusted her with all of me, damaged and undamaged, believing that we were in this thing together.  It would be very easy to throw myself yet another pity party and lament the fact that I have found myself abandoned, wholesale, again.

She doesn’t deserve any of that.  I think I finally have reconciled myself to the fact that I can only ever be responsible for me, and if I lose too much sleep over someone simply changing their mind then I am going to live well past 92 and unhappily all the way there. My gut tells me this: I know what is and what isn’t, and in the same sense that it isn’t my place to tell someone else that what they think or feel is simply wrong, it also isn’t my place to abandon self to become some sort of bandage for a hole in someone else’s soul. Maybe I’m just (almost) 46 and too tired to fight. Tonight, though, I’ll fall asleep on both the right and wrong side of the bed, something that only a single person ever really understands.