The Summer of Regret
Sometimes life decides to orchestrate a sequence of experiences and calamities in just the right sequence to put your mind in the perfect place for an idea that might otherwise simply pass by in the afternoon breeze to instead take hold and grow. Maybe it’s a sudden come-to-Jesus religious conversion. It could be an epiphany in the form of a falling apple unlocking the physics of gravity, Buddhist enlightenment, or a tumble off the toilet and a resulting forehead bruise that reveals the flux capacitor. There are few things as empowering as the spark of an idea to a combustible mind. It can be a lot of fun. It can also be an awful lot of trouble. If you’re Isaac Newton in this example, that spark gifts humanity an understanding of science that births the modern age and forever cements Newton’s reputation as a genius. If you’re a 22-year old who joins a cult after a series of unraveling personal events lead to a nervous breakdown in senior year of university, that idea might just be a phase that ruined your credit score and is a constant source of embarrassment. For the rest of your life you can’t go to an extended family event without your Aunt Linda inevitably bringing up that time you spent five months in a weird cult when you’re not in the room. Because Aunt Linda’s are fundamentally unhappy, cruel people and they’re the worst.
For me though, the idea wasn’t something profound enough to benefit broader humanity in any way or anything remotely close to a religious experience. The idea that life had served me up on a platter to be devoured by was ‘The Summer of Regret.”
I first heard about the idea of the summer of regret while sitting on a friend’s roof. Joining the group midway through an afternoon, I didn’t understand the relevance of the inside joke “the summer of regret!” that got everyone to laugh the first time it came up. So when someone declared the line a second time as a way to justify boldly stealing someone else’s beer while they were inside, I asked what it meant.
The concept is simple. Let’s say it’s 2:45 in the afternoon on a Tuesday and we all probably have things we should be doing right now. But what if we blew off the day to have a second, third and fourth beer on the patio?
“It’s the Summer of Regret, let’s do it!”
I work tomorrow and it’s already midnight, I know I’m having fun but I really should go home.
“Summer of Regret!” And suddenly you’re walking home with the sunrise.
Have you ever been to Grover’s, that shady-looking diner on the far side of town? Who eats there, anyways? I can’t understand how that place has somehow stayed open our entire lives.
“Summer of Regret!” Now we know to never, ever order the Grover’s B Special.
I think she’s flirting with me. Am I sure that this is a good idea though? It’s not like you want this to be a thing.
“Summer of Regret!” Two sets of clothes thrown haphazardly off to wherever they happen to land.
It’s a simple rationalization tool. My friend Randy used to employ a similar one where, whenever faced with something that we probably shouldn’t do, he would just count down from 3.
“Three, two, one.”
If he made it to one and nobody had stopped him yet, it meant that we all had to do it. The bottle was being opened, the food was being ordered, the fence was being climbed or the situation was about to escalate considerably. It’s not particularly clever — in fact, it’s childishly simple. But you’d be surprised how easily it gave entire rooms license to not just do something they probably wouldn’t have otherwise done, but make light of and revel in doing so. It was the devil on your right shoulder winning the argument with the angel giving better advice on your left simply because he counted down from three. So it was with the summer of regret. And I embraced it whole-heartedly.
You may remember that I earlier qualified that in order for an idea like this to take proper hold, a series of events have to occur to make one vulnerable to it’s influences. Such was the case for me. You see, I’d just gone through something of a rough stretch.
I hope that you are lucky enough to have a best friend. I was particularly close with mine. Nathan wasn’t just my best friend; he was my brother. I mean that sentimentally, but I also mean it literally. After essentially living at our house all through high school, my family adopted him into our own. My brothers called him a brother and treated him as such, and my parents called him son. He spent holidays and Christmas and Sunday night family dinners at our house. He lived off and on at my parent’s house all through his twenties and he spent more time with my family than I did. We all loved Nathan, and we weren’t alone.
