He was tired.

He could feel the heaviness weighing on his eyelids.

Shit. He could feel it brewing behind his eyes.

It had been a while since he had slept well. Most nights were restless. Tossing and turning between the sheets hoping to find some sort of serenity.  Searching, hunting down, that one spot where he could find an escape.

A place where he could close his eyes and leave the world behind, even if only for a few moments.

“Tonight,” he thought, “maybe tonight I will get some goddamn sleep.”

He had resorted to taking sleeping pills to help him sleep better. One night he would take two, the next night he wouldn’t take any. The night after he would take three. There was no pattern to the consumption of them. He took them if he wanted to.

Tonight was different, though.

It was warm out, but the breeze that streamed through the window was different. It was a different breed of animal.

It was colder.

Summer was coming to an end.

It wouldn’t be long now before the sun began to have less of a bite. His skin wouldn’t singe red when the sun was high in the sky. That he was happy about, but he enjoyed the warm feeling nipping at his skin. He wasn’t built for the cold. He made that known any time someone struck up a conversation with him about the weather during the winter months.

He felt his hands grip the plastic on the back of his rolling chair as he pulled it out from underneath his desk.

It was 3:00am on the dot now.

The electric clock on his desk reminded him of this. The red numbers stared back at him. He wasn’t sure if they were taunting him. Reminding him that he couldn’t escape it.

Not tonight.

For a moment he was weightless as his body fell into the chair. It had been a long time since he had sat at this desk. Time used to fly when he sat here, but for a long while, he had not a single reason to be sitting there.

The words, you see, had not came to him in a long while.

And when the words aren’t there, you cannot force them out.

He knew this.

But there was feint smells of wood to his breathe. It was smoky almost. The whiskey. He left the glass on the marble counter in the kitchen. The bottle was left elsewhere. Not by choice, but in about ninety-six different pieces scattered across the floor. The glass almost joined to the broken glass count, but his mind drifted to the desk and the words inside his head before he could smash that onto the floor as well.

The whiskey was coursing through his veins now. Some of it permeated within his fingers, but most of it resided right above his eye sockets. He was light headed, maybe it was from the bottle smashing, but he knew the rest of the whiskey would be lost to the bathroom floor at some point in the near future.

That is, if he could even make it to the bathroom.

He opened up the only side cabinet that still creaked open and pulled out a notebook he had kept with him for some time. The cover had some wear and tear to it, but he liked it.

It wasn’t old. It was filled with the “patina of a bygone era”.

Yeah.

That’s what the notebook was.

A bygone era.

It made sense. Memories had been the thing to fill the many pages of the notebook. No ideas or thoughts or sketches. Instead, it was simply filled with stories that had been of the epoch of yesteryear.

He found a new page.

“Pen,” he thought, “I need my pen.”

He opened the cabinet again. Leaning over he almost fell out of his chair as the wheels began to slip out from beneath his chair, but he caught himself. His hand slid into the darkness of the cabinet and shuffled back and forth. Finally, after a few moments more, the pads on his fingers felt the smooth cold metal of the pen his father had given him. He grasped it tightly and readjusted his body to the desk. It was then that he realized just how much he had had to drink that night.

He was still sitting in the dark.

The red numbers on the clock laughed louder now at him.

Click.

On went the tiny lamp that cast a soft light over his desk.

“Fuck, I need to get to her.”

The clock ticked again, laughing at him, and it was now 3:17am.

He thought of her asleep in the other room. It had been a little while since he had felt her skin against his as they slept. Her hair was soft and he breathed its scent in every night they slept together. She would hold his hands against her stomach. They would laugh and speak softly about how one day there would be something there, again, that one day they would replace…

“Replace?”

The truth was he could never replace what he had lost there.

One night there was a kicking. A soft foot could be felt against her stomach. It was there. He had felt it. He had felt her kick him as she held his hand to her stomach.

Their little girl, his “sunflower”, had been there with them one night.

They both had felt it.

But now they slept alone.

They were together, but they were alone.

This was when the sleepless nights began.

It was his fault after all.

He didn’t see it coming.

He didn’t hear the blaring horn wail out and cut through the silence of the night.

If only he had seen the lights.

Maybe there would still be three people sleeping easily in a bed.

The sound of the crash wrung through his ears and reverberated off of every synapse in his brain.

He felt something replace the sleepiness that resided behind his eyes, now. It was the tears swelling.

He heard the sound of the airbags explode out of their resting places. He had tasted and smelled that elusive white powder as it spread throughout the air. He had heard himself ask her if she was OK.

He didn’t hear a response.

The ink was pouring out onto the page now.

All of it. Every thing about that night was bleeding blue from the pen onto the yellow tinted pages in the notebook from a bygone era.

It was an apology.

It was a love letter.

It was a proposal.

It was all of these in one.

It was his offering to try again, to accept him and his mistake. To forgive him for the many things he did right and not the sole thing he had done wrong. It was his asking for her to hold him the way that she used to. To kiss him the way she used to. To smile at him the way she used to. To love him the way she used to.

But how could she?

You take the one true thing in a woman’s life away from her and watch how quickly the light in her eyes shuts off.

Watch how quickly her pupils die and the beautiful blue that once surrounded them empty into a void of steel gray null of any emotion.

She barely ate now.

She barely spoke.

She barely moved.

One night when they had met he recalled walking with her on the beach. He mentioned to her how he loved the darkness and the times he could slip away from the neon lights of the strip because he could see the stars so clearly.

“Look,” he told her as he gripped her hand tightly, “they just hang there like lanterns in the sky.”

He had that engraved on the inside of her wedding ring.

Like lanterns in the sky.

She told him later that that was the moment she had fallen in love with him.

But the light in those lanterns turned off the same night that the light in her eyes turned off.

Early on things were how you would think they would be.

Friends and relatives would stop by the house to see how they were doing. They would bring food so the young couple would not have to burden themselves with cooking or fending for themselves after such a loss. They would offer to take them out to dinner. Or maybe to a show.

Maybe, their friends thought, that the neon lights and an enjoyable evening would help keep their minds off of what had happened, but they did not get it. They could not get it.

How would they even begin to understand?

To her, something was taken from her. Something that had been with her.

Shit.

It was her.

And it was him, too, but a man could never understand the attachment that a woman has to her baby. It is that instinct that kicks in that they must protect it and fend for it and care for it and love it unconditionally until the day you die.

It was the last unspoken agreement we still had as human beings.

The promise that we would love what we bring into this world.

To her, that was all she had ever wanted. Ever since she played with her dolls as a little girl and held them to her chest as if the cotton that filled the rag doll had been her own lifeblood.

And for him it was his little girl.

All of his friends had said they wanted boys.

“It would be so much easier,” one of his buddies had once said, “no boys, no periods, no drama.”

To him, though, it was what he wanted.

He had wanted a princess.

He used to have dreams when he and her would lay together about a beautiful little girl that would grip his hand and ask to go out early in the morning to watch the sun rise.

God, one night her face had been so clear to him in his dreams it was as if he could reach out and touch her soft cheeks. Her eyes were green, just as his were, and her hair was so blonde, just like her mother.

“Jesus,” he thought as he tried to bring back the image of her young face sitting next to his in his dream as they waited for the sunrise.

Right now, he could barely see the words he was scribbling as the tears swelled and began to blot his vision and run down his cheeks. The drops fell off of his jaw and chin and blotted the blue ink on the pages.

His hands trembled and he wondered if she was awake in the other room.

If he could just fucking crawl up next to her. Maybe she would feel the tears. Maybe she would feel his pain and know that he was sorry. That he would physically reach into his soul and pull out thirty-five years of his own future and place in her stomach just so he could feel that kick again.

Just so he could see one sunrise with that beautiful green-eyed girl.

But he couldn’t do that.

He couldn’t reach into his own life supply and he couldn’t dare crawl up next to her.

The whiskey had gotten to him now.

It hit him like a freight train.

