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Quarter to Life

August 3, 2000. 2:22 PM. Twenty-five years later. Something about the quarter-life sentiment struck the fear of God in me. Am I really at my quarter-life point? My father — three strokes and two heart attacks before fifty. Still hanging in there, somehow. My father’s father died of a stroke before fifty. My father’s mother died before forty, of cancer. I’ve already had open-heart surgery. Sure, they had their vices: smoking, chewing, sitting around. I don’t remember my grandfather. I never met my grandmother. The only biological grandparent I have left is sitting in memory care. I want veins on my arms and legs. I want clear piss. No acne. A jawline.  When friends ask me to hike Mount Timpanogos, I don’t want to debate myself. I don’t want limits anymore. Being active has always been the solution to everything, so why the hell have I avoided it? I want to feel better. Look better. Live better. I want sex to be better. I just want to be better. The uncertainty of what’s ahead flippe...
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Su Vestido Amarillo

I've been having this vivid dream over the last few days, so I need to write this out.

Why now?

We took the car to Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was too late to go out anywhere, but we wanted to get dressed up and go anywhere but the apartment we were staying in.

She threw on a tight yellow dress with white heels and put her hair up in a messy bun — the humidity wasn’t sitting right with her normal hairstyle.

It was windy. Young couples all around us sat staring out toward the bay.

She lay between my legs, looking up at me as I looked out.

Times like these, when her irrational behavior was overlooked in favor of her beauty and fleeting moments of sweetness, upset me.

Two years of torment. Somehow, I saw through this romantic moment. For the first time, I felt poised enough to fight my habit of ignoring the reality of this relationship.

We were thousands of miles from home, so I knew it wasn’t the best course of action to bring any of these thoughts up then.

She snapped me out of it: “Where are you right now?”

I looked down at her innocent green eyes and smiled. “With you.”

She had an energy that night — running in the ocean water and jumping into my arms as I twirled her around.

She was doing it again. Making me fall in love with her. How could I not?

I never understood why we masqueraded as lovers.

I’m too ashamed to actually go into what happened between the two of us. Maybe I’m still protecting her. But a few weeks after we got back home from that trip, I never saw her again.

It took me a while to recover from that. To be honest, I carried a distrust of women because of her. It wasn’t until I met someone years later that I finally crawled out of that cave.

By dreaming about the most uncomfortable situation I’ve ever been in, I think my brain is telling me to stick with this newfound confidence — to never let myself feel like that again.