I admired Nathan’s ability to capture the moment and steer them towards the night’s furthest star. Nights out, parties, weekends, sudden trips, fiascos and adventures were the kinds of things that Nathan was famous for across dozens of different groups of people. He had entire followings of friends in half a dozen towns that would lose their minds with excitement when he walked into a party. I know this, because I met most of them, and I quietly followed him into those raucous rooms, waiting to eventually be introduced as his friend or brother, Andrew. Nathan was a rock star. And his talent was being him. He looked like Patrick Swayze, and he was exactly who everyone wanted him to be. He was just so much fun; picking up the group, soaking up their attention, not just comfortable in the spotlight but thriving in it, entertaining the hell out of the room. And if you had a one-on-one conversation with him he would just want to talk about you. What things do you care about? How are things going with you? He’d remember the struggles with your girlfriend or boyfriend that you had mentioned last time. How were things going with your parents divorce? You had randomly mentioned that to him the last time he talked to you 8 months ago because there was something you found oddly trusting about him and, of course, you were both drunk. Are you alright with all that? How’s it going? You know you can call him or text him anytime you needed somebody to talk to. He was the coolest, best looking guy in the room, and he genuinely cared about everyone else who was there. And he also had this mysterious past, and nobody ever knew what he was up to, or why they wouldn’t see him for weeks or months at a time. Trust me, everyone wanted to know everything about him. Nathan was a professional at never telling almost any of them anything. It was a socially brilliant burden that he tortured himself with.
But I understood it. And he in turn understood me. We were two people who would never talk to anyone about our emotions, our fears or how events and other people made us feel. We were both irrationally private, guarding our secrets, our stories and even stupid, benign details of our lives to even the people that we knew. Except that with each other we would talk about literally everything. I knew all the things that bothered him, the stories he couldn’t bring up without the pain breaking him down into tears, the fears that defined him and every mistake or crime, real or otherwise, that he committed. And he knew all of the same for me. We talked about literally everything. For someone who bottles everything up, never talks about anything and doesn’t trust anyone, you cannot possibly imagine what an exceptional gift and comfort that is. We would talk constantly, no matter what opposite sides of the world we happened to be on. If we were in the same place, then we would be competing at basketball or soccer or some stupid backyard game until someone broke or sprained something, talking about girls past or present, eating as much food as possible or playing NFL Blitz until 4 in the morning.
And then one day the week before Christmas I was at work, and I was told that someone was on the phone for me. I picked it up, and my Dad told me that Nathan had died. Pulled into the water by a rogue wave while exploring a rocky ocean point on a day off from his job in the Caribbean. He drowned.
The emergency workers could see his battered body, floating face down. But it was too dangerous to recover it. I had to call and devastate his sisters with the news that he was gone, trying to conceal the more gruesome of the details. That attempt at kindness failed, as they wanted to believe that since his body hadn’t been recovered, it meant that there was still a chance that he was alive.
“He was so strong, such a great swimmer,” they pleaded, “there has to be a chance!” I then had to explain the exact details of how and why everyone at the scene knew he didn’t make it. They were in hysterics, we all were, and there was nothing that I could possibly say to make it better.
That’s when the phone got passed to Nathan’s biological mother. She was matter of fact, and a little bit confused at first. But she was less concerned about the events of what happened then she was with something else.
“Can I ask you something,” I can clearly remember her saying, “Do you know if Nathan was a believer? Do you know if he came to the lord?”
Again, there was no feeling in her voice, like the automated voice announcing the name of each stop on the train. “Because I don’t think that he was. He was a sinner and didn’t come to the lord. That means that he’s in hell now.”
She’s a real treat of a human being. She spent the next few weeks calling my parents house to berate, accuse and insult whoever would pick up the phone. It would be six weeks before we could have a funeral. Six weeks before anyone who knew him and was trying to grieve could have a chance to say goodbye because she repeatedly threatened to file lawsuits against anybody who tried to have a funeral for Nathan. But eventually, we did, and hundreds of people came to celebrate his life and say goodbye.
The next few months were really hard for me. It was impossible to think about anything else. You learn to start putting on a face to mask the way you feel so the rest of the world will think you’re OK. You know you’re not fooling yourself, but you’re so sick of everyone’s well-intentioned pity, and more importantly, you just don’t want to talk about it anymore. You don’t want to think about it.