The emotions and the anxiety and the constant scribbling had gotten his heart pumping. His body was warm and his head was light.

Ever since the accident he wasn’t the same.

One thing that remained was his ability to be in control.

That was the irony, he noted, that the one time he wasn’t in control was the moment when his life changed.

When he was in front of people he looked like the same guy.

Was he the same guy?

Not a chance, but he couldn’t show that weakness to people. He was never one to show his weakness. In private, however, it was a different animal.

He was a different animal.

He broke down into fits of tears and gasping for air. He threw-up often as he replayed the scene in his head. That was the problem.

He remembered it all.

The sounds.

The taste.

The white mist of powder.

She didn’t remember anything.

She blacked out. So, she filled her head with what the police report said.

“Driver must have fallen asleep… drifted… reckless driving.”

If only he could take the video recording that he had firmly implanted in his brain and play it on a screen for everyone to see. Then they would know that he was awake because he remembered every goddamn second of the accident.

He wasn’t asleep. He didn’t drift. Shit, he was a pacifist. Reckless?

He couldn’t explain what had happened. Better yet, he couldn’t explain why it had happened.

It just did.

He couldn’t control it.

The clock laughed at him once more as it ticked to 4:49am.

He missed her.

He missed everything about her and she was only fifteen feet away from him through two doors. He sat in silence to see if he could hear her, but there wasn’t even a shuffle.

The alcohol had really gotten to him by now. He looked down at the notebook and tried to read the words that he had been scribbling for the past hour and change. Some words he couldn’t read. Some were smeared by the tears that had made their way to the pages and by his hand pressing over them as he wrote. Some words, however, stuck out.

I’m sorry…

Please…

I lost her, too…

But this was a bygone era.

The story had been written.

Now, he was just reliving it through the eyes of a lush sitting at his table getting laughed at by a three year old electric clock.

He had no soul left to salvage.

He had no dignity left.

He had no spine or desire.

The light in his eye, at 4:56am, turned off, too.

He let the pen fall from his grip and onto the tabletop. He turned off the lamp. He unplugged the clock and pushed it into the garbage can that sat next to the desk.

He stood up.

Pushed the chair in.

And went to lay next to the girl he had made fall in love with him.

What difference did it make? He had lost it all by now.

He wobbled back and forth in the short distance. Before he opened the door to their bedroom he leaned against the wall and took a deep breath. His hand turned the handle on the doorknob and the door opened silently.

He gazed in before stepping into the bedroom and noticed how quiet it was.

She wasn’t even making a sound.

His feet shuffled over the hardwood floors as he crawled into bed quietly with her.

He laid his head to rest on a pillow and extended his arm to wrap around her.

But she wasn’t there.

She hadn’t been there in weeks.

Months.

It had been years since she lay next to him.

“A bygone era,” he whispered quietly to himself as he drifted off to sleep, hoping, wishing, praying, to see that green eyed, blonde, beautiful, little girl once more as she waited for the sunrise.

I told her that I wanted to try writing at some point in my life.

The feint, dim, yellow light shone over the table.

It was an exact replication of the light that sat on my desk. Its shade was a mix between brown and maroon.

It was almost a clay color.

But as we sat there, her eyes looking back into mine, it was almost as if I had no fear in admitting I went wrong somewhere in my life path.

I had no fear in saying that what I was doing was just filler.

I wanted to write.

It’s so odd how we are told throughout our whole lives that we must aspire to find a job that is right for us.

A “job”.

It’s as if we were born onto this earth solely to serve a purpose that can be defined through our job.

Somewhere, I always believed, we went wrong.

Somewhere in the timeline of man, we fucked up.

We are born and tended to.

We are given a childhood where we can have playdates: stack blocks, dress dolls, build spaceships and odd environments out of Legos and Lincoln Logs.

We attend school and often despise it.

Why?

Because we are kids.

That’s why.

We want to play. We want to dream. We want to draw and create and be and love and live and experience and laugh and see what each day has to offer.

As we get older we tell ourselves that we must find a place in this world.

That we must find a job.

That we must find a way to occupy our time on this earth so we are not a waste or a let down.

It’s as if we are born and owe the world something.

We are given a life to owe the world a life.

We are born to work and to “pay our dues”.

I ask my friend why he won’t travel the world.

“I like America,” is his best response.

I shutter at the thought of his whole life wasted without seeing the Taj Mahal, or the Serengeti, or the giraffes of Kenya, or tasting the beer in Germany, or seeing a game of soccer in England, or making love to a woman in Barcelona, or dancing in Den Bosch, the Netherlands.

We wait for the weekends; a two day retreat.

When it comes to an end, we reminisce and relive the weekend on Monday, the day we all despise. Come Tuesday, we no longer remember the past weekend. Come Wednesday, it is mid-week, “almost there,” we tell ourselves. On Thursday we wait for Friday and on Friday we wait for the day to end to start the weekend.

Rinse.

Repeat.

That is it.

We pay our dues and fail to live.

We are alive, but being alive does not mean you are living.

I woke up one morning and decided that words were it.

They were what I loved.

I love the kids I find myself standing in front of.

I love holding the door open for them to come into the room to start class and for them to leave to end class.

They give me their attention as I stand in front of them and teach them about the history of the world; the story of the planet they inhabit and the people who made it into what it is today.

I find myself laughing when I discuss topics with them or answer their questions.

I genuinely care for them.

But these words in my head, the words that are dying to be put on paper, the words that are pouring out right now.

Those are the things that have the passion.

These words, they are the spark to the kindle that is my mind.

I formulate these sentences in my head every moment of every day.

It is a disease.

It is something I cannot escape.

I love words.

It is an addiction.

I listen to a song that makes me feel something inside.

It reverberates throughout every fiber of my being.

But that feeling is the same feeling I have when I write words on paper.

Or when I hear the constant “clack, click, clack” when the pads on my fingers hit the keys.

My eyes follow each letter as it appears on the screen.

I sit here waiting.

Waiting.

For the words to form something that can show me the way.

These things, these words, they are my life.

They are where I will “pay my dues”.

I am just waiting for them to be let out.

That hue…

That yellow dim hue of a dinner table lamp.

And having somewhere there, across from me, that makes me want to do more, to give more, and to strive for more, make me admit this.

All in a tavern.

Over dinner.

It’s funny how stories work.

 Humans love stories.

Now, let’s see if I can conjure one of out of thin air.

Let’s see where my story goes. 

Let’s see if my story leads me to the point where I can create someone else’s favorite story.

But sometimes those words do not come so easily. Sometimes words aren’t meant to be placed on paper. Instead, they are sometimes meant to dance around in our heads and tread gently on portions of our brains just to keep them fresh and new. 

This piece was based on a dream I had once that haunted me for many nights. It was a reoccurring nightmare that I would have. It was a story where I would just drift above and see this story unfold. I would see a person lose everything and be left with something amazing. I would wake up and wonder why that would happen. I would wonder how someone could push on after something like that. I never finished because the words ran short and the inspiration fell through. 

I truly did want to finish this and maybe one day I will. Maybe one day it will be someones favorite story. Then again, as it is, it will always be someones favorite story that was never finished.

I simply wanted to share it.

It is a story of love and a story of loss. It is a story about having everything and then having nothing. It is a story about how our life unravels before us and how we never see it until it is, sometimes, too late. It is a story about how our life never really stops and how our life never really begins. It is a story about the past, the present, and that weird little moment in between called the present.

It is a story about a little girl who grows up with her father after her mother passed away during her birth. It is a story about the moment she realizes her father loves her more than anything, but cannot love himself anymore after living a life without the thing he needed the most. It is a story that tells of the struggle of trading one world for another without ever agreeing to it. It is a story about how to love and how bad it can hurt and how difficult it can be to stand up again after your legs have been taken out from underneath you. It is a story that is written for that single moment when Layla sits next to her father, Eric, and tells him that she loves him and that he has done just fine… and that it is OK to love again, to live again, to be happy again.

