Ever After.

With a new season come new changes, but sometimes you have to dig into the past in order to make strides to your future.
I've accepted that my life will always be changing and that I will never get comfortable enough to enjoy it before another wave of change comes, but I’ve learned to embrace change. I was in a new house with two roommates who had already made plans to move out. I could afford to live by myself in this two bedroom apartment. Maybe I’d make one a nice meditation room. But in order to maintain my lifestyle of excessive spending without a budget I would need to get a new roommate. Enter my friend Renee B.
Renee was a short blonde who had the heart of a woman and the brain of a man. With a mouth like a sailor and a gung-hoe attitude towards life she seemed to be a perfect roommate candidate. Along with our friend Taylor, another blonde with a passion for fashion as well as skulls and blood, together we created a trio that shared a love for late nights and a hatred for selling Clarisonics. Being with them was like living in my late teens all over again. It was their confidence that inspired me and our mutual non-judgmental, supportive understanding of each other that kept us together.
The one subject that always came up between us: relationships. We could spend an entire day at work talking about how Taylor and Todd were “lobsters” or how being scared to let someone in makes it difficult to trust them and even how there is someone out there for everyone. We all had a different concept of “Happily Ever After”. Taylor had moved back into town leaving her long time boyfriend in a long distance relationship. She knew in her heart that they were meant to be and that someday they’d be together again. Renee was in an up and down undefined relationship with an old flame. They’re past extended with years in the sands of time and she wondered if their wounded past could make for a beautiful future. As for me, I was going on my second year of being single. As a self proclaimed “forever single guy” my dream was to follow in the likes of all the beautiful romantics who came before me: Carrie Bradshaw, Marilyn Monroe, and to be successful at life as well as in love. I was learning to deal with the ghosts of the ones that got away. I had talked to most of them in person and wrote letters of all the things that I’ve wanted to say to the ones that I had lost touch with. Simple words on paper, but powerful blows to the ghosts of men that I kept summoning to occupy the loneliness I often felt. It was just what I needed to explain my side of the story; even if that meant sometimes putting holes through the paper from scribbling too hard.
We all come from different backgrounds of love, but they are all filled with the same fulfillment, losses, tears of both joy and sadness and the ultimate pursuit of happiness. I look at couples all the time. They come in different shapes, colors and sizes. I believe in couples and what they can accomplish if they learn how to believe in each other. It’s the relationships that last a week, a day, or an hour that make me wonder: are most people just looking for someone to solve their problems? Are they looking for someone who can explain to them why they feel so broken? Relationships are not therapy sessions, relationships are special and one of a kind that require you to love yourself enough to be open with another person and they should be treated as such. I can only sum it up best with this quote from the lovely and talented Rupaul: “If you don’t love yourself how in the hell you gonna love someone else?” Can I get an Amen? New friends can make you see the world a bit differently even how we see “Happily Ever After”. Maybe Renee, Taylor and I didn’t just get the same job, maybe we found each other to help us understand the difference between a relationship and a fantasy, because like most fantasies, you always wake up just before the bottom drops and when it comes to relationships it’s who’s there at the bottom waiting for you to catch you when you fall.
I’ve come to realize that I’m always going to be working up a new mountain every time I finish climbing another. As exhausting as it is sometimes to be working towards a new goal for personal growth, I am truly humbled by the end of it. But with friends like mine, laughter is always the best medicine to cure even the most painful of heartaches.

Xoxo,
B.