GOING THE DISTANCE

FILLING THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

Time flies in the wake of putting together a string of good days that have eventually became months and since have led to years.  Moving to Omaha has been what I had hoped it would be for me, and that is one more opportunity, one more shot at getting back into this thing, this existence, this whatever you want to call it.

While I have endeavored not to begin celebrating before the game is over, I am really looking forward to heading to South Bend and making the drive to Detroit.  While it is very unlikely that I will have the chance to see my oldest daughter, meeting blog friends and getting the chance to see my Dad were and still, the main purpose of the trip.  The cherry on top will be getting to have dinner with Tee Jay (and maybe my sister if she wants in) and sitting at my favorite restraunt with some of my favorite people of the last seven years.

Upon my return I will finish up my study for my certification to be a personal trainer.  Once I pass that and become certified to be a trainer, it would leave matriculation as my main concern alone, and I am looking forward to the challenge.  I have to say that once I arrived in Omaha, that my life has gone better than I could have pictured it.

There have been moments where “the days of my nights are like the nights of my days”.  Thankfully, those have been few and far between.  Had to take a little something “on the chin”, relationship-wise.  Nebraska and I never got off the ground (though recently there has been a thaw between us; a wonderful lunch date a week or so ago in CB), and there was the still-born development between Princess and myself to account for, not to mention several “one-off” dates.  But remember, I never purported to be about finding love in someone else.  This was more of my finding myself, “the man that I know and love”, and rejoicing in the opportunity of being.

It hasn’t been easy and the road has been far from smooth.  I have never labored under the premise that things would be anything but, anyway.  The reason that there haven’t been too many woeful tales in these pages has been the axiom, “Problems that have solutions aren’t problems.”  I don’t panic, and another piece of military wisdom/saying that I have adopted, “working the problem”, is more helpful to me than being paralyzed by my fears.

“When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”  - Alexander Graham Bell

Going back to when I began my journey, because there were so many romantic or romanticized overtones to my writing, my words may have held a certain affect to the casual reader.  I am CERTAIN that it created a character profile of me in Nebraska’s mind that I believe adversely tilted our relationship.  Hopefully we can grow in spite of the foundation that has been laid since my arrival and become friends, no hyphenated suffixes or qualifications added.

There has always been a certain unease when I think about past loveships.  It was this feeling that kept me from a full-on pursuit of Tee Jay, and perhaps to a lesser extent both the SFC and Nebraska, too.  “History never repeats”, its been said, but, if one repeats history then what is history doing?  That is the thought experiment that I could never compel myself to ignore and it was a question that I always had to have an answer for.  This time when I see my “true love”, it won’t be to try to reignite something that burned brightly over a decade and-a-half ago.  No, this time it will be in celebration of what we had and the bond that we obviously still share.  And for me, that will be something new.

One of the really exciting things about this trip is the validation that will take place.  It was not without cause that the feelings and emotions bound us together… and I hope that I am not being melodramatic in saying this - and these bindings are around tightly about our souls.  I know that I don’t know where I would be without having made blog friends, and how they have refreshed my purpose.  Maybe I will have to go back to Chicago for a visit… and there are a couple of stops in Texas that I can imagine making, especially if they involve a trip to the Texas State Fair!!  And just maybe, maybe I will dare to visit New Jersey; Lexxie intends to move to Philly and that would be a good enough reason to go east in and of itself; visiting a blog friend - priceless!

"I began the process of unloving you that day… unloving you for the sly and uncaring way you were betraying us. More than this, I began to un-love you for being a stranger to everything my mind and heart had erected you to be." ~from Like Litter in the Wind by L.M. Ross

Though I am seemingly putting our relationship misfire solely in Nebraska’s court, I am not forgetting that there are two parties that have to act in concert to make a relationship work.  But my interests lay with myself, as I am sure her lie with her and what’s best in that regard.  So what do you want from me?  Still, this isn’t about that as it is about Princess.

One of the tactics that I have used since the beginning of memory has been to invite the ghosts that populate and linger in my heart and mind in for “tea and cake”, and to chat with them politely.  The quote selection that accompanies this part of my entry applies most directly to her and me.

The suddenness that our relationship came to a close was as jarring as the whipping of the cars on a roller coaster.  For the sake of this entry, I replayed how the sequence of events played out.  We spent Valentine’s together, then in March she had a procedure, and when April came, I was DX’d.  I don’t know what happened… I mean, her boys were so sold on our relationship that her two youngest were wondering if they would need to change their surnames after the eventual nuptials!

Kicking the idea around of what is NEVER going to happen (she has not contacted me at all in two years; and likewise, neither have I reached out to her, save a lost afternoon in Council Bluffs two years ago), I find myself not seeing where the gap is in my thinking that would allow me to welcome her back again.  Nor do I think she would be interested in looking for an opening anyway, but this is more about me.  This is the exercise that I have had with myself at the end of each and every relationship that I have been in.  The essence remains within, but it stays locked away and I have never had anyone ever try to recover whatever was left of my love for them.  And that, ladies and germs, is likely why I have not lost much time in trying to rekindle the embers from a once-burning flame.  I mean, what?  I gave it to you before??  So what, now that it has to be earned, it doesn’t have any value???