quiet.
When I left Boston in 2006 to return home, one my colleagues said I’d be miserable living in a quiet place. Too slow. Nothing to do.
I tried to explain to her then there was no such thing. For all my running, I’ve always found a great comfort in little bits of nothing in the middle of lots of bits of nowhere. I like the sounds of crickets and critters. Creepies and crawlies. I like places where everyone knows what your doing.
Less pretense.
Too many people think that they can get away with things in the world. My experience in cities is that people are just disinclined to care. For a long time, that served me well. In the sense that I could run amok without the fear of any real reprisals.
People in cities turn over quicker than you can blink. A fresh history. A new past.
The crickets in the country don’t go anywhere.
**
answers.
The Muse and I spoke the other night. We’ve been trying to work some things out, old things, for about a year. Seems like a long time, a year, even when I think of her in terms of the 17 years I’ve known her.
She knows me better than just about anyone on the planet. In the small town way. We’ve finally figured out at least a few of the big questions we’ve always had. They weren’t exactly the answers we thought they would be. This is not entirely an unhappy thing.
Finding answers is good. Or it’s good for me. Answers give me comfort. I am not cursed to need to see the greater meaning in every event. Sometimes it’s enough to simply know that an event happened.
Still when someone knows you better than you know yourself, it’s hard to hear the slips of disdain that come — rightfully — during conversations.
It’s a righteous disdain, too. Earned. And laser focused on the exact things that should be disdained. Worse, they are also the things that are the most me.
But you can’t seek out answers and be unhappy when they are not what you want. Or when they are changed because of what you have done. The buck, I’ve heard, stops here.
**
relief.
I’m retreating just a bit these days. I’ve felt it and The Muse pointed it out, concerned. Possibly disbelieving that I would stay in this place very long. I have a history of not. Then again, the history that we have is not one based very much on who I am now.
But there is a truth to both of her thoughts.
In my sobriety, I’ve come to find great peace in the lack of drama that unfolds in my life. I work very hard to avoid activities — and people — that may send me back to the bottle and to avoid the angst that we all unintentionally put out in the world and on other people.
Every decision I make these days is easy: if it requires me to hide something, if it requires some negotiation because of a situation outside of my control, I simply walk away.
This has caught more than a few people off guard. It’s called living in the sunshine. Pretty much a requirement for sobriety.
It reinforces exactly how strange addiction is. It also offers a fascinating insight into the psyches of the people around me.
**
moments.
A few years back, there was a moment between an ex-girlfriend and I. One of those moments that occurs after enough time has passed between the break-up.
We’d changed, the two of us. We were turning into the people that we wanted to be. And there was still love. Despite the separation. And when our eyes met, we had a conversation. One we referenced, briefly, many months later when I needed to check . To verify.
That the conversation did happen, in those moments where we were deciding not whether to try again. That was a given. But whether we would act upon it.
I hadn’t imagined it. And our lives would have been different had that moment gone a different way. I wonder if the happiness we both have now, individually, would have happened had we acted.
Of course that was just the latest — the most recent — moment. I string them all together, fold them and keep them in my mind’s pocket. When my mind starts to wander, I remind myself of them.
**
next.
People read my words and think I am overly hard on myself. Or that I’m sad. Or that I’m clinging to the past. Or, if they really don’t like me, that I’m a narcissist.
I’m sure there are pieces of all of that in me. Although there’s a school of thought that says we project our feelings onto situations to give them context. I am neither, as it turns out, a doctor nor a psychologist. I can’t say for certain who is right in this scenario.
I think I side with Whitman, though. I am large. I contain multitudes. And if I contradict myself, well, then I contradict myself.
I’m okay with that, mostly.
There are some sins I won’t ever get away from. I’ve accepted that. When I need to deal with those emotions, I do.
There are some moments that I missed that have escaped, slipped the surly bonds of the present, sliding effortlessly into the past. When I’m reminded of them, I sit with them for a moment, like an old friend.
I refer to my life as Melancholy: The Musical. It’s Andy Dufrane, sitting in the jail yard with Red. It’s hope that’s not yet here and not yet gone.
But if I’m permitted, I can say that I am not sad. Or overly hard on myself. Simply at peace for the first time. Unwilling to give that up. Unsure how to put my chips back on the table.
As The Muse said: “You’ll meet a girl — because you do — and you won’t want to be there anymore.”
Maybe. Part of me thinks those are words for a different person at a different time. Or maybe they were for her to say to herself. Or maybe I really will meet a girl and everything will come together.
All I know is that it will be something.