Life wasn’t great, but it was good. I was back in my hometown of Denton, Texas after my most recent meanderings through Colorado and Ohio and working at one of the two major local hospitals. Coming home always seems to recenter me somehow. It revives the forgotten or neglected emotions that have been put on ice, forcing a confrontation between us that always brings a glimmer of hope, but inevitably, reminds me why I always end up leaving again. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds understanding, if you choose to try, and the more you invest in the latter, that much less room remains for the former. So I sought out and found a comfortable place of understanding, and life was good, but it wasn’t great.
If you are reading this and you don’t know me, now would be as good a time as any for a brief rundown of my vagrancy so you have a little bit of context here. I was born in Ohio in 1980 and relocated to Dallas in 1982. Three years later I arrived in Denton for the first time. Since then, I have moved back to Ohio four times, Louisiana twice, and Colorado once, each time returning to Denton for anywhere from four months to several years at a time. It may have been that I was searching for something to define me, to give my life a meaning and a purpose beyond those ties that bind us to faith and family. Friends came and went. Women were either too interested in me or not enough for my liking, or, I just plain screwed it up. However it went, I wasn’t getting any closer to finding my person and starting a family, which consequently was really the only thing I ever really wanted since I can remember, but that’s another couch session for another time. Meanwhile, God had been slowly working His plan. Even so, the hopefulness that came with every new year began to attenuate, and as I approached my 40’s, it seemed clear that my approach wasn’t working. So, as I was just settling into myself and beginning for the first time to really understand who I was, I decided to take that busted approach and triple down on it. Enter S-K.
As I was saying, I was actually starting to see my life with clarity and purpose for the first time since I could remember. Failed endeavors had cleared the ground for new foundations of promise, and even the gnawing pangs of loneliness that have always accompanied my solitudinarian existence had, like the hunger of a fast, begun to feel more like a cleansing than mere suffering. So when a young, beautiful, confident S-K approached me on a rare night out in February of 2019, it seemed like the final piece to the puzzle was at last in place… It seemed.
Like a solar eclipse, she blotted out the sun and replaced it with some strange, magical, ethereal aura. It was as if the cosmos aligned just for us. Within a couple of months, we had decided that we were going to run off together with her dog and live happily ever after, and all of those idiotic things that fools “in love” conjure up. So, I bought an RV.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, it was one of the best damn decisions that I ever made. Even though life in the RV with S-K lasted only a month or so and those first few months alone had me questioning every decision I ever made in my life, I eventually pulled myself up by my bootstraps and got on with life, but now it’s an RV-life, and I couldn’t be happier.
The thought of settling down and having that life that once seemed essential still entertains my nobler aspirations, but for now, I’ll stay married to the road, through all the ups and downs, twists and turns, darkest of nights and brightest of days, always with a keen eye on the lookout for whatever bit of glory might peek from around the next turn.