I tried to keep as busy as possible. That was apparently supposed to help. I had started working a third job, so staying busy wasn’t a problem. But I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t pretend like I wasn’t drowning under the weight of everything, and I didn’t know how or who to talk to about it.
I remember coming home from work one day a couple months after Nathan died. I had realized that day that I was not handling things well. I felt like I was breaking down under the constant thoughts of what I was going through but not ever talking about. I knew that I needed to do so something, that I needed to tell somebody. When I got inside my girlfriend uncharacteristically came to meet me at our front door.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about.” I told her.
“There’s something that I need to talk to you about too,” she said, “and I think that I should go first.”
I’m not confident about a lot of the life advice that I give out, but on this thing I am certain: Never break up with someone on April fools day. Just don’t do it. Because then you’ll have to say “No, but seriously, this isn’t an April fools joke. I’m actually breaking up with you.” It’s a comically surreal way to start a conversation that is kicking you in the stomach, trust me.
We had lived together for three years. I did not see it coming in the slightest. I thought that we were building towards the rest of our lives. It turns out that I had a very bad sense of her and that relationship. Not a good feeling. So it goes.
After Nathan died, I started spending time with a close friend of his named Travis. Travis was the name that Nathan brought up most, as if the three of us had always been a little crew. But while I’d met him a few times, even with both of us being incredibly close to Nathan we had never really spent much time together. We lived in different towns, but I think that it was more a part of Nathan liking to keep the different worlds he’d made for himself separate. He always wanted to make sure that if you had to go to work, or the fun ran out, you were out of town or you somehow grew tired of him, that he had another group, person and place to go to.
Starting the day Nathan died we quickly grew a close friendship. We talked on the phone almost every day for the first couple of weeks. There weren’t many people who knew what we were going through, but we both knew that the other person knew it exactly. In a time when there was little else, that was huge. I think that for both of us it felt like holding on to a tiny little piece of Nathan.
We would text each other the most incredibly out of bounds jokes and memes for a dark laugh. We got together a couple of times, remembered Nathan, toasted him late into the night and made each other laugh at a time when laughs were few and far between. Travis was one of those funny people who had something special about him that would make you laugh harder than you thought possible. We made plans for getting together to cook huge dinners and to take a canoe trip in the summer to one of Nathan’s favorite places.
We found a twisted humor in the reality of us both being dumped by long-term girlfriends in the same week, just a couple months after Nathan left us. Though I think his breakup hit him a lot harder than mine hit me. He had probably lost someone better. Regardless, at least we still had each other, even if the rest of our world was disappearing around us.
He texted me a few weeks after our coinciding break-ups asking me if I could hang out the coming weekend, but I had to tell him that I was busy, working nights all weekend. It was the last time I’d hear from him, because that weekend he killed himself.
That was it for me. I went to his funeral a couple days later and I hid in the back of a crowded room. It was too much. Surrounded by all that pain and looking at the sad, one-man left behind parade that my life had become I decided that I didn’t want to feel anything. My breaking point wasn’t that I couldn’t handle the weight of everything anymore. It’s that I wouldn’t. I wanted nothing more to do with it. Take back your pain, life! Take your feelings and your trust and your openness! I wanted no further part. I wasn’t checking out of life, I was just opting out of that part of it. I took a confrontational approach towards anything negative or overwhelming that I’d been feeling and was determined to refuse to feel anything that wouldn’t help me forget it. Easier said than done, but I found some tricks.
And so it was that the summer of regret came across my path. I quit my office job, took a sabbatical from my part-time writing gig and just worked at the restaurant/bar where I’d been doing nights and weekends. I started saying yes to everything and began embracing a life of distraction. Plans for every night of the week; I would be at work, or at the gym, or playing sports or at an event or a friends or the bar or playing dungeons and freaking dragons, I was following the crowd wherever it happened to go. My experience was that spending as much of my time as possible distracted and surrounded by other people didn’t end up making me feel any less alone when I did have time to myself. But it did result in me spending a lot less time alone to think about it. And it was really fun. That was a new and pleasant change. And so I got to never wanting to go home. I knew damn well what lay in wait there, ready to keep me sad and awake all night. Passing out was much more preferable, so the later and drunker that I could come home, the better. Bringing company with me was even better still. If ever I felt myself falling asleep on a couch or in a chair I would take it. Any respite was worth it. Sleep was golden. Sleep meant feeling and thinking nothing, which was a miracle. And when you woke up, you never know, you might not have anything heavy on your mind. Maybe you’d just wake up, make breakfast and read until you had to go back to work without feeling anything. And then after work, you want to have some drinks? Yeah, more fun juice! Forget what’s on your mind, lose track of time, have thoughts give way to impulse and live for a night simply to maximize your feel good and escape. Laughter, friends, distraction, food, sex and then a brain that’s unable to function? Perfect.
