I’ve got a pretty stellar memory.  I’m getting older and things are starting to slip a little– I’ll open Google and forget what I was going to search, more often than not—but for the most part I recall details of conversations and events pretty well, much to the consternation of friends and family who get caught up in a situation of thinking things are one way when I pretty much remember every last detail. It’s never felt much like a curse; sure, at times, remember embarrassing situations with too much accuracy can be hellacious when running them back through my mind, but, I digress.

A few Saturday mornings ago, my dad and I drove through the snowstorm to take his aunt Donna to the airport to fly home.  Visibility was low, roads were pretty rough in general but the car was all wheel drive and didn’t struggle much at all with the journey. My dad commented on how tricky the roads can get in moments like that, and how you can’t control what other people are doing and that makes it especially difficult no matter how well you yourself might be getting around.

I replied “like the time you were taking me to work at the video store and we came over the hill on 68^th street and there were cars and people all over the road and we slid in to the light pole trying to avoid hitting anyone?”

He said “yeah…just ravioli everywhere.”

I remember that accident every time there is a big snow storm and roads are treacherous, because it was pretty traumatic.  We crested the hill, and, even though we weren’t going too fast we did have to crest that hill at a decent clip or we wouldn’t have been able to climb it.  Coming over the top, there were a cars all over the road way that had slid this way and that way and people…people trying to push cars, people trying to walk up the hill…and here we were, coming down the hill on our side of the road and all kinds of obstacles there that shouldn’t have been.  My dad hit the brakes and we went into a slide that ultimately landed us across the shoulder with my side of the car slamming into the utility pole.

The thing I remember most is a woman in the middle of the road who was walking up the hill stopping and screaming when our car hit the pole… and my dad saying “what’s she screaming for…we’re the ones that just wrecked the car.” Mind you, this wasn’t the time of cell phones yet, so, we got to a phone and called a tow truck.  I still went to work.  The car recovered.

But…the part I never remembered…in years and years of flashing back to this incident in times of major snow and crappy road conditions… was “just ravioli everywhere.”

I had heated up some ravioli for lunch and I was going to eat them when I got to work.  They were in a plastic container and they were the true casualty of this accident, because when we hit that utility pole they went flying all over the inside of the car, like some sort of Chef Boyardee crash test gone wrong.  In all the years since, I’d forgotten all about this pretty significant detail, but when I brought the wreck up to my dad it was pretty much the main thing he remembered about the incident.  It’s had me thinking ever since about memory and how it relates to personal experience.

We’re all writing our own script.  It’s not necessarily just snow storms and driving when we find in life how tricky the roads can get; how you can’t control what other people are doing; how especially difficult that can be no matter how well you yourself might be getting around; or, how your struggles in a given situation might have absolutely no impact on anyone else’s journey. So, while we tend to always see things through our own lens, the people in our life might focus on something completely different, and that’s OK, too. Just do you… you can’t control, or even know, what someone else is thinking or doing.  Take away everything you can from every moment, but, remember that we’re all sharing this experience and if you stop a moment and listen you might hear a different tune in someone else’s version of the song.

I’ve been listening to the same song over and over for days.  Sure, I let the album play a little further, or I skip back and let it build to the song I’m favoring, but it’s always landing there and I’m letting the emotion of the lyrics envelop me so that what I feel is a little less, and what I feel listening to this song is a little more.  It’s me,  slowly drowning in the moment, and then popping back up above the surface of the water at the last second…again, and again, and again.

I sat across the aisle last night from a young married couple and their little, maybe 2 year old daughter, at the Royals game, and it triggered all kinds of feelings in me. First of all, I felt like I’d just seen Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, because here was this young family and they were just so happy and together. Secondly, my jaded cynicism went straight to “look me up in a couple of years.” About the 4th inning, she turned to him and confessed that because she had taken tonight off, she wasn’t going to be able to take any other time off the rest of the month…and then he started grilling her on what other time she had taken off, and I thought “yeah, peeps, now we’re back to reality.”

Memes are so effective a communication tool because the common, relatable aspect in each one connects with such a wide (or sometimes specific) audience.

It’s really no surprise that everything I’m feeling right now, I could just chain post as memes and feel better about the day.  Writers don’t do that.  Words are our weapons; they are our strength; they are our consolation.

My nearly 2 and a half year relationship ended about a month ago.  Perhaps I should call it out as the 28 month old that it was; that seems fitting for something that never really matured the way I would have liked. It had been over far longer than that, but when you care about someone it’s hard to usher in the era of fault and blame without owning a little bit of it.  Our paths had diverged in the least likely way in the first place, and in her I had found a meaning and purpose I had thought long since extinguished.  I wanted to be something to her that she never really intended for me; she told me, as recently as 6 months ago, that I wasn’t what she “wanted” but maybe what she “needed,” and that she was settling because “doesn’t everyone?”

For a while now, when talking with friends about what wasn’t working, I would illustrate our connection by placing both my hands palm to palm, but one hand slightly lower than the other.  We were a good fit, but not a great one. I appreciated so many things about her that other people took for granted, and I always wanted to see her for what she was really thinking and feeling, but, here, I failed miserably.  When discussing the impending break up, she explained how miserable I made her most of the time, a feeling I couldn’t connect to because I didn’t see the situation through her lens.  In trying to be a solution to all of her problems, in trying to “solve” this issue or that issue, in trying to make sure if she wanted this or that she got it or if she wanted to go here or there, we would…I forgot the most important thing:  the person.  None of what I was doing for her made a difference because I hadn’t considered that the hole I was trying to fill couldn’t be filled with any of that.

For her part, she was trying to fill a hole with something akin to drinking vinegar when you’re craving a beer. Why I didn’t listen more closely when being told I wasn’t wanted?  Why was I so willing to accept a relationship where I should have known she wasn’t happy, even if you could scroll back through the last 6 months of conversations between us and think we were? I knew better; even though I didn’t know anything at all. I know the end of this relationship is a relief for her, rife with possibility; and that what I’m feeling…loss… is not anchored in truth but in desire.  I always wanted to matter to her in a way that was never even on her radar.  When she needed something blue and kept being given something red, the frustration mounted proportionately. In the end, everything I thought to be true was an illusion that I’m not near good enough a magician to figure out.

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.