As it is… It’s just a story. And humans love stories.

I hope you enjoy it, and sorry for the absence.

Things We’ve Loved & Lost

1

Eric had rested his fingertips against his temple. His elbow was positioned on the ledge of the car window and his eyes trailed blankly along as pine trees passed by just outside of the window.

He would always wonder: how come he could never just stare at the green of the trees as they trailed by? His eyes, instead, would always catch one and follow it until it would be lost to the corner of his eye.

The car pulled through the streets as his father-in-law drove him back to his house. It was 10:30pm and the darkness had consumed the inside of the car. Eric’s face was lost to the night as it invaded the car. There was no more light in his life. It was gone now, but when the street lights flashed their dim yellow light through the windows, Eric felt his eyes close automatically to block out the intrusions.

There were no more tears left to cry and the burning her felt behind his eyes was a constant reminder of that.

He couldn’t focus on anything but the pine trees and the words in his head. He could only think of those words and how they would never materialize on the pages he promised her. He could only think of the promise that could never be fulfilled; Eric’s promise to write about the birth of their child for his wife, Kenzie.

“It would be your own little story,” he told her originally on their way to the hospital, “that you could re-read whenever you wanted.” It would be a story that was penned solely for her. It would tell the tale of how Kenzie smiled when she first held their daughter in her arms. Eric would have written about how it felt to be crouched next to her bedside and see her brown eyes look over their daughter, only moments after she was introduced to this earth.

It would be, Eric promised, waiting for Kenzie by her bedside table when she returned home from the hospital.

The table, Eric thought, that he could never look at again because it would forever be too empty. It would always be missing something. It would be miss those words. The promise.

Everything went just as it should that morning.

Kenzie woke up in a frantic rush. She could not find any words to say to alarm Eric of what was happening. It was in those moments of panic, it seemed, that the complexity of the human brain can do no more than to repeat only one word over and over and have that symbolize every single manic thought that passed through ones brain.

“Eric,” she started, “here! Here! Here! Here! Here!”

Eric realized what was happening despite the lack of detail as to why Kenzie was awake and shouting. It was June 8th, and their daughter was about to enter the world.

They rushed to the hospital. Kenzie was panicking, not knowing what to expect, it was in that moment of chaos and uncertainty that Eric made his promise.

“Baby, remember when we decided to try?”

“Try for what?” Kenzie muttered through heavy breaths.

“The baby.”

“Yes… I was scared beyond all…”

“Yes,” Eric cut in, “I know you were scared because you didn’t know if we were ready.”

“We were in a different place nine months ago, Eric.”

“Yes, I know, but that isn’t what I am talking about. We never would have been ready, but we are still here and this is happening.”

Kenzie looked over at Eric and held her look unsure of what to expect next.

“But we tried and we are here,” Eric’s eyes connected with hers, “and I want you to know that no matter what I will never let you go through this alone. We will never be ready, but I will be there, always, to go through it with you.”

She smiled.

“I know you love when I write,” Eric continued, “so, how about I write about this all when it is over? I’ll write about what it was like for me since you always were fascinated with the idea of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. It would be your own little story…”

Eric brought himself forward in his memories to the moment he first heard the air rush into his daughter’s lungs. She was so tiny, he noted, but the wailing of her screams as the first batch of air filed into her lungs, and then back out through her open mouth, was impossible to ignore.

He removed his fingers from his mouth. He had been biting his nails without realizing it and now placed them on the bridge of his nose. Tears felt as if they were swelling, but Eric knew well enough there were none left.

The image of her eyes scanning over their daughter is the only image he had now in his head. It was in moments like that, the moment he saw Kenzie looking at their daughter, that Eric found his life in a state of perfect harmony. It was in those moments where all of one’s dreams come true. The thought of what that moment would look like had passed through Eric’s mind before. Some nights he stayed up, feeling Kenzie next to him, resting, as he would try and paint the image of what his daughter would look like. What would he say or if he would even say anything at all occupied his thoughts before he found rest many nights, too. Yet, in that moment, when it finally came, Eric could not remove his eyes from Kenzie and she could not remove her eyes from their child.

Eric knew that Kenzie’s world and everything she ever desired was right around her in that moment. He knew well enough that all of the times he had promised her the world if she asked him to get it were now apparent and at her fingertips. Kenzie, Eric began to remember, carried his sunflower with her for nine months. Not once during that time did Eric wish Kenzie would calm down or relax or to stop being so random or “bitchy” as one of his friends had labeled it once. Eric had watched Kenzie place her hands on her stomach as she walked through the house. He saw her step around the house, her feet patting the wood floors in the den. From the doorway to their bedroom, Eric had listened to her many times as she rested in bed and sang softly as the baby lightly kicked.

The sound of the tires as they turned against the wet pavement was what Eric heard now.

He was brought back to reality and the present moment.

The rain continued to fall on the hood of the car and each drop reminded Eric that he only wanted to know why this had happened. Why Kenzie had died only a few hours after Layla was born.

2

Growing up in northern New Jersey brought with it many challenges, but also many chances to succeed. Eric van Vliet grew up in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. A wealthy town located in Bergen County that saw him come across a few more problems than some of his peers. This dilemma, however, did not stem from Eric being a trouble maker or a deviant. In fact, he was noted early on in life for being talented in several areas. Mostly there was a keen interest placed on his athletic abilities on the pitch and on his academic abilities in the craft of writing. The adversity, however, that Eric would come across growing up in said town was that he was the minority.

He was dark skinned. Eric, as he liked to repeat to his friends in high school, was “not black” but “an olive-brown”. Extensive Google research one evening, actually, had allowed Eric to form and coin that as his skin tone.

His father, Ruud, was from The Netherlands. A first generation American who was born in Zandvoort, a coastal town located in the province of North Holland. The surname van Vliet meaning “from the water” was only a brief introduction into the rich history that his fathers family had held on the North Sea. His mother, Abeo, but called Abby, was an American citizen. Both of her parents were African born, but upon marrying had sought a new home and had settled in Rotterdam for a few years before moving to Atlanta wherein Abby was born.

Both his father and his mother both were of dark skin and despite his small claim to an African heritage Eric often just claimed to be fully Dutch without thinking things over.

When Eric would be accepted into Princeton University and was asked about his upbringing while at a party during his first year, he would speak of how grand some of the homes were and how the schools were well off and how everything seemed as if it fit just perfectly into that small town mold everyone desired. But the town held a vast sense of wealth and riches behind closed doors. In fact, Eric only lived there for because his father had inherited the family brewery located back in Zandvoort. Ruud had passed a majority of the responsibilities onto his brother while only holding onto a small share of the business. This was where most of the family’s income came from. The move to Franklin Lakes was originally a choice made by his mother and his mother only, but to fend off boredom, and to keep alive his interest in the beautiful game, Ruud would still work a few hours a week coaching a U-12 soccer team that met in the park behind the library.

In time, though, Eric would begin to tell the hardships of being raised in that town and being one of the few residents with dark skin.

 “You see,” Eric would begin with a slight smile, “When you would get your year book each year come June there would be about three black kids. Now, don’t get me wrong, it was just the town, but people would always joke about how there were entire rows of Asians. You know, Jamie Lee, John Lee, Yu Lee, and then it would jump to Stephanie Lu and Kento Lu and Katie… You understand?”

Some people did genuinely understand. Some people understood because, as he sat at a bar after getting out of his evening classes, he knew that the people he was telling the story to were the students who filled in the other rows in the year book.

“You were the norm in that town,” Eric would begin.

“How so?” one of his friends would ask.

With a big smile Eric would then say, “Well, because you’re white.”

After a few beers his friends would of course laugh. Eric was not a person who believed skin color was anything to base the foundations of a friendship or relationship of off, but if anyone had any doubt as to why he told the story in the first place it would soon be satiated once he had placed his beer back on the table and let out a slight sigh.

