It becomes painfully obvious as you get older that the things you think you want aren’t really the things you need. It becomes even more obvious that the things you get are the blessings you should have been asking for. Once the obvious finds it way through your thick, unrelenting adult brain, your eyes open and you see that thing you were searching for all along.
Whether it’s the love you’ve been longing for or the solution to some apparent end-game problem, that thing you needed so bad has been sitting on your doorstep this entire time (so to speak).
I found mine this year after walking around with my head up my ass thinking that I couldn’t or would never find that thing. So, amidst the turmoil of the Covid-19 Pandemic that started screwing with the world in 2019 and was still not at its peak by March of this year, I got a call from the woman I was dating. I say was because we weren’t dating when the call came in. We had just ended what that relationship had been culminating into for the last two years (on and off).
Her and I had been dating, not dating, dating again without a title… the list of bullshit things we were doing was endless as were the reasons we weren’t more serious. In part, that was on me for not seeing where my life had mired down in an emotional ditch I couldn’t figure my way out of. I wont go into specifics here as to what was going wrong, but lets say both families were surprised either of us were speaking to the other.
We each came into the relationship with a few things in common, kids and baggage. Neither of us worried about the kids. As kids go, these five are pretty friggin awesome. The kids always got along although the siblings had their issues as all siblings do. It was the adults who were fucked beyond understanding. Between abusive ex’s, bad habits that should have been treated with professional help and two fighting spirits that never could back down when it counted, we had dated and broken up as many times as any high school couple ever had. Needless to say, it turned into two years of breakups, falling in love, fighting, making up and eventually deciding it wasn’t worth staying together after all that bullshit.
Currently, the kids, most of them anyway, are downstairs playing Mario Party, laughing and loosing their minds.
Back to the phone call – her and I were not talking much. I had packed up a few of her things that had been left two days before. The kids had been caught in the middle of the shitstorm of which I am not too proud to say I decided not to let go of when I had the chance. I was angry at her and the kids took some of the yelling. Either way, it had been a few nights of crying, not wanting to answer each others calls and ignoring whatever things we didn’t want to admit to each other when we were still talking.
“We need to talk when you have a moment” This was the message; altogether completely benign and ominous at the same time.
I think I asked her if she wanted to talk in person and I think I knew what she was going to say but I wasn’t ready to admit it outright. It was the thing I had feared and prayed for at the same time so many times over the last two years.