Sometime during those first few liberating weeks of that summer I remember one conversation that left a major impression. It wasn’t so much what we talked about (though the subject would linger as a ghost to haunt me later), but rather the person who it was with that stuck with me. Have you ever had a conversation with someone who you didn’t know all that well that caused you to see them in a completely different light? As if they were a whole new person. Maybe you’d already known them for a few years, maybe you grew up together but were never close, perhaps you only know them because they dated someone you knew or they were just somebody that was often around in groups of mutual friends. But you never really got to know them. And now they’re suddenly this whole new person, at least to you.
That’s what happened over the course of the conversation I had with this particular girl. I don’t remember how she did it, but somehow she conned me into a deal where we would each ask the other one personal question that the other had to answer truthfully. I blew my question on something silly. I don’t even remember what I asked her. But I do remember what she asked me. She surprised me by inquiring into the extent of my sexual history. I scrambled to give an answer that was at once completely honest and fair while obfuscating the fact that I technically wasn’t answering her question directly at all. I told her that I didn’t believe in having regrets. Every experience matters, because it’s what brings you to where you are. Yes, of course you make mistakes and sometimes you do incredibly dumb things. But it’s more important to learn and grow from those experiences than it is to go back and not have done them at all. And that if you’re trying to live life at full speed in order to explore as much of it as possible before your ticket gets punched, you have to accept that there are going to be some of those terrible, cringe-worthy mistakes along the way. But I didn’t believe in regrets, I told her, especially when it came to the people that someone has been with. I would never care about how many people someone had been with, whether that number was big or small. Because whatever experiences they may have had with whatever partners they were with is what led them to become the person you care about now. There is no point in obsessing about the names or numbers of that past, because that past is the journey that it took for them to become the person that you want to be with or the person that you love. You can’t begrudge someone how they became who you love, as long as you care about who they genuinely are now. It doesn’t do any value to think about it, so don’t. Just accept who they are now, because that’s somebody that you wanted to be with. So I’ve never cared to keep track of how many people I’ve slept with or ask anyone else or care what that answer might be. Regrets are things that cause people to get trapped in the past and miss the future, I told her, and so I don’t believe in having any of them.
She noted immediately that I didn’t technically answer her question, but she didn’t mind my answer either. We kept on talking, and slowly but surely I started to feel like I was looking at somebody new. Maybe it was the way I noticed her looking at me. How the corners of her mouth crept just a little too far towards a smile, betraying the coy smirk she was trying to wear. I’d never seen eyes as spectacular and as able to speak as fluently as hers. She had interesting things to say and knew immediately whenever I tried to get away with spouting my bullshit. All of a sudden she was this whole new person from the one that I thought I knew, and I very much wanted to know more. Our conversation and that smile stuck in the back of my mind for a few days. After another talk she stayed in the back of my mind for even longer. Another conversation that turned into more than just talking and she never left the back of my mind again. Despite my best efforts to feel nothing and deny it, I could tell that I really liked her. More than I was ready to deal with. So the back of my mind is where I left her.
The summer of regret ended, the line stopped being as funny to yell out in a group and time moved on. But while the ‘summer of regret!’ sentiment had been a largely group movement, I had internalized it in a way that I didn’t realize. It’s not like I became an apostle or quit my job to go door-to-door with pamphlets asking people if they’d heard the good news about the wonderful, life-changing rationalizing powers of the summer of regret? Months turned into a year and then two, as it looked like I had no intention of ever letting that summer end. Everyone in my life was either held at a distance or temporary, and it had become impossible to pretend like that I wasn’t hurting people in that process. Meanwhile I was trying to live forever, all at once. Gradually something started to feel familiar. I knew this story; I’d seen it before. This is what Nathan’s life looked like.
