I like cemeteries.

If you hadn’t guessed by this point, a major fear which I’ve inventoried multiple times yet continues to arise in my life is that of dying before I can leave a legacy.

One day, out of the blue, I croak and they bury me deep in some cemetery outside of town, grass overgrowing the headstone, extended family all living in other states, no immediate family around, no real major accomplishments under my belt, all of my savings blown on some loopy project near the end, all of my belongings up in flames in some freak accident… Nothing but a few slightly humorous stories among some people at meetings about some guy they knew for a while, which will inevitably be wisped away like vape clouds into my apartment’s ceiling fan.

Despite all of the prayer devoted towards ridding myself of this fear, my battle with mediocrity remains very real.

So what the hell is this post about you ask? Not surprisingly… a girl.

It’s as if God was really fucking with me on this one. I’ll try to avoid any major details for the sake of anonymity (ha) but if you were to’ve asked me a few months back about what my dream woman would be like, I’d begin describing this girl I recently dated to a tee. Smart, funny, sarcastic, gorgeous… The kind of girl that makes YouTube videos with her acoustic guitar and tells you she posted them because of an existential crisis even though she’s barely into her twenties. The kind of girl that knows all the bands you like and tells you about deep tracks which you’ve never heard, but pretend to know. The kind of girl who sends you her poetry and tells you about her dream to one day live alone in a castle off in the woods somewhere drinking black coffee and writing with her wolf dog. The kind of girl who claims she used to have a blog but explains it was shit so she doesn’t anymore, even though you suspect she still totally does. The kind of girl that sings acoustic versions of your favorite rapper’s songs for talent shows.  The kind of girl with interesting little tattoos that speckle her pale, stunning body like tiny landmarks leading to interesting life stories which help pass the time while you lay around naked and watch cartoons and talk about aliens and your higher powers…

Let’s put it this way, I’ve essentially been obsessed with Conor Oberst since high school. I’ve seen him live over a dozen times, I know all of his music and relate to it all on a very personal level, and every time I bring him up to anybody, especially whichever girl I happen to be dating at the time, I’m met with a confused look and a very idle demeanor. This girl, however, immediately dove into a debate about which Bright Eyes album is the best and will, to this day, bring up his songwriting in random conversation.

The craziest part is that I had a dream about her weeks before we started talking and thought to myself at the time, “How strange is that..? Obviously I stand no chance with this girl and don’t even really know her in the first place”…

… so smash cut to weeks later as we cuddle on my couch talking about how great we are together. Needless to say, I had it bad. She was definitely on the short list of the most fascinating people I’ve stumbled across. She was younger, but one of those people you’d legitimately refer to as an old soul. I’ve dated girls in the past, had breakups here and there and been bummed out for a couple days about them, but this was on a whole different level. I literally didn’t know people like that existed until her.

So of course, what happens?

Valentine’s Day happens.

Valentine’s Day is by far my least favorite holiday of the year. It has a long back story that involves some very unlucky and unfortunate events for me. I normally wouldn’t delve into these for sake of the flow but shit… this is my blog so what better medium to do just that than here.