“You see, there in that town, the columns of the yearbook were filled with your everyday small American town kids. But dotted amongst them there were the three black kids. Keep in mind, I have dark skin, but I am European. There, though, I was considered black. So, my first year in high school, right, I am in a US History class and the teacher is going through the Civil Rights movement.”

Eric would often without noticing adjust his stature at this point. He would place his elbows on the table and lean forward.

“So, the teacher is going on about Plessy v. Ferguson and Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X at the Audubon Theatre, you feel me? And he looks at me and goes, ‘Eric, who is someone from this time that inspires you?’ I look at him and tell him that the time doesn’t generally interest me. He goes on, ‘well, why not?’ I just shrug my shoulders. This man comes up to me and goes, ‘you should care more. They fought for your right to vote!’.”

No one would laugh here. Mostly whoever was around him just held a look of confusion.

“But,” Eric would continue, “the man sees that I have taken a weird look to whatever he had just said and goes, ‘oh, wait, you live in Franklin Lakes, you’re not really black.’.”

Here, a few listeners would shake their head with slight chuckles while one or two would voice something along the lines of “that’s some bullshit”.

It was stories like these that left Eric with a bitter taste about his hometown. The town was lovely, but simply was not where he needed to be. “Something about the vibe of the place,” Eric would say to his mother, “just isn’t me.”

Eric was enrolled as an English major at Princeton. He was an excellent writer who had several of his works syndicated for online sites ranging from self-expression pieces that would be featured on the front page of Buddhist based websites to short stories and prose pieces that were included in several compilation pieces while only in his first year. Not to mention that the short stories and prose that didn’t make it were often polished up and sent to various competitions or message boards, or simply just to friends, and always met with positive response.

However, in between the three years Eric had been at that party telling his friends about the teacher who told him to be proud of his non-existent past relatives who gave him the right to vote (“A voteless people is a hopeless people!) and the time he met Kenzie, Eric would come to make a new home in Princeton.

The town itself held such history. Having toyed with the idea of double majoring in History, Eric would come to look into Princeton’s vivid history often on his own time simply out of boredom. That was who Eric was, though. He was the kid who always sought something new and would want to learn everything there was to know about something before moving on to learn about something entirely different.

Outside of its history, Eric loved the way Princeton felt once the sun had set and the streets would come to life with fellow students and townspeople. The town itself was built around the university and its stature. Small roads cut in and out of major roads and down each pathway was something new to find ranging from a sweets shop to an ice cream parlor that was noted nationally by GQ Magazine. It was in these tiny, tucked away, escapes that Eric truly found love, both literally and figuratively (Eric would meet Kenzie in the Princeton Record Exchange, one of the towns worst kept, but still absolutely amazing, secrets.).

He was a Princeton Tiger now and enjoyed every moment of it. His talent on the soccer field was matched by his teammates, but it is worth noting that he was now playing alongside students who were born and raised in cities such as Marseille and Braga, even Newcastle. Eric was now teammates with students who had held summer trials for European power houses like Borussia Dortmund in Germany, or Lille in France, or for the greater Manchester clubs: City and United. Eric, however, never trained alongside the Citizens at Carrington in Manchester, or with the Germans in Bavaria. Eric held camps for kids and worked on his writing, but mostly filled the time by writing articles for a soccer website.

He didn’t mind his role in the team. In fact, he came to enjoy the game more from the sidelines. Eric’s father had been the one to originally push him into playing soccer. Ruud had played professionally for HFC Haarlem for several years. Eric had come to love the game on his own, though, and took to the field with enough confidence and poise to get offered a scholarship to Princeton. His future, no matter how skilled he was with the ball at his feet, was always in writing. Eric had known this from the second he first put pen to paper and began to write stories, but he would always have a love for the game. Watching the game unfold from his front row seat on the bench, and occasionally on the field, he would come to appreciate the gracefulness found in seeing his friends play with promising futures that only began to be written on those training facilities in Europe.

“Three miles,” I thought.

It would be 2.4 miles, actually.

The walk was calming and I found myself rambling, just emptying my thoughts and views through a phone.

It is funny how it works out. How we have these ideas, or thoughts, but we cannot fully describe them or put them into perspective until someone else, or something else, does it for us. We see a scene in a movie, or hear a verse of a song, or a paragraph in a book, and then all of a sudden we think to ourselves, “That is what I have been trying to say.”

This happened on my said walk.

Buddhists speak of life as a system of never ending struggles. They speak of life and how it is built on the premise of suffering and desire. To escape suffering, we must escape desire. This belief follows along with a simple saying that I hold true to myself, and often remind myself when I feel pulled towards something I may be unsure about: Remove yourself from temptation and temptation will cease to surround you.

We wake up each morning and have the ability to choose what we shall make of our day. Each day is a blessing, some say, but to others one day may be a curse. It may be a day filled with pain of a bygone era or time where we are forced to swallow our pride and push forward, wading through the thick underbrush in an attempt to simply reach our own bed again at night where we shall rest and escape the often rough realities that can plague one’s mind all in the span of a twenty four hour period.

It is hard, almost unspeakably difficult, to remove yourself from desire. That is why few have been able to achieve that status that one man, Siddhartha Gautama, reached many moons ago. He sought enlightenment and gave it to the world when he achieved it. In doing so, he became the Buddha, but he also gave everyone on earth a chance to achieve it too. Buddha is everyone and anyone. Each one of us has the opportunities to reach our own place of solace, and sometimes we choose to embark on the crusade towards that place. Yet, during that journey, we are forced to realize our flaws. We begin to see ourselves for who we are and what we truly stand for; what defines us. We make the hardest decision: to love ourselves.

To love who you are is to say that you can be flawed, but that you accept that.

It is to say that you have made mistakes, but that you accept that.

It is to say that you can always improve, but that you accept that.

It is to see yourself as a broken person, but to accept that.

It is to see that this journey we take, no matter how alone we may feel, will never be walked alone because we are bound to people.

We are not alone in life.

Never are we alone.

We are bound to people all around us, both present, past, and future.

Several movies highlight this effect. Meet Joe Black and 500 Days of Summer come to mind first.

In the former, a man is in a coffee shop and meets a girl. She is in a rush and sits down in a hurry. Soon, the two are talking. The man makes an immediate impression on the girl and soon they are enraptured in each other, but the reality sets in that they are both on separate paths right now, and that they must depart, for now. The man and the woman exit the coffee shop and turn to face each other once more before they possibly leave each other behind forever. When they turn away, they begin to walk. A disparity grows between them with each step. After a few steps, the man turns around and looks at the woman as she walks away. He smiles, and then continues on. The woman, right after he turns to continue walking, turns and does the same. She, for a moment, entertains the thought of chasing him, maybe to say one last goodbye, but she quickly shakes her head and brings herself back into the moment. She turns around and continues to walk.

The man crosses the street and is hit by a car, killing him.

In the latter, Summer and Tom are the lovers, but their romance is cut short, or at least cut short in the opinion of Tom. Summer desires a new adventure, and becomes bored of Tom. They sit in a theatre, towards the end of the film, and watch The Graduate. Tom, a hopeless romantic, believes that this movie shows true love. He believes that it shows two people who escape together and beat the system to live happily ever after, but as he watches the close scene, he notices that Summer is crying. She ends the relationship shortly after the movie.

The two would grow apart, but eventually Summer would invite Tom over for a party. Tom, in his head, creates two worlds: one which is his reality, and one which is his dream. In his dream he is talking to Summer and making her laugh, but in reality he is leaning against a wall, alone, holding a drink. In his dream, he touches Summer’s cheek and kisses her. In reality, he sees that she is wearing an engagement ring. Tom runs from the rooftop and walks home alone. Tom would find himself sitting on a park bench one day in the future overlooking one of the city’s skylines. Summer calls to him, “I thought I might see you here,” and Tom steels himself as she approaches to sit next to him. They begin to talk. They speak of how she is married now, and how she never told him. He said how he never will understand how she never wanted to be anybodies girlfriend, but now she was someone’s wife.

