Can’t help but smile looking back on old times when you find heartfelt words from days gone by. At one’s own views that seemed so different back then. Even if they weren’t tremendously long ago.
There were a few times when your words met screen before WordPress. Chance led you to one of them that in retrospect… God heard. That ‘chance’ led you across it again tonight. Nostalgia of Nostalgia. Long-winded and pitiful, with Alcohol fueling your emotions and typos as you poured out your soul. Only thing changed are names.
Nine years ago. Such a different time. Such a different… you. You sure weren’t a kid, but you had felt left behind by so much. You had no idea what was in store for you. So naïve. God answers prayer. Sometimes the way we want. Others, the way we need. His plan unfolds in strange ways sometimes… but it always unfolds… for weal or woe. Sometimes both.
* * *
(Sunday, March 31, 2013, 3:52:25 AM)
I remember 1984. Not the Orwellian 1984, mind you, but the actual year 1984. I was a child, and I had such late night thoughts. Just like now. Back then, I would smuggle a radio walkman (or whatever it was called then) into my bed and listen to 104.7 WNOK as I just let my mind wander.
I heard The Cars so often. Seriously, I heard many, many songs during those nights when midnight seemed so amazingly late, but it was The Cars that stood out. It was “Drive”, a romantic song that reminded me of the girl that I’d eventually be lucky enough to wind up with. Pretty amazing for a seven year old kid, but it was what it was. It was “You Might Think”, right out of the crazy music video, which ADHD-riddled me sang at Nursery Road Elementary School occasionally and the kids all agreed with my interpretation of the lyrics. It was cool, though.
It was so many songs, but for some reason I always remember listening to the Cars; as if that radio station had an infatuation for them.
To this day, there is something about listening to that band late at night, just as I am to this day beholden to the night when it comes to my time. I feel the night, and don’t want to waste it. I am the only child who feels so in touch with myself at night. And back then, the Cars were invited.
That was almost thirty years ago. Thirty. Years. I cannot believe what is happening. But here I sit, on my 36th Birthday listening to a new album done by The Cars, and I feel like a seven year old kid again as I listen to “Take Another Look”. Same band, new music. Romantic, possibly even sappy one could say. But it just fits the night like a glove, along with my eagerness to embrace it at the expense of the sleep that everyone else in the world (it seems like) treasures.
I love sleep. I hate sleep. It’s relaxing and I need it. It has absorbed approximitely 12 years of my lifetime.
I’m 36 years old. No wife. No kids. Nowhere close in my personal or professional life near where I wanted to be even at my least ambitious dreams. As I sat in the abyss of depression with no home of my own with my tail between my legs at age 30, I contemplated having a more imposing professional life by 33.
I’m 36 years old. Past halfway to 70, and she’s STILL not here. And neither is the RG that needs to greet her.
I’m still that seven year old child listening to The Cars instead of going to sleep. And the strangest thing about it is that…I’m fine with it. I’m fine with the loneliness; the “missing her” (whoever she is). I pray for “her” occasionally – ‘Lord, please see to it she had a good day today”.
But there’s something wrong with me. It’s almost as if prefer the pain. No, not almost. I… I do enjoy it. I enjoy being romantic with the idea of a girl that isn’t here. It’s so much easier for me to see her in such an intangible form a la Blanche Fleur that I don’t even try to find the girl that might actually be available.
The funny thing is that this is combined with a level of self-confidence, or even arrogance in myself and “who I am” that I cannot – or will not – accept any woman that doesn’t meet my “standards”. Am I a self-obsessed beyond-shallow man who won’t give a woman a chance, or am I a decent man who realizes how shallow he is and doesn’t want to hurt anyone by opening doors I don’t see myself walking through?
I had so much fun tonight being someone I used to be – a man with no pressure just having a good time meeting people and being 1995 one more time.
It’s bizarre. When I was a young kid I was so hyperactive and extroverted. Then that all changed in that car accident that changed my life; I became more quiet and introverted.