I certainly hadn’t meant to, and it wasn’t some sort of tribute, but I now realized that in the time after everything fell apart for me I’d managed to recreate so much of the exact chaos that he lived in for myself. We now had so many of the same habits. We were both alone as little as possible, both always chasing the night. Both valuing a good distraction more than any of the consequences bound to come from it. It’s funny, because I never once envied him his life while he was living it. Well, maybe I envied that every girl he talked to seemed to immediately fall for him, especially when I was younger. But I used to know all too well how that tended to pan out for both of them. I got used to never thinking of Nathan’s girlfriend’s as anything more than temporary, no matter how incredible they were or how much he might have professed to like them. And really did. And he treated them incredibly well, right up until he absolutely didn’t.
I remember once he spilled a glass of red wine on my parent’s carpet. Not a big deal. My parents quite like their wine; they know that spills happen. But instead of trying to figure out how to clean it properly or telling anyone, he rearranged the furniture to try and cover it up, hoping nobody would notice that the couch was suddenly in an entirely new location. And then he left first thing the next morning and didn’t come home, call or text for almost a week. He was 27 years old. He’d been considered a full member of the family for about a decade at that point. But he was still so scared of what my parents (who didn’t care, but would have had an easier time cleaning the spill that day instead of two weeks after it had set in) would think of him and what they’d do that he irrationally tried to pretend it didn’t happen instead of just asking my mom or Google how to get red wine out of carpet. This is the exact same approach that Nathan took towards break-ups.
Nathan would act like everything was perfect, trying his best to make you think that you were in a fairy-tale. And then he would run away. Let me be clear, I mean he would literally run away. If he was dating you and wanted to break up, he would simply not come to visit you at school for the weekend like he had promised to, he would not answer your texts or message when he didn’t come to pick you up on Thursday night for dinner like you’d planned, he wouldn’t talk to you for days and days and he would not show up to your birthday party without telling you he wasn’t coming, even though he knew you’d been excitedly telling all your friends about the guy you’d been dating over the last couple of months. Ghosting, I believe the kids call it now. Except he wouldn’t do it after a couple dates, it would be after months of a serious relationship. I’ve never loved a friend more than I loved him, but the way he would do that was so cold, and so cowardly. Too many times my door bell or phone would be the one to ring, and I’d have to be there to catch the soon to be ex-girlfriend whose world he had just sent crashing towards Earth, breaking up in the fire of velocity as it hurled through the atmosphere to it’s inevitable destruction. I knew the drill, and I hated it. He didn’t show up? He hasn’t responded to you in days after blowing you off? Have I heard from him? Here we go.
“Look, here’s the thing…”
And then, like an infomercial hack lawyer, I would have the pleasure of tackling the challenge of explaining Nathan’s history without betraying his trust, how it wasn’t their fault, how they were right and he was being a coward, how he was doing this (hurting them, probably more so than if he just dealt with it like a human being, in person/at all) because he was actually afraid of hurting them. How sorry I was. How they deserved better. How great you are and how silly he’s being for not seeing and appreciating it. That he really doesn’t mean to be hurting you the way he is right now. Yes, I know that this is coming out of nowhere, that everything was great and you guys were just talking about taking a trip together. No, that I’m sorry, but I don’t think that this is just something that he’s going through. And yes, I will sure as hell make sure he calls you or comes to see you as soon as possible, trust me on that.
Which is how I, feeling like a cheap infomercial lawyer, would have to confirm on behalf of my client that yes, this was almost definitely Nathan ending a relationship with them. I would express, on my own behalf, how sorry I was. How they deserved better, how great they are and how foolish my client was being for not seeing that and appreciating them. Yes, I understand that this is coming out of nowhere and that the two of you were planning on taking a trip together. I assure you, it is not just something that he’s going through right now. And yes, I agree to make sure that he calls or comes to see you, immediately. I can’t tell you how many times I lost my mind with him for making me have that conversation, and for treating somebody with so little humanity and respect. What the hell is the matter with you, I would demand. How could you be so callously selfish? It took me a long time to understand just how firm of a hold his fears had on him.