She replies, “It just happened.”

“Right, but that is what I don’t understand. What just happened?”

She tells him that she woke up and was sure of something she was not sure of with him.

Tom breaks, but goes on to say how the worst thing is that he realizes now that everything he believed in was bullshit, how love and destiny was bullshit. Summer disagrees, and tells him he was right all along.

Summer begins to tell him that she was sitting in a deli reading a book and then all of a sudden the man she would marry came in and sat next to her, and the rest is history.

“So?”

She tells him about all of the other things she could have done. What if she had gone to the movies? Gone somewhere else for lunch?

What if she had gotten there ten minutes later?

It was there, and it was meant to happen, she told him.

What if the man had turned around in Meet Joe Black?

What if Summer had gone somewhere else?

What if a moment never happened?

What if you had looked away, or chosen not to go somewhere?

What if you never got the job?

What if you never said “hello”?

What if the seat in front of you had been taken?

The list will always go on and with each of those questions presents a life that never happened simply because this life was meant to happen.

Even when we think of the past we remember who we have let into our lives and who we have let out of our lives. We are bound to them. We carry with us these moments and things that have happened to us, what these people have said or done and sometimes we leave behind a piece of ourselves with those people. Sometimes we leave behind things we will never get back.

Some people can patch up those holes and move on, never seeing into the fine lines that lay around the edges of the plaster used to cover up the damage. Yet, to others, all they see is the thin line around the hole, reminding them of what used to be there and what never will be there again. Either way, we choose to move on and continue living life. And when we find something else to give ourselves to, we give ourselves to it in a sense where our souls and beliefs have been broken down. Those who are there to carry that weight that you carry are now the ones to hold onto your “mirror”.

We are all mirrors, and we can see ourselves in our mirrors daily. Sometimes that mirror breaks when we hold it out for someone else to hold onto for a while, and when we put it back together we may cut our fingers, but we do so because we simply want to see ourselves again. We look back into that mirror that is oneself and we see ourselves, smiling, because we have it all back; we can see our own smile again. But with that we also see the cracks and they remind us of where we have been and what we have been through.

No two mirrors will ever be the same, just as no mirror ever breaks the same.

To see that our mirror, no matter how damaged or destroyed, is ours and ours alone is to see that we are all unique.

And when we see that is when we finally begin to love ourselves.

When we understand that, we finally realize that we were never picking up the pieces to put back together a new mirror, but simply to remember what the original one looked like.

That is when the slices on our fingers from the broken glass finally begin to mend.

“That is crazy,” he said, “but I still don’t know what I want to do with my life.”

“Neither do I,” I conceded.

“But you are practically student teaching.”

I shrugged my shoulders and made a sound to acknowledge his comment.

“I always wanted to be a writer.”

I told him I know it is too late now to turn around and go back, but I also admitted that that is the only thing I regret in life is that I shied away from a career and life as a writer, but I regret it because I will never be able to see that life. I told him that I had not the slightest idea as to why I feared taking the leap into the world of words in the first place.

“But there is no money in books,” he reminded me, “no one reads books anymore. It’s all electronic.”

True, I admitted, but I reminded him that I would rather be happy doing that. Money never was important to me. At least, not as important as happiness was.

Words have always been there. They have always been present in me.

When I see things in an idle moment, I write out a sentence in my head as to how I would describe the moment.

That is how I have always been.

It is my disease; my addiction.

As we weaved in and out of cars trying to find mine, I began to tell him about another realization that had come to me courtesy of the book I have been reading, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

I told him that I often ran away from things because I was afraid. I told him that in the book the main character, Oskar, is without his grandfather in his life. His grandmother always told him that he simply picked up and left one day. Throughout the story, the reader comes across letters, dated to all different times.

One is written by the hand of his grandfather.

He talks about how he truly loved his wife, Oskar’s grandmother, but how he grew afraid because he did not know how to live fully with her. He was anxious, and ran.

He swore that if he had another life to live he would gladly spend one with her because he knew, deep down, that she would have made him the happiest man on earth.

He noted that “it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life.”

I was afraid to write.

I feared dedicating my life to words because I was simply unsure.

If I had another life to live, I would have given it to words. Fully, I would have given my life to them.

I sit here, not ashamed, but curious.

As we drove away, I told him this.

I tried to explain how it is that we fear making a mistake. It is that we fear wasting our life and often never take chances and it is not until it is too late that we realize the mistake that we made only to wonder what could have been.

I told him that I do not regret my path to become a teacher because I love education and I love history. But not a day will go by where I wonder what my life as a writer would have been like.

A world where I sit at a desk and type sentences.

A world where I report on wars.

A world where I speak of hidden pathways and local news.

A world where I write a love story for someone special.

I will always wonder what that world would look like, but I live this life knowing that all of my decisions have led me here.

Know, please, that I will never stop writing.

And I will never regret the day that I chose to deny myself the pleasure of having these words and sentences and images surround my life.

Each day is a new canvas to paint whatever it is you may desire.

One day, I will paint myself a canvas where I sit at a desk.

A canvas where I am writing.

I run because it is what I do when something is eating at me.

I began to run because I could not stop moving. I am like a shark, if I stop moving, thinking, doing, I die. My thoughts consume my mind and soon I am submerging myself in thoughts and the thoughts of thoughts. I sit idle and let the details shred through me and slice at me. When I first stopped running I slipped into a very dark place where I simply did not exist. I was alive, yes, but I was not living.

I was doing.

Now, I run because it is an escape. My feet hit the ground and I never know how the run will go.

Maybe I will run for seven miles, maybe ten miles.

Or maybe only a single mile.

I run because at some point in the run you realize what you are thinking. It is hard to have so many thoughts on your mind and run at the same time. Your eyes flash from car to car as they pass and then again to the road ahead. Maybe you glance down at your feet and watch them pace in front of you. If you run with music then music fills your ears and helps to drowned out the many sounds that surround you. With each step a thought leaves your head and eventually you begin to realize the burning pain in your thighs and calves. In time it is just that single thought and the pain. The pain, eventually, subsides because you only wish to delve into the world of that single thought.

It becomes your mantra.

You lose yourself in the process and you soon realize that your body is just doing. There is no thought, just step after step after step.

When you run, it is hard to feel sorry for yourself.

When you run, it is hard to feel anything.

I await that rush endorphins to be released from my spine and spread through my blood stream. My cardio is no longer jacked up, and neither is my breathing. My legs feel like they were brand new. I await that runners high. I wait for that feeling when I am in complete bliss and I can just run without fear of pain in my chest, heart, back, or legs. I entertain the thought of running forever because in that single moment I am OK. There is nothing on my mind and nothing weighing heavy on my thoughts. It is my nirvana, my place of solace and my place of equilibrium. But when I established that moment as my place of equilibrium I presented myself a problem: I cannot run forever.

A lesson in life is that you cannot run forever: physically and metaphorically.

We are simply not built to.

When we run, we run to, or from, something.

And when we run, we run to, or from, something.

It is the physical act of trying to distance ourselves.

It is the mental act of trying to find a place where the only thing that matters is what lays right in front of you. Whether it is a road, a gravel path, or the muddy trail that runs adjacent to a river, that single inch in front of you is all that matters.

Running teaches us that we take many paths on our journey.

One day we take one path, and the next we try another. Each path presents us with a new opportunity to see things, or a new challenge. The road may be smooth, but long, and it tests our persistence. Or the road may be rough and winding to test our threshold and strength. The road itself is just as important as the act of running. If we run fast through the trail by the river, we miss the beauty that lay all around us, but we reach the end. If we run slow down the empty road, we take in the minor details, but take a bit longer to reach where we desire to be.

It is the epitome of life.

We must find our path by trying many paths.

We must find our ideal pace by trying many different speeds.

We must find the music to accompany us by having different songs push us.