Valentine’s Day 2009: My seven year relationship with my childhood sweetheart had been, against my will, put on hiatus since that New Year’s Eve a month and a half prior. My drinking and college-failing shenanigans had put quite a strain on the relationship and apparently breaking up with me was her New Year’s resolution. For the seven years leading up to that, we didn’t go an hour without texting or calling each other. We knew each other better than I’ve ever known anybody. Not a stuck together kind of love either. Like a best friends, read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences, crazy in love type of thing. But my burnout-esque nonsense was taking its toll, so after we had eaten pancakes with my parents on New Year’s Day morning, following a rather pleasant New Year’s Eve… she didn’t contact me for weeks. I’m trying to think of a word like uncomfortable to describe not having contact with her at that time but I just remember feeling like I was wearing a lead vest around. This weight on my shoulders at all times. This pressure on my chest. Like when you put your back into a really cold shower and you can’t breathe. I was addicted to her and it was now out of my hands if I would ever get to talk with her again. Cuddle with her. Laugh with her. Play with her hair. I still remember seeing her name pop up on my phone in the middle of class, mid-January, after the longest break from contact ever. I sprinted from the classroom, down the school hallway, full of excitement expecting to hear her voice explain how she was still so in love with me and how much she missed me… but as I stood there, seeing my pudgy, hungover face staring at its own reflection in the window overlooking that grey, dead, wintery Southfield skyline, I answered the phone with a shaky, “Hey..”. I forget what exactly was said but she hit me with a brief, rehearsed spiel ending with, “I think we need a break” and then the call ended. I think I tried to call her back a couple times but getting her voicemail seemed so routine I can’t really recall. I just remember feeling devastated. Was this it? It couldn’t be. This was a bummer, certainly, but I figured a “break” wasn’t necessarily a break UP. It was just a little time apart to get our shit straightened out and get back together stronger than ever eventually. So the weeks went on, drinking a lot, worrying a lot, not getting my shit together, not sleeping much. So my logic at the time called for me to buy her some chocolates and a necklace just in case we had the grand, impromptu reunification on this glorious holiday. I got a card and this calligraphy set to write a really heartfelt note about how much she meant to me. I’d say I had high hopes but I just had never experienced rejection before. She was my first girlfriend and the girl I hoped to eventually marry. So Valentine’s Day hit, and I waited… I think I sent a non-descriptive text. I let the anticipation build in my own head about us getting back together in grand fashion, deciding to get married, me actually graduating and buying us a home, having little babies…. and then around 2pm or so I got a call from my sister. Something about Facebook. So I logged into my computer…. and my world that existed at that time essentially ended…. 52 photos of my now-ex-girlfriend and some dude. In an album entitled “Aruba”. Cuddling on the beach. Cuddling in their hotel room. On the dance floor. In the hot tub. I felt hollow for a long time after that. It’s like my heart’s battery died. I can’t really describe the feeling exactly because it was more like a lack of feeling. I don’t think I slept for months. This isn’t meant to say I deserved any better at the time, although any human being probably does. This story is just meant to exemplify my hatred for a day that’s devoted to an emotion that’s so reliant on another person’s behavior. Of course, I wish we could all be zen, all the time, and love everybody no matter what the circumstance. The amount of pain I felt on that day, however, was some very next level shit that makes love sometimes seem less like this fantasy type of spiritual connection between two souls and more like some biased delusion based on what another person selfishly means to your own being.

Valentine’s Day 2011: It was cold. I drove to class early that day so I could study for a quiz later that night. Somewhere along the line, the ridiculous notion struck me that maybe I could make an attempt at connecting with my ex-girlfriend from the previously mentioned debacle. After a half hour of frustrating phone antics which I don’t necessarily recall to this day, I stood in the parking lot of my school around 10:00AM with no class until 8:00pm, and let’s just say I was not spiritually sound. What I thought I needed at the time? Lots of vodka and extremely depressing indie rock. Where did I find myself? In Southfield jail the next morning, not knowing how I got there. I had had a blood clot in my calf weeks earlier and I awoke with a piercing pain in my chest. This was following the Serena Williams pulmonary embolism scare, so I frantically contacted one of the jail guards as I started to piece together what was going on. What did I do? Where am I? I think my blood clot traveled to my lungs! The heavy set brother working the guard shift walked over with an extremely serious face, and then burst into laughter as he informed me that my chest actually hurt because while blackout the night before, I had attempted to fight some police officers before getting tazed. Twice. Not a wonderful Valentine’s Day.

I have a couple more downer stories about some other mid-February hijinks but I’ll leave you with this one. The date of my last drink is February 5th, 2015, a little over a year ago. While driving to work in the morning on a typical Thursday, I randomly made the decision to, instead, buy a ton of vodka, drive to Bass Pro Shop, and drunk text a bunch of people before getting a DUI. Why did I do that? I couldn’t tell you. Certainly there’s a multitude of logical reasons I could try and muster… but there’s something about this time of year that just makes me numb. Everything outside is dead, it’s blistering cold, Christmas is long gone, and after a couple of months passing through my chillingly mundane existence, what stares me in the face but a holiday resembling something I used to weigh my entire life on and am now bankrupt of. I actually am extremely grateful this last DUI fiasco happened, because it got me here. That being said, it was quite possibly the most demoralizing February ever.