You have to understand, Nathan’s childhood was different than most peoples. He moved from foster home to foster home, usually separated from his sisters. He would have to try and adjust to a new home, find his way without a family and without the kind of emotional support that so many of us are blessed enough to get at home without even realizing it. He had to catch up in class to being at a new school and try to fit in with the new kids. Then he’d suddenly move and have to do it again. And then do it again. As he realized his home was different, he grew more and more terrified of what the other kids would think of him if they found out. They all had something that he didn’t: a family at home. As if it wasn’t cruel enough of fate to have not given him the emotional support of having a family growing up, his biggest insecurity became that he was embarrassed about not having one. It made him feel empty and unaccepted. I think it’s what made him want as many people’s approval, acceptance and embrace as possible. But at all times he had to keep his life, his secrets hidden away. All through high school he thought that if anyone found out he was in foster care they would stop loving him and abandon him outright. That they would find out there was something wrong with him and want rid of him. I think on some level that’s how he must have felt being shuffled around as a kid. So he hid his life. So much so that I remember countless times as adults when he would lie about basic, unimportant details or dodge simple personal questions. He didn’t need to do this. People weren’t personally investigating him because they suspected his secret past; they were just making casual conversation. It didn’t matter. He never stopped being scared that if you knew his story, if you knew his weakness and the heaviness he carried around with him that you’d stop caring about him. That you wouldn’t want him around anymore and someone would come and take him away. He never really shook that. That’s why he covered up the red wine stain and then ran away, like a little kid breaking something, afraid that you’ll send him away and stop loving him forever. I think that fear and vulnerability is why he was so empathetic and why he cared so much about anybody he called friend, of which there hundreds and hundreds. He wanted everyone to feel important, accepted and cared for. Everyone. He gave more time listening to the problems of people he either loved or barely knew and sometimes gave so much of his money or food to the homeless that he didn’t have enough left for himself. He was incredible that way.
It’s also why we was afraid to break up with anyone, instead acting like everything wasn’t just fine, but perfect, right up until the moment that he literally ran away. He couldn’t bear you not accepting or wanting him. It killed him to make someone else feel that way. He was too scared of both of those things, so he simply left you to deal with that pain, confused and alone. And he would do the best that he could to hide from the guilt and reality of that by surrounding himself with the loudest distractions and longest nights possible, with somebody new to distract him.
I don’t think that I ever understood that part of Nathan until I found the part of him that was always trying to run away and hide from the same darkness that I was now. I’m not trying to say that we went through the same thing. Nathan had to deal with a bigger burden than I ever have, and he was often a much better person than I have ever been. We had different pains and paths to them, but we were both doing the same thing in trying desperately to forget that pain, or at least never be left alone in the same room with it. We both needed people around, we needed to be accepted by them we badly needed some sort of intimacy. And while neither of us meant to, we both hurt people over and over again because we were more selfishly interested in catering to our fears than dealing with them head on. Nathan needed to be loved, but he couldn’t stand the idea of you leaving, so he always had to leave first. And even after he left, he couldn’t stand you not caring about him and hating him instead, so he’d avoid you completely and hope it’d all somehow blow over. For me, the only intimacy I would dare with someone anymore was sex and a late night heart-to-heart where I was too drunk to enforce my feelings-filter and we were both drunk enough for me to hope that we might both just forget the conversation completely. In either case, both Nathan and I had every intention of running away.
“I know that Nathan’s talked a little bit about his Mom and growing up, and I know that’s really messed him up and so some things are harder for him,” I remember one of Nathan’s ex’s telling me during one of those break-ups I was telling you about earlier, “But I don’t get how that somehow means he can think it’s OK to treat someone like this.”
She had a really good point. I told Nathan as much, repeatedly, all those years ago. So what the hell was my excuse now?