We must find the right way to prepare, and the right way to rest.

We must find the perfect way to start.

And we must find the perfect way to finish.

No one has ever drowned in sweat, nor will anyone ever.

I run, not because I want to race, but to find out what I can do. What I can endure and what I can tolerate.

How much pain can I handle before I cannot run anymore?

How far can I push myself before my legs begin to stress and develop slight fractures.?

How much weight can I carry with me on these runs?

How quickly can I liquidate the thoughts on my mind and release myself to the solace that is the trail that lay in front of me?

Each run, itself, is a metaphor for life.

But it is not until I am running that I realize and can fully live that metaphor.

That metaphor of life: to only deal with what lay in front of you.

To take it one step at a time.

To visualize what it will look like at the end, and never forget where you came from, but to know, that somewhere out there, there is a finish line.

And when you reach that finish line you will be able to rest; that you will be able to stop.

At that finish line you will be able to look back and say “I did it” and remember each step along the way.

Where we can remember what the fear felt like when we took our first step.

Where we can remember what it felt like to explore a new trail on an impulse.

Where we can remember what it felt like to have those endorphins release and feel bliss.

Where we can remember the pain.

Where we can remember how foolish we felt for never wanting to start.

Where we can remember how great it felt to finally reach the end.

Maybe I have had too much time over the past five to six years to chip away at what I believe it means to be a man. Maybe being in college has helped this viewpoint progress at a quicker rate, as well, but then again, if there is one place to see what to do, and not to do, as a male, it is probably at a New Jersey college.

This is a sporadic writing, and I am writing this because I want to. After all, that is why this blog is here to begin with, no? And frankly, this has been something I have wanted to write for a while.

Too many guys grow up nowadays thinking that to be a real guy, you need to be ripped out of your mind or slay through girls as if you are, as comedian Daniel Tosh helped me to label, the one Spartan fighting off massive hordes of Persian hookers. Maybe it is the idea that you need to be tough, and be able to take a hit. Maybe it is the belief that no emotion equals no flaws, making you the ideal man who can stone face any problem that stares you right back down. Maybe it was the father who worked in trucking his whole life, or the mechanic dad who has a hard exterior that forces the next of kin to grow up with that shell of armor.

Either way, I have prided myself on developing my own views for what it means to be man; what it means to be me. I grew up in a strict household, but I was not forced down a path to grow up. The only thing, indeed, which was forced upon me, was a sense of respect for those above you, and the ability to maintain a level head, and a sense of manners. So that is where I will begin:

1. It is the 21st Century, and, no, saying ma’am or sir is NOT dead… nor will it ever be.

Raised in the north, hearing sir or ma’am is limited to the realm of high rises in Manhattan and to the one displaced southern kid who was out of place in a New Jersey school. I never heard anyone use ma’am or sir as a way to address someone until somewhere between fourth and sixth grade. A friend named Jared, who moved to New Jersey from somewhere down south, answered a question from a teacher, simply with, “sir?”

Upon moving below the Mason-Dixon Line to South Carolina, I did not even intentionally mean to pick it up, but I did and eventually took it upon myself to answer with ma’am and sir at a whim. It did not really make a difference in the south since it still is a standard way of everyday life. However, the effectiveness of this was realized, fully, when I moved back to New Jersey. Granted, I received my fair share of laughs from others when I would answer in the respective, but it did make an impression. Often, men, although mostly women, would be surprised upon the use of sir or ma’am (as it can be seen as a sign of respecting elders.), wherein I would simply reply, “sorry, it’s a southern thing”. It does put you one ahead, and even landed me a job recently, wherein a manager told me the head honcho hired me simply because of my manners

Try to include even a ma’am or sir into your daily life, and if it works, then begin to use it more and more, until it just comes natural. I promise, no one will regret it.

2. Take Pride in What You Wear.

Fashion is something that can be seen as a girly thing to be interested in, that, there is no doubt about. However, I will be the first to say that I hate the way my generation dresses and how we represent ourselves. Granted, I am one of the many who partake in the mass watching of trash TV such as the Jersey Shore, and the forced watching of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (my mother and roommate are fans, I really emphasize the word “forced” in the sentence preceding this.). We are the generation of partying hard, and being even dumber. Never in my life did I ever think I would be allowed into a private university, and then see so many kids waste space at that university, paying over $46,000 in tuition. I mean, let us be real, here, a 2.3GPA in high school does not get you a scholarship anywhere, not even if there is a fire. To just to walk around with a hat sideways and go to parties every Friday night sporting polo shirts and cargo shorts or white washed, ripped, $95 jeans purchased at your local Guess does not compute well with me.

I enjoy when kids in college dress well just because it is another day. I even applaud my overly pale, lanky, suitemate, when he wears a collar shirt with a pair of khakis and his Nike running shoes, all a size to big. It is the effort that counts, and it is the feeling of wearing those clothes that count more.

Recently, I have taken to buying my clothes to the exact size. I am twenty years old. I stand at five foot ten inches, and I weigh 160 pounds. That is not going to change for a while. My pant size is a 29/30, I wear a size small shirt (yes, it fits just fine), and dangle in between a size 9 to 9 1/2 shoe. I prefer slim fit khakis over boot cut jeans, and will always take a white undershirt over an Abercrombie emblazoned shirt any day. No, I threw away my Nike 6.0s a long time ago, and yes, I prefer a plain boat shoe to your Reebok Zig-whatevers.

Tom Ford was documented once about his lifestyle and his career. He noted that when he is upset, he puts on a tie. A tie, to him, was a layer of armor. It announces you are here, and you cannot ignore me. When you wake up and you feel down, for whatever reason, get dressed, and get dressed well. To look good is to feel good, and that is already half the battle.

Style is not something that is purchased in a store; it is a culmination of everything you have ever worn. It is the plaid shorts and white polo high school abomination that transforms into the white oxford dress shirt that is worn casually with khaki shorts and a pair of slip on shoes. It is the flip flop rainbow obsession that transforms into smooth loafers. Wear your shirts snug across the chest, tight around the ribs. Let the shirt hang just below the waist, if it hangs more, tuck it in. Let the shoulder seams ride vertically on your actual shoulder bone, not the meaty section of your upper arm. Let your pants fall right at the start of your ankle. Let your belt ALWAYS match your shoes. And never, ever, wear black and brown.

I am not saying that my style is for everyone, because that is not the case. Style is something that comes from you, and reflects you in the best possible way. If you want to wear your hat sideways and walk around campus as if you’re Billy Badasses badass brother, Pauly Pissed Off, be my guest, but don’t be offended when kids despise you for no reason at all.

Wear your clothes like it’s your portrait to the world: make it you, and who cares if you wear a vomit green dress shirt, or a pair of pink khaki shorts, if you think it looks good, it looks good.

3. Write well. Speak better.

I have mentioned this once before, but something I pride myself on is the ability to speak, and write, well. I have absolutely no conscious awareness of how many commas I use, and frankly, that is because I write how I speak. So, whenever there is a comma, there is a pause in the way it is working out in my head.

However, it was not always this way. I, at one point, despised writing. It took me four years, and four separate teachers, to open me up to the world of the written word, and to see the beauty that encompasses written works. Here is how it happened:

Step 1: Mr. Debock, freshman year, English 1, MBHS:

This was the man who started it all. He opened me up to the world of Shakespeare and other modern day successes. He gave me the low down on how to write, and how to get your point across, more so, how to work things out and how to arrange them. It opened my eyes, but think of this as Leonardo’s Great Horse sculpture: It was the blue print of a simply unspeakable work of art; I just didn’t get my hands on the copper, yet.

Step 2: Mr. Ligon, sophomore year, English II Honors, MBHS:

Confident, copasetic, and every other C word that could be attributed to a man who helped me improve my writings even more. He told me one day that Debock was a great man, but “taught you a crock”. He made me forget a lot of what Debock had said, but allowed me to keep the foundations of what I had learned, and to build upon it (After all, as said by Arsenal manager, Arsene Wenger, “You build a player like you build a house: you start with the foundations, the fundamentals”.). He introduced me to the world of Jay Gatsby, and the process of storytelling, and how to build up suspense. He taught me to really leave you hanging until I can punch the story and the point into you. After all, we all desire a surpise.

