With rose tinted glasses, I remember when a time was simpler. I remember a time when the autumn had the cool breeze with the brisk air, without it being too cold or too hot, and the sunsets illuminated the horizon with the most beautiful colors humans could imagine.
I remember staying up late playing video games, trying to complete that one last level or surpassing that story element that captivated my imagination and joy so much that I just couldn't stop until I felt there was a lull.
I remember hope. Hope in the notion that the future could remedy all the ailments I felt at the given point in time, yet comically, I don't remember what the majority of those ailments are. Again, those rose tinted glasses.
Because the other thing that I know to be true about those times is that I was still miserable. I don't remember all the why, but I know I wanted the following day to be better than the day before so badly that it would ruin the day I was having. Those sunsets were lackluster, and largely ignored. The video games, an escape from whatever problem I was having at the time. Those autumn days, likely, filled with bugs of some sort.
And perhaps that is just the human in me. Perhaps being a human is to never be able to fully live in the moments because of what happened earlier that day, that week, that month, or for the fear of what could be happening in the not too distant future.
Tomorrow I turn forty years old. I never thought I would live to see that day. When I was young, I made a deal with myself that I would kill myself at age thirty-six. It seemed like a decent age to die. Arbitrary enough to not have any substantial meaning from a numerical standpoint, young enough to not feel the consequences of an aging body too much, and old enough to have made plenty of mistakes that made life worth living.
And to an extent, that was all true. Being a sexual deviant throughout all my twenties meant that I had fulfilled most all the fantasies I had wanted – save a threesome, but that wasn't even much of a fantasy anyway. I had also traveled the country. From Florida to Los Angeles. I had visited 40ish states before I even hit thirty years old.
And then I made a choice that left me in total shambles a way that I never could have imagined. I spent years trying to get to a point of breathing again, and once I was there I started planning a future. I was 28 years old when I moved to Florida, and a couple years had passed since I had my life feeling like it was shattered into a million pieces.
About a year into that, I met my ex wife. I can remember how great it felt to feel like someone truly wanted to listen to me, to truly get to know me. It felt so good that I completely overlooked the fact that she was just struggling to understand me and honestly didn't care to know me at all. That all came into clear perspective the day we moved into together, after we had gotten married, on my birthday and she chose to ditch me to hang out with someone else. And leave me with moving all of our stuff into the apartment alone.
Three years later she came to me and told me she loved another man and I told her that I wanted a divorce. It was the easiest break up I have ever had in my life. And I got to travel the country for five months consecutively from it.
Those five months were not the best months of my life. Not by a long shot. I was more lost than ever. I had just blown up my whole world and while it was burning to the ground, I was just walking aimlessly away from it. I am glad I never went back to it, but that lost feeling from then is something I will probably be stuck with for the remainder of my life. I can't imagine a job being fulfilling. I can't imagine that anything will be as wonderful as the freedom I felt for those five months, and that freedom wasn't even something that felt satisfactory. It just felt like another means of being trapped in my own self.
And perhaps that is always going to be the big problem. I turned that 36 years old four years and a day ago. I remember thinking that day that I could have killed myself at any point before that, but I hadn't because I still had this massive amount of hope that the future would somehow live up to the rose tinted past.
That's the big problem, though. The things we find important today end up not being all that important at all, and the things we don't realize are important end up being what changes our lives entirely. Of course, that is all relative, as well. No two people hold value in the same things all the time. There are overlaps, which is how we relate to one another, but there are just as many differences, as well.
Love, for example, can be found in everything from the extreme all the way to the mundane. A person can love the way worms rise to the surface after a hard rain every bit as much as they love a person they consider their soul mate. It just matters where their passion falls, and I wish I understood more about that singular word – passion.
I understand sinking into something so much that nearly everything else ceases to exist, but I can't understand something being so captivating that it lasts a lifetime. To elaborate more on that, I have worked more careers than any other adult I know. I've done everything from being a factory worker to a manager of a coffee shop to a mechanic to sales to IT. Even the most enjoyable of these things wore me down to a point of feeling like there wasn't any room left for 'me' – and I suppose the best way to describe what that means is to say that I dedicated so much energy and effort to those career paths that it felt like I had nothing left outside of it.
Now, it is exactly a week after my 40th birthday when I finally got back around to finishing this. There are so many things in life that I want to accomplish, yet they all feel equally as unimportant. I want to write more novels and have them actually published. I want to build an electrostatic speaker set, and have them sound so good that I want to utilize them regularly. I want to record more music, and become better at it, and I want to build a car that I want to keep for the rest of my life.
I want to keep listening to amazing music, and discovering more things in music to love. I want to open up a museum based around experimental music, complete with sound pods where people can experience things like Nurse With Wound, Coil, Current 93, Swans, and even more extreme forms of audio art.
I want to start a non-profit to help get homeless people off the streets and help acclimate them back into society in whatever ways work best for them, including helping them with any mental health issues they have, or drug addictions, or disabilities of any sort, and anything else for that matter.
I just want to make the world a better place. All of these things just require so much money, and money is something I am surely not familiar with at all. The limited amounts of times I have had any in excess, it has been so short lived that I have been terrified to spend it.
But I am 40 years old now. Perhaps it is time I really do start planning for the future I never wanted. It doesn't look like it is going to evade me after all.
-Dustin S. Stover
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