Stories

I’m currently on my reading week from school.  I decided to flee the cold weather of Calgary and visit my father and brother in Victoria.  Alas, the most snow, and the coldest temperatures they’ve had all year made an appearance during my visit.  Luckily, I had the chance to stumble around Victoria yesterday, and I ended up in a fantastic bookstore by the name of Monroe's.  I love book stores.  I love the smell, the feel and the weight of books.  I love discovering new writers.  I love getting lost in the story, literally losing myself with the characters.  Words are incredibly powerful and when someone is a gifted writer I feel as if my own life is pale in comparison, as if my life is the story and they story is now reality.  After these books I feel altered, sometimes taking parts of the character into my own life, melding their speech with my own.

Something needs to be said for biographies.  There’s something so raw and untamed about listening to another’s conquests.  Sharing in ones victories, sorrows and purgatory experiences connects them with me, and reaffirms my own excitement in life.  Here before me sits a person who’s lived to tell the tale.  Although the details may be slightly embellished, this is a true story.  I guarantee you that if you sit down with anyone and ask about their life you’ll discover something interesting.  Accomplishments you wish you’d thought of, let alone completed.  Pain that makes you thankful that you’ve been spared such wrath.  Tales of the human plight are so invigorating to me because I’m comforted in the fact that I’m not alone in my struggles.  Loneliness is an emotion everyone has experienced at one time or another, and this emotion tends to isolate me from the world.  These stories bring me back to reality.

My favorite part of any story is the reckless choices, whether they worked out or not.  I like to believe I live my life according to my rules but when I honestly exam my motives, I’ve stopped myself due to the fear of judgement.  Whether that judgement came from my peers or my family, it still made an impact.  So why can’t I let go and just jump?  I imagine it’s connected to the concern for my friends and family.  Growing up I’ve been lectured on my tendency to be driven to the point of obsessiveness.  My family told me that to live a truly full life you need to have many interests that you pursue at the same time, juggling them to make them fit together, whereas I take all my eggs and put them in one basket.  As an example my dad would talk about professional athletes and how hard many people work towards becoming one, when statistically they will never achieve their goal.  I’m twenty-one now and I know an Olympic athlete.  When I was younger we swam together in the same swim club.  She was definitely obsessively driven towards her goal of becoming an Olympic swimmer for Canada and she accomplished this goal by swimming in the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.  

Fear, it consumes our daily lives.  Fear of what others think, fear of repeating mistakes, of never learning.  Fear of the unknown.  It’s strange the power fear has on our lives and the compromises we give it to make it complacent.  Not everyone is happy experiencing a small amount of satisfaction from partaking in many things at once.  If that’s true then maybe I’m meant to sink fully into my own nature and pursue my dreams obsessively in the hopes to master my craft.  A couple years ago I asked my close friends to describe me in one word; they all said intense.  Every one of them told me at different times that when choosing out of the entire English language, the word that described me was intense.  Intense is an extreme adjective, a word fitting of an extreme personality.  I don’t know how I feel about being intense, I certainly like to believe I’m an easygoing person, but even I have to admit I never let myself get walked on.  I speak my mind, which is a possibly a positive, most definitely a negative at times.  If I intend to grow as a person, than I feel like it’s time to start recognizing these facts.

Life so far has been nothing but a constant learning experience.  I expect it will only continue to be a learning experience, and when it stops being a learning experience I’ll be dead.  So until then I’ll have to make some interesting choices.  I don’t know if I truly have the ability or the talent to achieve my dreams.  Perhaps my fear will consume me and I’ll settle for typical life.  Who knows, all I can hope for is an interesting story.

The Ending

I sit here staring out the windows of my mothers’ twelfth floor apartment, pondering my latest pothole in this seemingly endless road.  I have failed, yet again, to maintain someone’s interest in me for more than six months.  I suspect he’s already moved on, I can’t imagine I meant much to him.