So I bring it back to the girl at the beginning of this post.

I remember one day as we were cuddling under a pile of blankets on my parents’ couch, dog-sitting, she asked me what I was thinking right then at that very moment in time. I stalled for a second, knowing I couldn’t explain how I actually felt about her. I assumed it would be better for us in the long run if I just made a joke about her butt. But deep in my head, as we laid there with my dog’s head popping up in between us, her cute little body wrapped in my arms, I questioned if God deliberately had my life play out in this bizarre fashion for the last nine years…. the “no degree, no girlfriend, no long term sobriety, no money saved up, no credit, nothing to show but a lot of AA convention lanyards” lifestyle… just so I could refine my appreciation for this very moment as I lay on the couch with this wildly fascinating human being who I think actually likes me for just being me. It felt as if the metaphorical, depressing, downer of a playlist looping inside my mind for the past decade had suddenly been replaced with Bob Marley’s Greatest Hits. I had been through the wringer and my faith had been refined to a point where I could now fully appreciate life on a level in which I didn’t think was possible. It was almost like I deserved this and whatever higher power that happened to be out there was giving me something for finally coming to this spiritual understanding.

This was far from true.

She was working on Valentine’s Day, so we decided let’s hang out the following night. I remember some texts that evening about her wearing my sweatshirt because it reminded her of me. She wished my arms were around her. She said she felt lame for sending cheesy texts. I texted some cheesy things back and told her I felt lame too. We both agreed we love being lame. She said she was smiling like an idiot. I fell asleep thinking about her smile.

So what happened?

In all honesty, I’m clueless. I don’t quite know what went wrong, or if anything had ever really gone right in the first place. This will probably be the most boring paragraph in this post because it all happened very matter of fact-ly. The next day she stopped by again, we went to eat, we wandered around the mall, we drove back to my parents’ place, we lounged on the couch watching some old school game shows, and she said she had an exam the next day and had to head out. I gave her these raspberry chocolates, because she said she used to have raspberry bushes in her back yard growing up. I also gave her some roses because, come on, it’s Valentine’s Day, and you can’t leave Kroger’s without buying them. Nonetheless, she texted me when she got home how happy the flowers made her, and I didn’t hear back from her the entire next day. When you’ve been getting daily good morning texts from a girl for a few weeks and a solid 18 hour chunk of silence pops up, you can’t help but scratch your head so around 6:00PM I hit her with a witty, “This no text thing makes the workday go a lot slower.” Which she then hit me with the “We need to talk.” A two minute phone conversation later involving the phrase, “…it’s not you, it’s me”, and we haven’t talked much since.

Now, I’ve been through that night a thousand times in my head, which is very unhealthy for people like me. What exactly did I say wrong? What could I have done differently? What if we would’ve waited the extra half hour to eat at The Cheesecake Factory instead of California Pizza Kitchen? Maybe if I hadn’t brought up the story about that crazy girl who made out with me and then said I “assaulted” her. Maybe if I would’ve remembered a couple of the more relatable examples on why I disliked this one girl we both know who randomly came up in conversation. Maybe if I had just gone over to my apartment instead of the restaurant. Maybe if I didn’t buy her chocolates AND flowers. Way too heavy on the Valentine’s Day thing. Way too forward. Or maybe not forward enough. My head was spinning for weeks. We got along so well and then… nothing. For no reason. Just it’s not you, it’s me.

When a girl seems to really dig me for weeks, gets dinner with me for Valentine’s Day, and then wants nothing to do with me following that dinner, my human brain tells me there must be some sort of concrete event or reasoning that had to have triggered this reaction. Ideally something fixable… you’re fat, your breath stinks, you have no money, you drive a shitty car, you have no job, you don’t have that much sobriety time, etc. These things can be fixed somewhat easily. These things can be worked out. But the worst reason is when there’s no real reason at all. Or something that isn’t fixable. You’re old, you’re boring, or my own greatest fear described at the beginning of this post… you are completely and utterly mediocre.