Who on earth am I? Am I the grown up version of the kid who enjoyed kids thinking he was crazy, or am I the grown up version of the kid who was so quiet and scared of rejection he could barely stomach the notion of asking SOS to be his “girlfriend” in the 6th Grade?
Who on earth am I?
Am I the man who lost his home due to bad decisions? The man who had to leave that first 10 year job involuntarily and screwed up his whole financial situation as he ignored reality?
Why can’t I do things? Why can’t I FIND HER? Or even someone to fill in for a while?
Who am I worried about hurting? Me or Her?
Oh, yeah, that’s right. NO PARKING SPACES. All of them have rings or boyfriends. And yet, I don’t care when it comes to having a good time with no ill intentions (as I try to be). I had so much fun tonight, and yet there is no real chance of any development of anything with the women I met. No chance of a relationship with Lisa of Channel 5 News either, but THAT was refreshing.
Where is KJ from high school? Either 1994’s or 2013’s will do. Why can’t I thank her for kicking my ass out of rampant introversion?
The amount of time between my car accident and my going off to college was NINE YEARS. Nine. That’s the blink of an eye, and is frankly terrifying to contemplate. It’s March 30, 2013. Right now, nine years ago, I was managing at first gig in that last summer (2004).
Why do I insist on punishing myself? Because I have decided to , of course. I am a pathetic horndog. I play, I do everything I feel like, and I hurt – and have hurt – women by doing this.
Am I abstinent because I believe it’s best for me, or because it’s what I need to do, or because I don’t want a reason to give a “normal” girl a chance?
I have no idea. I have no idea why I’m in such a good mood tonight, and yet I’m listening to a sad song on repeat and wondering why I’m NOT WHERE I NEED TO BE.
God, please help me. I’m not ready for her. I’m not ready to be 36. I’m a child still fighting sleep to listen to The Cars, and I LOVE IT.
Lord, please help me. Please give me the drive and direction to find what I need to move forward in life. If I am ever destined to taste the lips of a woman I am so lucky to call a wife, please help me. If I am meant to die alone, I think I have insulated myself in enough self-obsession over my (for lack of a better term) “martyrdom” that it would be alright.
But part of me sees her. As in the woman that could make AQ look like just another girl. A woman that would be the missing piece of me. I have no idea who she is, or how on earth I would become a part of her life. I have no idea if she’s even real – if I end up alone, she obviously wasn’t.
Everyone has someone, God. Everyone (at least to me) that matters regarding my status. DP – Married and a Doctor. CF – Married and a Doctor.
Me? A Letdown, in every way that matters.
God, I accept the person that I am – the man you have created. I know I am a failure in so many ways, but I also feel myself and that late night feeling of listening to The Cars and I wonder – Who Am I?
Whoever she is, I love her so much. So much.
I’m so scared. So alone. Why can’t I find her? Why can’t I even really start?
And yet, I’m so content with my life. So comfortable.
I want an AQ. Not her, but an AQ. I want that partner. And I don’t know what on earth I’m doing to make that happen.
God, give me strength. Please. Give me wisdom, and patience. God, please just…..
…find a way just to be “RG”.
Help me. Please. Help me be happy. Help me become the man I should have been years ago – but with a decade and a half of wisdom, or whatever.
Dont you want take another look away?
Dont you want to play the whole thing down?
Dont you want take another look away?
Dont you want take a look around?
I love The Cars. And late nights. Wherever she is, I hope she finds me soon. If she’s a girl that can honestly make my jaded heart start beating again, she’ll be worth giving up whatever I need to give up to be her man. If there is a girl out there that actually can foil my immature aspects of physicality, please God let me see her.
Please, God.
I can walk through life without her, but I can’t truly “live”, at least not the way you would have me live.
Please, God. help me.
I can’t live without you. Help me find someone I won’t hurt, and I beg that she be someone could hurt me if need be.
Please God, help my friends open up to you as you have seen me open up to you.