I love pursuing stand-up comedy but I need to take time away because seeing my ex hurts.  Hearing his comments tears me apart and sends me diving into a two six of vodka.  I hate that he has this power to with one look, all the while seemingly oblivious to my existence, gut me like a fish. It entertains me that only a few short weeks ago he confided his thoughts and desires in me.  I’m at a loss, every time I feel like I have something truly solid it turns into sand slipping through my fingers as I frantically try to grasp it.  I feel so helpless, if I really deserved good things I’d have been prepared for this, armed with a blow torch, turning the sand into glass.  I don’t like losing people from my life.  Correction, I don’t like losing people I love from my life.

I start wondering about the choices I’ve made that have brought me to this point.  The impulse to make this relationship work is no different then the one that led us to begin it.  What changed?  Did lust overpowered us and hide the realities of our situation, only to allow them to catch up with us later?  We both view ourselves as people who strive past the confinements of societal views.  Despite that, we let the very people we don’t allow to “influence” us effect our choices, stealing the spotlight away from the only two people who should be basking in its’ warm embrace.  So are we hypocrites?  Or, are we just a couple of fools still too optimistic to view the reality of our situation.  Age is a factor.  Time for each other is a factor.  Life experience is a factor.  Those three tiny factors are the very reason two people who care for each other can’t continue down the same path.  

Love, it’s an interesting idea.  I love him now.  Eventually I will have loved him, and when that happens I will be the only one who ever knew or cared about that fact.  There are so many cliches involving love, my personal favorite being “it’s better to love and have lost, then never to have loved at all.”  Statistically speaking, with my generation it’s more likely that your relationship will end then succeed.  So where does that leave you on the loved and lost part?  Is the continued ending of love worth of the pain involved with having loved them?  I haven’t decided yet.

I’m sure there are things I’m naive about right now, but I know I will move on.  I don’t hold on to the hope that we will get back together because ‘he’s the only one for me’.  It’s a great movie premise for the romantic in all of us, but I just can’t believe that.  I believe every relationship (including our friendships) teach us the lessons we need to learn so we can discover who we are.  So the question I want to answer is what did I learn?  I’m unsure if I’ll ever know all the ways being with him has affected me, but I’ve taken a few important lessons.  The first is that little things can be the end of relationships.  In fact, I think that it’s the little things that always end relationships.  I’ve also learned that you can break up on the best terms possible, but you still die inside when you see that person.  You can’t help but assume the worst from every action they do from that point forth.  It always seems my emotions can blind me and steal my logic.  Oh how I lament my irrationality.

What infuriates me is when people tell me that he wasn’t the ‘one’ and that person is still out there looking for me and when I meet him I’ll just ‘know’.  I feel everyone who watches these Disney movies should be made to watch a disclaimer informing the viewer that the movie they’re about to watch is a work of fiction.  As far as I can tell this idea of ‘happily ever after’ is one of the biggest lies we’ve spread.  I do believe that people can succeed in staying together, I just believe it takes an incredible amount of work and communication from BOTH people.  Nothing worth while in my life has come easily, so I assume this corresponds to the realm of relationships as well.  

Anger has no place in my feelings following my break up, hurt, longing, and a sense of being inadequate definitely do.  Are they reliable feelings?  I suspect not, because in reality even though I love him and wanted my future to continue onwards with him. I have a dream.  I want to achieve that dream.  Ironically, I shared the same dream with him, but from what I’ve gathered from the relationships I’ve been in, and from the ones I’ve had the ability to view with an outsiders perspective, one person in the relationship always sacrifices for the other.  I can’t give my dream up.  Neither can he, and he’s more prepared to deal with the fact that to accomplish your dreams you must sacrifice.  Truly sacrifice, in the hopes that you will achieve that seemingly impossible desire.

So here I sit, the night has swallowed the city and I look upon it and I wonder how many of the people driving past have really made the sacrifice to achieve their greatest desires.  How many people strove only to give that dream up for another challenge.  Does it really fulfill them or do they regret and resent these choices?  I don’t know, I’ll never know, the only thing I’m actually certain of is that I won’t be satisfied in life until I do.  I’ve been losing sight of that recently.  Let this be my constant reminder.