“I Love You!”

I have concluded that this phrase is horrid. While my experience with love and companionship is limited to a handful of people, I have found that the phrase itself is empty and devoid of meaning. It’s a phrase used by those without creativity, without passion, without heart, and frankly, without love.

I have used the phrase in the past and it has led me down some very strange roads. One of my girlfriends actually got mad at me when I said it and told me straight up that I didn’t. Confused the hell out of me because I had been friends with the girl for over a year before we even entered into an exclusive relationship. Needless to say, that relationship was pretty much busted after that point. I knew how I felt and that phrase was, at the time, the best I could come up with to express it. Another girlfriend craved for me to say the phrase to her. If I didn’t, she would throw a guilt trip on me and even get mad. She would assume that I didn’t really care about her. Insecure much? So eventually to me, the phrase didn’t mean shit except a stop-gap to prevent an argument. However, this same ex-girlfriend recognized something that I was doing that spoke louder than words. My actions. The way that I would talk to her about something. I was doing those things naturally. She picked up on it and called me out on it before I even recognized what I was doing.

The girl that I’m in a relationship with right now, I have considered saying the words but to me they mean less than what I really feel. To me, the feelings that I have expressed to her are larger than just a single phrase. The meme world on Facebook is full of wonderful sentiments that perfectly express my feelings for her and her feelings for me. We’ve told each other we love one another a hundred times already. We feel it when we hug and kiss each other, when we’re sitting on the couch watching TV and I’m playing with her hair, when we feed each other at the dinner table, when we stare at each other, and so many more actions that speak far louder than words ever could.

So, at the end of the day I won’t cheapen how I feel with a phrase that has become trite and meaningless to me. I’d rather shower her with phrases that express my passion for her, or tell her how inspiring she is to me, or how pretty I think she is. In reciprocation she does the same without expectation. The relationship is meaningful to us both. We mean a lot to each other.

Swept off my feet!

I would like to tell you about a girl I met online named Samantha.

I’ve been down the road of meeting people online. I know all about ‘catfishing.’ I’ve been doing shit on the internet since well before the shit was popular. I’ve been meeting awesome people through the computer since the late 80′s. I have a clue.

Up until this point in my life I have gone through cycle after cycle of being happy being alone to being straight up lonely and in need of intimate human interaction. I was feeling myself slip back down into a depression again, feeling alone. Then…

My buddy Darren made a post on facebook about him seeing some dude jogging in shorts during a blizzard. Darren saw him while he himself was walking to the bar. I thought the statement was pretty damn funny so I decided to start clowning him about it. Meanwhile, 2 other people were doing the same thing, Foy and Sam. What started out as a drive-by joke, turned into an interesting conversation among all four of us. It lasted for a couple of hours. Lots of laughter and a little flirting with Sam between the three guys. She took it like a pro. She was pretty impressive. Meanwhile, I got to looking at her public profile pictures and was quite impressed with how she looked. The few pictures I could see were pretty amazing. It wasn’t the first time I’ve gone through her pictures, either. I’d seen her make comments to Darren before so she wasn’t an unfamiliar face, just unfamiliar in conversation. Later that night Darren posted a message on my wall joking around about how I stalked him all night. I told him that I thought Samantha was pretty interesting. He agreed and that was pretty much it. I didn’t ‘friend request’ her immediately because I think that tends to lean more towards being creepy. I thought about it though. I wanted to give it another night.

So the next evening I started looking for her to make a post on something that Darren said and sure enough, she did. I jumped in there and made a joke about it, got a little bit of conversation going and then it stopped. We hopped from one post to the next. In the meantime I sent a message to Darren asking for a little info from him about her. I told him at that time that I had a gut feeling about her. He clowned me about it because I live down here in Kentucky and she lives up there in Michigan. That thought didn’t really matter to me because my gut was telling me to cautiously step forward. I finally just friend requested her and she immediately accepted it. I started checking out her posts about stuff and started watching some of the video links she was posting. Bloopers and practical jokes and whatnot. I’d click on like, then another one would pop up. So I got to looking for similar links to post. This went on until I got out of work, which was earlier than usual. I took off to the bar to contemplate over a beer and a shot. I get there, drink my drink and my shot, then pull out my phone and see that I had received a private message from her asking me, ‘Are you watching the videos I’m posting??’ I hadn’t seen any of the new links but this sparked an interesting conversation with her. I was hunched over my phone every once in a while talking to her and at the same time talking to my friends. We ended up chatting on facebook until a little after 9 in the morning.

I don’t know what happened to me in that conversation but I felt every single brick that I had put up around me to protect my feelings, fall away like nothing. I had gone out to the bar on Saturday (3/16/13) night and wasn’t really having a good time because all I could think about was Samantha. We picked up our talking from the night before and just kept on going. Later that night, after I had gone home, she offered me her phone number.

From that moment something caught on fire. We ended up talking on the phone for 9 hours. This last Sunday I talked to her on the phone all day long, at least 13 hours of talking. So much has happened in the last 11 days that anyone else would think we had lost our minds.

I still can’t find the words to describe how I feel about her. We’ve swept each other off our feet and have found ourselves floating in our clouds. I’m heading up to finally meet her on Friday morning. It is going to be the most magical experience I’ve ever had. I’m certain of it.

I can’t wait to see her!