Please God, help me. If MP and KP have become divorced, I don’t even know if marriage is what I search for.
I don’t know. All I know is that for the first time in my life, I’m 36, and I haven’t done jack squat.
Dont you want to take another look away?
Dont you want to play the whole thing down?
Dont you want to take another look away?
Baby have another go around….
God, please help me. Please.
I love her so much, the woman I don’t even know yet. I pray for her to have a “good day”, and I just don’t know what you have in that big dorm room?
God, I would trade every year I’ve had since my freshman year for one more freshman year.
And when I was a kid, I swore I wanted to make my own rules so much it never occured to me that people would or could respond visially. I’m so selfish, so lazy, so corrupted.
Please help me to be less selfish. Please help me. Please jsut help me.
Please God. Please. Please. Just one girl I could date that doesn’t have a ring on it.
Somewhere out there a soul that is as decent as Flame, someone who liked me so much like CS. Someone that isn’t the Lime in the Coconut.
Please God. Just…Please…
I love you.
Thank you for everything.
* * *
Wow, lolz… so self-absorbed… but alcohol and loneliness can do that. Poor fool had waited so long to find one he’d fall in love with. You can’t be this RG anymore. And you’d never want to. You read these old words and marvel at how pathetic they sound. In fairness, you didn’t write stuff out often and rarely did when you weren’t hurting, but… we’ll just say you’ve gained a lot of wisdom since then.
But there is still something so… lost about it all, especially now. She has literally no earthly idea how happy she made you when you finally found the ‘her’ that was. How many nights you chose to be alone rather than settle, feeling in your veins that one day you would find ‘her’.
And now, she’s gone, and you still feel so… many things. Fortunately not as naively and difficult to read as how you cried out in 2013, but… it is what it is. Anger, regret, loss, hope. They cycle daily. Your thoughts fill with her. What you could have done differently. What you wish you’d said. And now once more you reach out to God. You still pray for her, but she’s literally chosen to go back to the hell she tried to escape from.
You just wish so many things. Anger leads to you wanting to send the pics she’d sent you of her bloodied and crying to the police. To her family. To his ex wife for whatever use she had for hurting him. Just to damage the parasite that had the gall to contact you like you were even capable of respecting him.
No. He’s thrown her under the bus many times and would again. Probably saved his own pictures just to hurt her. That and Romans 12:19 were what stayed your hand. Every second you think about him is one you’ll never get back, though, and hate has no place in the heart of the kind of man you try so hard to be.
In 2013, she was in your future. Now, she is in your past. She awakened something within you that makes you incapable to go back to the pitiful state you were in that night. Thank God.
Where that takes you is up to God, who you’re trying to put in charge. That has (so far) led you to Lady… but it’s just far too soon. Heal. There’s a chance you haven’t learned a lesson you needed to.
God’s purpose in pushing you over and over to read The Book of Ezra is now beyond clear. It was about Crow. How everything came together after you had waited so long, suffered so much, and finally all fell into place exactly as destiny would have set the pieces up for. And… Discord. Disunity. Minor issues arising to become major ones and before you know it… life-changing levels of failure and disappointment.
If you can make it, Thursday will be a week without dreaming of her, and you’ll silently open the channel again in case she needs prayer. Otherwise, you gave her everything you were. Gave her everything for a new start. To Grow and become More together with you, leaving those old demons to the past.
She chose to side with those demons and rejected every single ounce of your love, future, happiness, home, family… everything – save wanting you to go back to watching helplessly as she plunged back into the abyss you suffered so long and hard to pull her from.
No. Stop. Being positive…will steer your dreams away. Thoughts of your future. Of how far you’ve come since that 36th birthday.
And no matter what, thanking God for answering your prayers and choosing to put Crow in your life regardless of her choices. She helped save you from that miserable time. She gave you battle scars of maturity and wisdom you would need to be ready for the one yet to come.
Now go to sleep… dream of the future once more… and Grow to Be More…
It’s Not a Frame of Mind 