My brother died. My girlfriend dumped me. My friend killed himself. Awful and tragic, sure, but so what? Plenty of other people have it worse. Life goes on. So what the hell is the matter with me? I didn’t know what the fear was that was driving me, but I knew the way I was dealing with it wasn’t making me happy and that I couldn’t keep using it as an excuse to leave others feeling hurt or used. Why am I still so fucked up? It turns out it’s easy not to know the answer to that question when you’re going out of your way not to ask the question.
I was seriously depressed, but it wasn’t thinking about the people that I lost that depressed me. It wasn’t some numbing sense of the world being a dark and frail place without meaning; it wasn’t self-loathing or anything clinical. I had been trying for years to put off feeling anything and I couldn’t do it anymore. I was drowning. It was loneliness. I was so overwhelmingly lonely, but I was doing everything possible to make sure that nobody could fill that void.
There’s a psychological term called ‘transactive memory’. It’s the idea of two people having a shared brain. Not a telepathic connection, but the idea that you store information inside someone else’s brain in a relationship. You don’t both have to remember every detail of the past, as long as you can piece it together. In a relationship, one person knows how certain things around the house work, so the other person doesn’t have to remember, they just have to ask. One person is more organized, so they keep track of all the dates, events, family birthdays and appointments, etc. Think about how nobody remembers anyone’s phone number anymore, because they’re all stored in your phone. Same concept. It’s one of the reasons why some people seem like they fall off a mental cliff after a divorce, or especially after a long-term spouse dies. Because there was a functional part of their brain and access to shared memories and information that they knew was in their partner’s memory, and now they don’t have access to it. Most people don’t even realize that these partnerships exist, and that the information is something they’re relying on someone else for.
In one particular way, Nathan and I had an important transactive memory connection. Nathan was the one person who I always talked to — about everything. If you put all the histories and stories and dump random crap and inside jokes, hopes and dreams and guarded feelings that everyone else I’ve ever been close to for my entire life together, it still doesn’t even come close to what Nathan and I talked about over 15 years of friendship. There was 15 years of shared memories and exposition and understanding that went into the start of any conversation. We could see how the other person was really feeling about something from a mile away. In a lot of ways he had a much better understanding of me than I did, and I had the same for him. And I leaned heavily on that. Rare was the occasion when one of us would be struggling with something that we wouldn’t talk out for as long as it took together. I had needed that person to help me out more than ever. I needed my brother who would understand, who I wouldn’t have to spend time explaining everything to first, because he already knew. I needed someone who I could trust, who could see the solution clearly and tell me what I should do. I needed him because I was scared now to talk to anyone else or let them in.
It was a few months ago now, and I was trying and failing to talk to a friend of mine about how I felt. He was rolling his eyes at me because of course I was talking about the girl who lived in the back of my mind. You remember her? With the smile and the eyes? I tended to talk about her a lot, he said, for a long time now. There had been a few times when something had happened or seemed like it was going to happen between the two of us over the last couple years. But I would always run from it, or she wouldn’t take me seriously, expecting me to disappear. He was having a hard time understanding why I had so much anxiety around not wanting to date someone that I was obviously crazy about, considering how much I brought her up, and the way I talked about her. I tried to explain to him the thought as it was in my mind.
“I can’t date her, because I really like her.” I told him. “She’s not the kind of person you want to blow a shot with if you can get it. She’s the kind of person you would want to marry.”
He stared at me for a minute, and then told me, “You’re an idiot.”
As soon as I finally said it out loud I realized how profoundly stupid it was. That’s all it took to get the wheels in my head rolling. Do you ever have something in your head that you feel strongly about and then as soon as you say it out loud you realize instantly that it’s the dumbest thing in the world and you don’t know what you were thinking? Yeah, I acted on that thought I kept silently in my head for years. Because she scared the crap out of me, and I didn’t understand why. I just knew that I’d committed to not feeling that and blindly, stupidly marched forward to the beat of that drum.
And that’s how I finally, eventually figured it out. I found the fear that was literally driving me every day. I was terrified of ever letting anyone get close to me. I was terrified of losing them, so I just refused out of fear to let anyone get close enough to me for that to happen.