Saying goodbye to an old, ‘friend’

When I quit smoking, I felt like I said goodbye to an old friend. It was bittersweet but I knew the value in doing so was greater than the feeling of loss. There is another old friend, older than good ole smokie, one that I have been attached to, addicted to, obsessed with, for a very long time. I know this thing isn’t a real friend because it, at the core, is full of pain and hurt. It hurts me every time I let it in. I need to kick it out once and for all. It always convinced me that it was for my own good, that it was better to just accept it but, I cannot. I cannot let it beat me down any longer. I must let it go. It’s going to be a terribly difficult fight to endure but I think I have the tools and the support to finally kick the bastard habit. Soon.

The above post is something I put on Facebook. The topic is about loneliness. It’s about self-pity. It’s about being unforgiven. It’s about all the things that I’ve done in the past. It’s about all the things that have happened to me in the past. It’s about my love life. It is about my lack of a love life. It is about the tragic failures I have had in my love life and how I eventually developed this coping mechanism that told me that being alone was the best way to be. That I didn’t need anyone else in my life to complicate things. It led me to believe that I would be happy so long as I could control as much of my life as possible. It lured me in with the prospect of happiness out of loneliness. I fell for it. It became my philosophy. I hate it.

I hate it more than anything else I’ve ever hated in my life. It has led me to feel sorry for myself. Aided me in believing that I wasn’t worth a shit to anyone. It led me to destroy otherwise good relationships due to my own utter selfishness. I want out. I want out of this trap and hole I built for myself… and now, I see light at the end of this tunnel. I’ve seen this light before. I want to believe it is there, I want to see this future outside of this tunnel. I’m ready for the challenge. I’m ready to take on loneliness and make it my bitch. I’m ready to share my life with someone else.

Now is the time.

My Problems

I’ve been on a buying spree lately. New car, new glasses, new contacts, all these things that change the way that I look or at the very least, perceive myself. I am still haunted, however, by my one phobia. I have met a lot of nice looking and interesting ladies in the last couple years. What happens is we meet, get along great, have solid conversations but then I hit a brick wall. I know there’s a step to climb up but I refuse to step onto it. The conversation grows stale, interest wanes, that’s it, chance of taking things up a notch, dies. It leaves me looking cold and uninterested.

Cold and uninterested are my shields. They protect me from doing, saying, acting, a fool. They protect me from rejection AND from success. I know who I am, I know my traits. There are some habits about myself that I just cannot tolerate and wouldn’t want to burden anyone else with. Yes, this is a self-esteem issue. I hate how quickly I am to get angry about certain things. These are situational and topic related triggers that cut the otherwise long wick of my temperament. Then, there’s the verbal abuse that follows. I have been verbally abused all my life between my mother, my father, my sisters and my friends. I’ve learned how to not just say mean things but to go right to twisting that knife towards unrecoverable damage. Then there’s my black moods. That’s what Sara called them. Those are those moments where I get obstinate about anything and everything. I get a sneering attitude and dare people to cross me. My patience disappears. These traits often show up unannounced. One moment I could be sitting there watching TV at the bar, the next moment something crosses my mind and my entire attitude changes in a blink. One more thing that I’ve had to deal with all my life is anxiety and its evil affects on my body. Anticipation anxiety is what gets me the worst. It’s why I am completely afraid of dating and why it’s easy for me to say that I am terrified of woman. Most other situations of anticipation I can handle fine. It’s when I know I’m going to see someone that I like that my stomach decides to play evil nasty games with me. It gets all twisted up, hurts like hell, and I spend the next 30 minutes in the bathroom instead of going out. Any one of my old friends and family can vouch for that.

I suppose that the only way to get out of this ditch I’ve dug myself into is to work on trying to be more accepting of my own flaws. To not see them as deal-breakers. Easy words to say. Impossible, I fear, to follow.

The move that finished it

You see the picture of the boy and girl on a bench. The boy slides closer and closer to the girl, bashfully, eventually trying to steal a kiss or put his arm around her. It’s an innocent picture that does much to describe the process of courtship.
Courting, these days, takes on a much more mechanical process.
I had been trying to court someone that I should have known better than try. I made a slight move towards her on the bench but she moved away. So that’s a done deal. I’ve deleted her number out of my phone and vow to not visit her anymore.
The End.

Feeling Sad

I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve been depressed for the last month, if not longer. I recognize what my ‘turtle shell’ is made of. It’s not a fear of going out on the weekend. It is an attitude that causes me to come off cold. I purposefully act uninterested and aloof to those that I actually do care about. It generally takes 2 things to get me to loosen up: alcohol and a solid state of mind. Unfortunately, after I do go and cut loose, I feel terribly guilty, terribly stupid, and terribly embarrassed the next day. I fret over every little thing I said, every little look I made, every smile, every touch until it drives me to convince myself that I made a fool of myself the night before and I should just stay home from now on. This is a constant battle for me and it is wearing me out. I sleep all the time because I’m just fucking depressed with the one aspect of my life that I just can’t seem to scale the ladder of. I pretend to not care so much that my actual feelings are just about to rip my heart open. I get tears in the corners of my eyes all the time because I feel so sad.

I was thinking of you but it passed.

When I was walking out of the store earlier this week I walked by the birthday cards. I stopped for a second, looked at the cards being displayed, considered buying one for a person I know but decided that would make me feel way too uncomfortable. So I didn’t. Then her birthday came and went and all I shot to her was, ‘enjoy your day…’ I’ve created this rift to an otherwise good friendship because I am completely afraid of liking anyone too much… because I like her too much. I put up this wall to let my own feelings subside into the depths of darkness where my heart resides.