Step 3: Mrs. Tallada, junior year, English III AP, MBHS:

The lady that I adore, and respect, tore me down, ripped me apart, and built me up again all in the same motion. She put it all together. In an email to her a long while after I had graduated I admitted to her that she was the one who put the finishing touches on me as a person. She took me as far as I could go, and made me realize what I could, and could not do; all while pushing me to strive for the unreachable, because it was better to try and to fail, than to just sit back and succeed. She taught me the art form of journalistic writing, and just how punishing it can be to succeed at. She made me find a joy in prose. She made me see the absolute beauty and disgusting nature that words could carry; how they could form romantic sonnets, but also scribble out a suicide note.

Step 4: Mrs. Tuttle, senior year, Humanities English IV Honors, FLHS:

I am surprised that in my time of writing this blog, no one has asked me about the title, or why the subtitle is about stories. Well, the title is a song that makes me feel OK whenever I need a lift (Remember to Breathe by Dashboard Confessional), and the subtitle I took from Tuttle. On a banner in the front of her room hung a hand drawn picture of Snoopy on top of his dog house, and beneath it read, “Humans love stories”. Tuttle taught me the beauty of not just the word, but the art of visualizing the word. What is a story if it is impossible for a reader to visualize the scene in their mind? I could have easily have said that I stole the line from Tuttle, but no, I want you to see the same banner I saw everyday for my senior year of high school, and for it to impact you exactly how it did me. Granted, I added a little bit before it, but regardless, it is still the same. In all of my writings, I think the aspect of detail and visualization is always present, that is something that I can never forget. It makes my writing what it is, and is somewhat of an added extra for the reader.

I want you to close your eyes and see the rows of flowers and their petals. I want you to see how a finger would run across the delicate petal and how the rain drop always hangs there loosely, as if afraid to fall to the ground, and be consumed by the dirt.

What comes from this is the ability to speak, and speak very damn well. When you can hold a conversation and not be looked at for using a word that simply does not exist on this planet, or the next, life becomes just that much simpler.

And PS – If I ask you how you are doing, don’t you fucking dare say “good”. Good is not a state of being. You are “well”, not “good”. Baby steps.

4. Have a vibe to call your own.

Music is beautiful. They are the vibrations of sound that echo through our heads and ears every second of every day. Even when music is not playing, it is still playing. Upon being locked up in solitary confinement, Andy Dufresne noted that the time flew by because he had his music with him. A fellow inmate asked if the warden let him have the music player with him in the hole. Andy replied, “No. That’s the beauty of music. They can’t get that from you…”.

Find yourself in music, whatever it may be, and make it a part of you. I will always wish to have the chance to shake Tom DeLonge’s hand and say thank you for saving me from a very dark place back when I was younger. His words and songs made me OK. They made me wake up and have the ability to push on. As I grew older, I came to enjoy the melodic jams of Dash Berlin and Armin van Buuren. Markus Schulz had his dark tunes. ATB provided the rhythmic, reassuring, lovely dance tunes. Now, I find a nice vibe in slow jams. As I type this out, Climax by Usher is on repeat playing through the air in my room while the windows let in the smell of summer. Every night, I fall asleep to Good Morning, Midnight by Fanfarlo. I let the sounds of a soft guitar strum take me to a world inside my head for the night.

Find a sound. Music can define you. Just think of any time you have looked through a friends iPod. No doubt, we have passed judgment on the artists that occupy their ear drums.

5. Love something that DOES NOT have a pulse.

It is awesome to love an animal. It is awesome to love friends. It is life changing to love a girl. However, I think one thing all men can agree on is that to love something that is not real and something you cannot control, makes love just that much more enjoyable.

I am talking about sports, in my case, at least.

We all stare at televisions, or tune into a broadcast through our phones or radios, absorbing  an event that can make our day amazing, or ruin it, even though we have absolutely zero influence on the game. Soccer, for me, portrays this best. Here I can sit for an hour and half, slapping my knee, cursing, yelling, only to have the game end in a scoreless draw.

BUT, watching your team lose the game in the last minute, or give up a massive lead (Last year, Arsenal were leading Newcastle United 4-0, only to see the game end 4-4.), maybe win the game in the last minute, or destroy a huge rival (This year, Manchester City toppled Manchester United 6-1 at Old Trafford.), makes the game all the better. I guarantee you every guy has a memory that will stick with them forever, and that that memory is related to a sport. Maybe it is the New York Giants game winning drive to beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl back in 2007. Maybe it was the 1995 Stanley Cup Finals when the New Jersey Devils beat the Detroit Red Wings to take the cup. Maybe it was Leo Messi flying through the air to seal the win for Barcelona over Manchester United in the 2009 Champions League Final. Whatever it may be, it is good to love something you cannot control. It takes the pressure off of your back for once, and puts it on people you will probably never meet. However, what it does do, is allow you to see emotion in its purest form.

And that is pretty damn powerful.

6. Love something that DOES have a pulse, and love it honestly.

I remember reading a quote somewhere during my freshman year in college, and it going something like this:

“Any man can love a million girls, but it takes a real man to love only one girl, a million ways”

It doesn’t even HAVE to be a girl, but in this case, it is. It is easy to sleep around, or date a ton of girls. It took me a summer, alone, in Texas, to finally realize that that college life was already outdated for me, and that I wanted to get away from it, and move on. I wanted to be something to someone, and my goal was not to find it, but to just live life, and wait for it to appear.

I came to college with that mentality, and I hurt people with that mentality. People I truly respected as friends cannot even speak of me because of how I used them or hurt them. There is not a day that goes by where I would pass the chance to go back and kick that kids ass for what he did and how he treated girls.

It is easy to have fun, essentially. Yet, it gets to a point where that fun is not fun anymore, and you grow up, and you realize that sometimes spending a ton of nights with one girl, is a lot better than spending one night with a ton of girls.

It is that simple.

If you have the spine to say “I love you” and mean it, then follow through and be sure to truly love how they deserve to be loved.

7. Be humble. Be willing to admit you are wrong. Be willing to lose.

There is nothing more annoying than someone who is too serious. Granted, know when to work, and when to play, but you must always be able to admit defeat when absolutely needed, and you must always be able to laugh at your own expense. Having humility is something I am still working on perfecting, and losing is something I am working on as well. This is, simply, said best in the film A Good Year:

“You’ll come to see that a man learns nothing from winning. The act of losing, however, can elicit great wisdom. Not least of which is, how much more enjoyable it is to win. It’s inevitable to lose now and again. The trick is not to make a habit of it.”

I cannot help but to connect the ability to admit defeat, and the ability to have humility, together. They just go hand in hand. To admit failure is to admit you have a flaw, and there is no moment of greater vulnerability than to admit that you, the person who you love the most, hands down, has a weakness, and making that weakness known through admittance. That moment where you turn away and finally begin to walk away brings down on you every negative emotion. You failed. You did not win. You lost. Every piece of you wants to turn around and fight again, but to know when to stop is the smartest thing a man can hold in his arsenal. To know when to stop is to know you have given your all and that it is now time to be on your own; to go it alone. To turn back around and beg, to seek mercy, is to bring more pain upon your own self. Every thread in my being craved to fight on again recently, to beg one more time, to please try, but when I walked back slowly, the lingering “goodbye” hung too heavily over my head, but each step away brought me a step closer to something I cannot see yet.

But what this most exemplifies, is that you have to accept failure and let down as a part of life. When you accept that sometimes things just may not work out, then a bigger door to living life opens up. The pain that we experience in life is inevitable, but the suffering is what we can choose to avoid.

Be willing to play the game of life, but also be willing to lose. Just don’t make it a habit.