Girls text with me at first and get this smooth talking, witty, intelligent persona. Props to me on my text game being so on point. But then they hang out with me in person for a couple weeks and this seemingly uninteresting individual inside begins to peek through the cracks. Now yes, I have about 3,000 random hobbies, I tend to stray from popular opinion, I’ve got a million stories up my sleeve, and I make for what I’d consider quality conversation. I also unknowingly but surely pride myself on being unique and interesting. But when it comes down to it, this wildly interesting girl had had about enough of me after a week or so.

I wake up every morning and somewhere halfway through taking a piss, I look up, see myself in the mirror, remember the situation with her, and I’m struck with that eerily familiar sinking feeling in my chest. We didn’t even date for very long. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I had just liked her that much and had never been given the chance, but to be allowed a taste and then get immediately cut off is such a much deeper type of mind fuck.

We haven’t talked much since. A couple random texts here and there about somebody we both know who plays music or some random nonsense about this group we’re both a part of. We ate at an Applebee’s with a group of our mutual friends last week and wound up sitting next to each other in a booth… not a word was spoken between us. I’d say that was the worst part yet. Just knowing that even while I’m sitting next to her at a restaurant, random Snapchat stories on her phone are still more interesting than conversing with me. I go on pretending this is the same type of nonchalant scenario as when I briefly dated her friend last fall. Or the same type of heartbreak like when I found out this lady was banging both my friend and I last summer. As if this is just something I’ll inventory, pray on, and will be laughing about two weeks from now. Like me and her will poke fun in six months about how we dated for a week.

This is also FAR from true.

I’m not saying it was love. I’m not saying it was any specific thing. All I’m saying is it was much more than some flirtatious texting and a random hookup. If anything, it was a personal revelation. A jolt in the direction of this crazy notion that maybe love isn’t some storybook fantasy where two spirits form as one. Maybe it’s nothing more than a delusion in which we think we have this pre-determined fate, reliant on what we’ll refer to as hocus pocus, but really it’s just an ingrained physiological, psychological response based on mating habits formed hundreds of thousands of years ago. I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t examine the possibility that maybe I just liked the way being with this girl helped me subconsciously write off the past decade of me fucking up. Dating a girl nine years younger could essentially erase the last nine years and give me an even better starting point because she was that much cooler than my ex. Like randomly finding an extra life at a perfect spot in a Mario game… You get the one up, then almost inevitably you die thereafter, but you remember where that extra life was, you find it again, and continue on with knowledge of how you last died. This girl is essentially the personification of this continuation and the fact that she was so fucking awesome represents the level being that much easier the second time around.

In the end, I think it was the combination of a couple of these reasons. She’ll still talk at meetings or amongst groups of our friends and it’s bewildering how well my mind vibes with her. Mix that with the sexual attraction and some deeply ingrained ideas about fairytale romance, and you’ve got a disastrous combination in my head.

One thing I find myself wondering is if I’ll ever meet a girl as fitting or would I even want to because maybe that isn’t compatible in the end. Maybe opposites attract for a reason. My buddy said something quite thought provoking the other day though. “She must’ve not been so cool if she didn’t choose you.” My ever-changing level of self-esteem has me looking at that comment in all sorts of lights lately.

Nonetheless, about a week after she gave me the “it’s not you, it’s me” she was officially in a relationship on Facebook with some younger dude I’ve seen around meetings. Who would’ve thought?

This all brings me to the whole reason I started writing this post…

Tonight I was driving home from the gym. This girl situation was thick in my mind so I absolutely killed it working out. It was sleeting and snowing for a few hours at that point and the roads were complete shit so everybody was driving about 15 mph.

