freefall.

Objective reality might as well be objectivism itself when it comes to measuring irony.  (Kant touch this.)  It was mere months after coming to real, tangible peace with the impossibility of love.   It was mere months before familiar conversation with a favorite familiar grew and narrowed and pierced and left me wanting more.  Wanting more, over 1000 miles away.

Falling for someone you already have a sense about seems like a common occurrence among the young – free of the mistakes-come-experience, surrounded by friends before understanding friendship, all of it accelerated by wide-open naiveté.  With age such a thing becomes novelty, nay improbability, as you take your chances and write your story using pens pressed from salt and chaff.  You find yourself in a strange place where those closest to you have been fully stripped of mystery and flippant possibility.  Perhaps that’s why we’re so afraid of being old and single and alone.  Not because we ultimately want to die beside someone.  But because we’ve run through our course of chances with those that actually know us.

She moved up to Seattle and we celebrated our one-year anniversary mere weeks ago.  I could write novels about how I feel about this woman, but I’d rather read them to her.  And I need to treat what we have as the fragile, breathing entity it is - rather than writing about it as something I’ve conquered and shelved.

The most mind-blowing of the realizations remaining is thus: I’ve spent my most recent life crashing my ego against the rocks of “trying to do it yourself”.  I’ve inspired and hired and fired and begged and lost it all, multiple times now.  If it wasn’t for the path I’ve taken, if it wasn’t for the madman-esque return to the sea, I would have never had the talk that slowly turned torrid.  Nine years of my life and nine years of effort, all of it for a simple chance at a re-introduction?

Worth it.  All of it.

I’m a lucky man.

repurpose.

This was never intended to be solely a place to write about travel. The double meaning of work was as much about "belonging" as it was "earning money". I've always loved drastically different meanings to the same word. For years I've been wanting to change my name - more as a symbolic snip from my church-or-war family name, but many hours have been spent combing over my mental micro-dictionary to find the perfect new me. (Same as the old me?)

I ended that search with one of the most displeasing names you would find in a Baby Name book. The word "wage" remains one of my favorites - both an incredibly intentional, committed action as well as a passive, limp swear word used in arms-up surrender to our freedom machine. But there's no romance to that word, and what good is a new name if it's ultimately an in-joke with yourself? Who am I kidding about flow of the tongue - I'd so name myself wage if I could come up with a banging last name to sit beside it.

I closed this book abruptly, a year ago. I skipped over all of the details, as if those years beyond 2010 were somehow devoid of life. But the reality of coming back home was incredibly tough. I'd felt quite distant from everyone but my closest friends - a 9-month play-by-dropbox game of Fall From Heaven 2 was the most constant of connections outside of my tumultuous affair with Facebook. I pulled all of those belongings from that small crate on my doorstep and asked myself what the fuck I was doing.

My impatient attempts at dating went sideways, I found myself in a short-lived relationship with the wrong woman, and one day hit a very specific calm in my romantic life. This hasn't been the first suddenly-permanent revelation that I've experienced - in my youth I was struck down on a very specific Sunday that I was no longer innocent. While the 20 year-old me went in search of an open tattoo shop, this one resigned himself to the tragedy of his comfort - I would truly be okay if I never fell in love again. That medicine sat thick in my throat and took me a month to swallow. But it was true, and I was grateful to realize I didn't have to keep throwing myself against the rocks of bad odds. The realization that I could live a completely satisfying life, alone.

That, and putting everything I had towards the finish line, was my spring of 2012.