We then started to talk about a mutual friend and about a story he had heard as to why the friend may have been acting strangely lately. I simply replied that something I carry with me is that every person has a story and that we can never know the weight which they carry with them as a result of living through that story. He looked at me someone blankly, and said that he thought I had an interesting take on things. This, in a matter of a split second, made me concede that, for a long time in my life, I had felt utterly alone and depressed. It is something I hold close to me, that I felt those things at one point in my life, but for some reason, maybe because it was late or because he was intoxicated, I admitted this to him fairly easily. He, again, looked at me as if I had revealed something he could never had guessed or thought of. More or less, that look was spot on. He said that he could never have guessed and that he could not believe that I, a person who makes it a point to be simply at bay with everything going on in life, had a dark stain on my life.

See, I had no reason to feel lonely or depressed. I amassed things in my head and never released them. I held on to feelings and thoughts and plans for what could be and refused to live in that given moment. Yet, when I think about the topic in a deeper sense, does anyone who is depressed really have a reason that will ever be understood? In some cases, yes, but in most cases, that sense of having your mind consumed with senseless doubt is brought about by something no one, but the one suffering through it, could ever understand. Even now, I look back at my middle school and teenage self and have a hard time understanding why I felt that way. I cannot fathom why I did not just feel OK, and why I often cried and hoped for more. A moment that will always stand as a pillar in my life is the moment I found myself standing in my garage at night wondering if I was here for a reason; if “God” had placed me here for a purpose. That moment would come to define me for a long while. In fact, if someone had diagnosed me with clinical depression those many years ago, I would have been relieved to know that this pain had a face and a name and that it wasn’t simply just my own head playing games with me. Every day I sought out “why” and let it consume my mind and my thoughts. I never felt wanted and never felt reason. Every day seemed like a constant damper and struggle. There is a scene in a movie called “A Single Man” where a man wakes up after having yet another reoccurring nightmare about the death of his partner and lover. He has an internal monologue about the pains of waking up when you feel like there is simply nothing to live on for, where “waking up actually hurt”.

Waking up, I never accounted for a loss of a life or a loss of something substantial to me. I awoke to a loss of things I never had. I still cannot explain it, but I simply felt alone. I felt empty. So, when I told my friend this story about my dark spot and he replied that he could never have guessed, I felt the need to tell him the whole story. I had this story that I carried with me that no one ever saw, and for good reason. The thing is that this sense of loneliness never disappeared until fairly recently. It took an immense amount of pain before it settled in as a piece of me. I often take walks and feel the depression and loneliness come back in doses, and it frightens me because I still cannot place my finger on it. My friend told me that he felt bad for me because no one should have to go through that alone, but what is loneliness if we do not go through it alone? This sense of being alone made me who I am. It made me into a person who has a substantial amount of foundation; a person whose feet are always on the ground, but head always in the clouds. That time spent alone never leaves, we simply mask it.

Why I find myself writing this is because of an article I was lucky enough to stumble on to one night when I really needed to be reminded that my sense of being alone is never truly there, and that it is something I build up in my head. At the same time, however, I also needed a reminded that what I was feeling was normal because everyone is alone:

“But then your sister comes to visit, or your boyfriend, or some pal from high school. And you remember what it’s like to not just know people but understand them, to know their habits and their preferences, to recognize their shirts, to touch them without thinking about it. You remember how good it feels not being alone, and you try to soak up every moment and absorb enough energy to last the long winter. Often it’s awkward because you have nothing in common but memories and mutual affection, so you spend a lot of time staring at each other and wishing you could think of something more interesting to do, some way to better appreciate your visitors, to better make use of your time. You don’t want to waste this. But maybe you do.

And then they leave, and you break again, and your “good” drops to “fine” and then to “okay, I guess.” But soon enough you trick yourself into forgetting how it feels to see love in someone’s eyes, and you adjust back to solitude.”

I measured my happiness on a sense of being surrounded, or being content. That is the closest I can ever come to trying to understand why I felt such a sense of seclusion; why I always felt in the dark and that the sun could never, or would never, shine on me.

The next day, I found this:

“It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.”

And I was soon reminded of why those demons of my past have been relegated to the past; I came to love myself and love those who love me. I came to love the people who have helped me on my feet, and who have helped me to progress.

And not a moment goes by where I think I will be alone ever again.

“There are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late.”

I recently received fantastic news.

My pitch that I submitted into The Moth was accepted to be processed into their Listen & Vote section. What this means is that the pitch that was sent into the website will now be available for all to hear. Now, I discussed this topic previously and I said that I would not tell the story again until it was accepted and processed. Now that the story has made it a little further, I am beginning to feel very optimistic about the whole experience.

After I first submitted the story, I was anxious. Nervous is also a good word to use. However, I felt relieved. I spoke of how I was ashamed of this story and how I wished to free myself from its chains because I no longer wanted to carry this weight around with me. I no longer desired to be left in the dark wondering if this was a pain that only I carried, or if it was a pain that my brothers and I all shared. It was time for me to tell this story. After I recorded my pitch and played it back, I submitted it… and then my mind was cleared of the story. It did not haunt me or plague my thoughts every now and then. Instead, it simply vanished into the internet to be judged by The Moth and deemed good or not good. Luckily, it was determined to be worthy of competition, and with that comes the anxiety of reliving the story. See, I lied… I told someone the story last night, and frankly, all of the same emotions came back as I was telling the little tidbits of the story. The listener simply looked at me as I read the story. I wanted to look at her to see her reaction, but if I did, I knew that I would lose my train of thought, and with that I would also lose my emotional state. She held a slight smirk as she listened carefully as I opened up a piece of me that no one has really ever been able to see. The thought of all of this passed through my head relatively quickly in the matter of a split second as I told the story. At the end of it all, though, I felt an odd sense of comfort. She smiled really big after, and told me she enjoyed it. All I could do was insist, “really?”.

I expressed my joy and fear in possibly having the chance to tell this story. I told her about how I wanted to tell this because it was finally time to let whoever was willing to listen hear it, but I told her I feared my family hearing it because of this situation: what if none of this was felt by them, and instead, only I felt this weakness and pain? What if this is nothing more than me over analyzing and thinking;killing myself with these thoughts of separation and deceit? The thought of this left me in an odd limbo.

I still am waiting for the pitch to finally appear, but when it does, I will post the link.

(Here is the link to the page where you can find my pitch. At the time of posting it is on Page 4: Christian L – The Wolves of the Pack)

Best,

Christian

So, how can that be? How can I have a lot to say, but not a lot to write? I don’t know, really. I guess that this piece is just a filler. For now all I have to say is that summer has started (kinda?). I can wear my Sanuks without socks, throw my sunglasses on, wear shorts again all day, and feel my skin burn slightly as the sun hits it in the afternoon. With summer comes my new job working on campus. It has been somewhat of an awkward feeling, actually, knowing that I am not about to go home for three months and isolate myself from everything and everyone and get back to neutral. Instead, I get a week of solitude in my newly abandoned dorm and then move into a new building where I will be living until the end of summer. Summer is here (again.. Kinda?), so now what?

Well, for now I am just going to take this time to bond with my new friends who are also my new co-workers, while still taking a break from everything and just get back to neutral. That was my favorite thing about living in a different state come summer time: right when you begin to tire of people from living with them or seeing them day in and day out, there is a nice break where I am away from it all for a while, and everyone needs a break. I love my roommates to death, and I rarely, very rarely, tire of them, but time alone is always welcome in my book.

Just like Ned Stark would say (before he was beheaded. Damn you, Joffrey.) “Winter is coming”, summer is coming, more so it has almost arrived, but I welcome it, and everything it brings, with open arms. Hopefully this includes skydiving…

If you need me you can find me out on the soccer fields with my headphones in doing my workouts or practicing some free kicks. It is summer, after all, and the fields are empty… I gotta take advantage of it while I can!

- Christian