Now, on a complete tangent… Over the past couple of years, I’ve developed a system when I go through some girl troubles and find myself naturally gravitating towards some indie rock/emo bullshit that depresses the fuck out of me. I’ll catch myself and make the conscious decision to immediately dive back into my Spotify and veer the exact opposite direction. I find some hard, confident, beat driven rap music. 2Pac is a perfect example. For some strange reason a while back my mind viewed 2Pac as the stereotypical deushbag at every college party who was trying to swoop my girl from me. I was resting on my laurels at the time. I had lost that sense of competition. In hindsight, 2Pac has come to resemble the mindset of worrying about my own shit, working on myself, and having people be attracted to that. Not trying to attract people to this unstable stunt I’ve temporarily assembled. He resembles not giving a fuck about what other people think. He resembles working hard on what I find important and having the results come to me. I’ve come to believe that if I can get in tune with that mentality, my life will be far better off than if I stumble into the mindset of some suicidal guy softly singing his tales of self-pity over his acoustic guitar. If I’m resonating to melodies riddled with the concept of me being the fucking man, as ridiculous as that sounds, I think there’s some instinctive reaction in my brain that ignites confidence, which in the long run helps with my overall inner peace… Long story short, a lotta 2Pac in the last couple weeks.

So… I’m driving through this snow storm after two hours in the gym of pumping angry 2Pac through my ear buds and absolutely destroying my body via free weights. I’m pulling through downtown Wixom with these street lights glowing bright overhead. I’m slinking in my seat with that post-workout mixture of exhaustion and endorphins pumping through my veins. I pull open Spotify and search for something chill, and up pops Kanye’s new album with the first track, a gospel track, “Ultra Light Beam”. This song seems to be all about Ye’s relationship with God, and my own spirituality has been growing leaps and bounds as of late.  Now, clearly a lot is on my mind. My own mortality. My fear of mediocrity. Fear that I’ll never find the right girl. Fear that I won’t do anything meaningful with my life. Nonetheless, somewhere around Chance’s verse kicking in, I began to sing. Loudly. Now the specific lyrics may differ from my exact situation, but the feel and tone of his words almost identically matched the way I felt inside… I’m an alcoholic 29 year old, not that easy on the eyes, no money, no degree, stuck at a meaningless job, with a breathalyzer on my car, struggling to pay my rent, not a master of any instrument, played sports my entire life and now have a blown out knee, I sometimes stumble over my words and say the wrong things on dates, I sometimes get really quiet in groups, and even though I really, really like somebody, I can’t date them because there’s some hip, slick and cool fuck that’s 6 years younger, tells a quicker joke, and is most likely smoother in social situations… But as I sat there, belting out Chance’s verse word for word, I began to have this drastic uprising of emotion. I’m not entirely sure what emotion really. Hope, faith, confidence, optimism, whatever… whatever it was, my higher power was saying something to me. God, whatever that may be, has given me this life in which I’m actually insanely blessed. All these distractions… this girl I’ve been putting on a pedestal, my friends all getting married and having kids, the 19 year old students in class looking at me funny, my parents after I let them down one more time, the people at meetings after I fuck up again, my co-workers when I’m falling behind, all of these outrageous potential scenarios waiting to play themselves out, direct examples of my life being driven by those hundred forms of fear… all of a sudden my situation came to focus. Crystal fucking clear. As I panned out from my life for a minute, looking down on myself, cruising through a snowstorm, screaming to myself in this warm, bubble of a car…

I was alright. I was actually more than alright. I was spiritually on fire.

I have family. I have friends. I have my health. I have a kickass job. I’m smart. And funny. And have a good heart. And look pretty good in my underpants. And if somebody can’t see that then they probably aren’t the right person for me.

And then I got a text…

It was my brother-in-law, Kurt. It was pictures of the twins my sister had literally just given birth to. A boy and girl.. Chills shot down my spine. Tears began to pour down my face. I continued belting out Chance’s verse.

Something about switching from that weird, little slice of self-pity I was living in for a couple weeks, to all of a sudden seeing these tiny bundles of life my sister had just brought into this world… it reversed my morale and my perspective so quickly that my physical being almost couldn’t handle it. It was like coming to from some delusional state. It had me feeling like this life thing is so absolutely amazing. Why spend it worrying about what other people think, especially some girl who clearly isn’t as awesome as I’ve built her up to be in my head, who I only hung out with briefly, and who clearly doesn’t like me?

Some 2Pac shit essentially.

I’m pretty sure this is the clearest mindset I’ve ever had in early Spring.

To bring it full circle… I’m thinking at the end of my life, I’ll leave way more than an untended gravestone in some cemetery on the outskirts of town.. and if not, fuck it.