Today Frank Warren of PostSecret asked “What would you write on a postcard you could mail to your younger self?”

I found the art book and glued it onto the last page. =)

Sunday night I was talking to my friend Andy at work. He was really upset over the girl he has feelings for dating a guy who is a complete shmuck. And he said “I’m really great. But she doesn’t want me, does she?” And then he said “I guess she just wants anyone but me.” And to me that just perfectly summarizes one of the lessons we had to learn as teens. I wish I could have told my 16 year old self that there are a million ways people can reject you even if you’re an amazing person who would probably be the best thing that ever happened to them. I wish I could go back and tell my 16 year old self a lot of things.

So, I sat and watched the waves crash for like an hour today. I didn’t find any answers but I did think of this: the point is that it hurts. If you want to stand in 38 degree ocean water then it should hurt. If you want to rebuild a friendship then it should hurt. If you want to tattoo your love for someone on your wrist then it should hurt. Life hurts for a reason and I’m okay with the pain.

Because you have the most knowledge about life the moment before you die

I really don’t know that much about anything. But I do know that there is probably a reason I’m still up at 2am even though I have a slamming headache and my body has wanted sleep for hours. There is probably a reason I can’t stop thinking about what my biggest flaws are. Because here’s the thing, we all play to each other’s flaws sometimes. And it makes us shitty friends and shitty people when we do. We drag each other down because we can. Because I’m insecure and you are too, we just go about expressing our insecurity in different ways.

Rebuilding anything is hard. Because obviously you want to keep some pieces of the old. If you didn’t you would just be building – starting over from scratch. Rebuilding a friendship is hard. It’s a lot easier to entrust someone with your wallet than your heart.

I think one of my biggest flaws is how much I want to be loved. Because there has been a dearth of love in my life. I mean, yeah, at the end of the day we all want to be loved. But in the past I would prostrate myself to people for an approximation of love. At some point I would like to think we’ll grow up enough. Grow up enough to be able to hold out for the real deal of whatever it is that we have been searching for.

For a few years now I’ve been a real fan of life’s unseen forces. Karma, spirit, God, all that stuff. I think there is a reason you meet the people you do. I think there is a reason that you can feel like you have lived an entire lifetime with someone in two and a half years and yet life shoves you back together with them. Because you weren’t done learning from one another yet. Maybe my perspective on this is the same as my answer to most of the unanswerable questions: life is both. I need to believe that there’s a force that draws people together for a reason. But I also need to believe in free will. That I can resist my flaws and be a better person for it. That I can let go of my anger and hurt and anger over being hurt. That we can share the same space as in the past but be different people.

Was I high when I wrote this?

On Tuesday morning Henry woke up and stared at the alarm clock for three minutes before it went off, playing a tune on the radio that he did not recognize. His wife didn’t stir; he knew this without looking back as he padded down the hallway towards the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later he was dressed in his khakis and polo shirt. His wife always teased him that since he had retired this had become his uniform. It was true that he had approximately seven pairs of the same pants and owned the polo he was wearing in every color that L.L Bean made. Nonetheless he resented her for this. Women have more options than men, he thought.

He grabbed a donut from under the clear plastic dome overtop the tray on the kitchen counter and went outside to his car. He heard but didn’t listen to an NPR show as he drove to the hospital. Henry took the first spot in the parking garage and puffed out his chest a little. He made his way through the tight hallways of the hospital, trying not to look around too much or to breathe too deeply. He noticed that he must have taken a turn that veered from the directions the woman at the front desk had given him because he was definitely in a wing with admitted patients. Once he found the doctor’s office he sat in one of the uncomfortable lobby chairs and filled out paperwork without reading it.

Henry spent four more hours having tests done on Tuesday as morning turned into afternoon. When the doctor told him he had stage two testicular cancer he looked down at his khakis and thought of his wife – women have more options than men.

"Look at all the shit we've made it through."

Untitled 3/7/08

I loved my hands the first summer I was in love with her. I was flailing, ill-equipped to deal with the rate at which my life was exploding around me, the rate at which I was falling. I was stranded, a fish out of water. A writer who could not write. A writer who wouldn’t even put pen to paper out of fear of the truth that might pour out of it more like blood than ink.

The first girl I ever loved told me that the way to get over the second girl I ever loved was to make an art book, to “channel my creativity into something productive.” Thus girl number one bequeathed to me an old hardcover book onto which I was supposed to pour my soul via paintings and drawings and doodles and whatever else I could think to put on its pages. So I worked for hours every day, sometimes forgetting to eat, always forgetting that I am not an artist in this way. And after hours of paint fume inhalation that made my head spin I had created a masterpiece and a monster. I had created something that was one part self-portrait and three parts shrine to girl number two. I had created something that I can now neither bring myself to look at nor to throw away.

When I was younger I had inspirational quotes of all kinds taped to the closet doors in my bedroom. Quotations that I ripped down while crying at four in the morning one day the second summer I was in love with her. I got to the one that said “Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real,” and I sat on my floor, cross-legged in a pile of torn papers, staring at it until the sun came up.

I don’t miss anything about either summer. Anything except my hands smeared with Technicolor paint.