Maybe Nathan would have helped me realize what I was really afraid of much sooner. He definitely would have seen how I felt about that girl long ago. She was magic. But I didn’t need him to do that. The problem isn’t that he died with the only copy of the Rosetta stone and now I was written in some dead language that nobody living could understand. The problem was that I didn’t let anyone else try. I didn’t talk about anything that I was going through with anyone. I just tried as hard as I could not to feel it. And that built up into me being afraid to feel anything. I could have let someone into the void that all of those losing all of the people I cared about most in a 5 month span and felt better, not worse. Even if I had of just talked about it, I could have felt a little less alone, and maybe have figured some of this out earlier. Sometimes the journey we take to get someplace isn’t worth celebrating.
Suddenly this girl wasn’t something that terrified me anymore — the idea of her was a leap for joy. There was an unbelievable weight lifted off my shoulders. I didn’t have to carry around the plight of that unresolvable fear with me all of the time. It felt like an impossible victory over gravity. I was giddy. I had to tell her. I had to tell her that I was crazy about her and that I should have realized it long ago but I knew now that I wanted to be with her.
She said no. Not what I was hoping for, but the door seemed open a crack. It made sense, why should she believe me? I’d given her every reason to doubt me. I’d never actually explained to here how I felt. I’d never actually really opened up to her, which is something that she’d definitely brought up in the past. Unfortunately, I’d also chosen other women instead of her in the past. Some for a night, some for a little while longer. It didn’t matter that I chose them because I didn’t have the feelings for them that I had for her. We’ve established already that that was unbelievably stupid of me. I knew that must have hurt her, and I knew that she didn’t understand why I’d done it. So I tried to explain it. I told her everything. I told her how I felt about her, and how long I had probably felt that way. I apologized over and over again about how I had been too afraid of letting someone get close and then losing them to see that, and to see who she was and what she meant to me. I told her that I knew now that I was in love with her. I had never known someone like her. Just by being who she was she made me want to be a better person, while making me want to be bad. I can’t think of a more perfect way to describe the person I’d want to be with. Give me a chance and I wouldn’t ever make her feel anything less than special to me ever again.
There was a moment where she really thought about it. Where I could see that if I’d maybe figured it out sooner or not made some of the mistakes along the way… But it didn’t matter. It was too late. Actions have consequences. Life doesn’t wait around for us to figure our shit out. Too much had happened, and she was ready to move on. And she did. Ironically, everything I did while being terrified of ever letting anyone get close to me because I couldn’t take losing them directly caused me to lose the one person I let get close to me. It’s not the ending to this story that I would have preferred, but it does feel like the one that fits.
So here I am. Still alone, still a little bit lost in the wilderness. But I have an idea now of how I got here. I’m still making some of the same mistakes. It’s exasperating, but I can at least see them for what they are now. And I’m trying.
While I haven’t been able to replace Nathan as someone I can talk to, nobody can say that I’m not being honest and opening up now. Maybe sharing everything I felt like I couldn’t talk about with anyone (right up until I clicked on the publish button for this) with everyone I know and the entire Internet is swinging a little too hard in the opposite direction. I might have overcorrected. Every word of this piece has been entirely outside of my comfort zone. We’ll see how that goes.
I lost a lot. I’ll never get those friends back, I’ll never get the friendship I had with Nathan back and I’ll never fully get back all the parts of me that I lost in the process. Some things never fully heal, but they scar over, and we carry on.
I know now that I was incredibly wrong about not believing in regrets. There is absolutely value in trying to live your life to the fullest, if that’s what it is that you’re doing. There was a bit of truth in the speech I gave that girl more than two years ago now about not believing in regrets, but not all of it.
I connected with the most incredible person during my enduring summer of regret. You could say that maybe never would have happened if not for it. Maybe. But you could definitely say that my summer of regret mentality gave me license to hurt a lot of people who were just trying to find their own way, too clouded in my own bullshit and too scared of repeating the same pain to see that there was something truly magical flapping it’s wings right in front of me. I missed it, until it was too late. I wasn’t living my life to the fullest; I was running away from it. And goddamn it, do I regret that. I think I will always regret it.
