I love it when life imitates art. Well, the art in my head. Being a creative, I often live in a world where reality and fantasy are just across a small footbridge, with either side exchanging places with the other, often at the most unexpected times.
Such a time happened this past week. I was in my boss’ office and noticed the flowers on her desk. It was her 21st anniversary and I joked that all the years I had been married came close to that.
It was then that another coworker in the office asked how many times I had been married.
I gave a ready reply. The first time I was too young, but my daughter came into this world so it was totally worth it. The second time, we were married for 10 years. Given that we were together 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it was more like 30 years in real marriage time, and it just kind of burned itself out. Too much togetherness. And then there’s Kat, last and best.
For those of you who have been following the bouncing ball that is my life, you’ve noticed that something seems to be missing. Several years, in fact. In the intervening years since I returned home, my Floridaze have become a more and more distant memory, like looking in the rearview mirror of a nameless, small town you just went passed through and noticing that it gets farther and farther away, smaller and smaller until it simply disappears.
Suddenly, you find yourself questioning whether you were ever in that small town. Was it just a mirage, or what is really there.
Such are the Floridaze. I seems more like a dream these days, so much so that it rarely comes up in conversation. It’s just a distant past, like that small town in the rearview mirror.
I guess that’s a good thing. No, check that. I know that’s a good thing. Our minds have a wonderful way of healing and moving on. The past becoming various shades of gray with no detail seems to be that way.
For the longest time I have had to think long and hard to remember any detail of this miscalculation and misadventure. For quite a time, only the pain and sadness was in technicolor detail, none of the good times. Eventually the good times turned to color, only to have the sad ones turn to gray. And now, it’s all gray, no sharp details, just fuzzy impressions that heralded a strange time in my life that was part Outer Limits and Twilight Zone with just a smidgeon of Dukes of Hazzard and Green Acres.
Like those old shows, you can get caught up in the reruns. I did for a while. I would continually loop back and forth through everything, changing scenes until they met my own desired reality, and cutting scenes or rewriting them entirely to hide my pain and my feeling of being lost in an alien world.
It’s not that I pretend that it all didn’t happen. I could easily take the cheap way out and pretend it was all a dream, or a nightmare, depending upon how I want to think of it. It wasn’t. It just was. All the meaning I had added to it were just a bunch of stories. Stories I would tell others and tell myself to feel better about making such a bonehead decision.
I guess we do that in our lives, create stories to sell us on something we either want to do, someone we want to date, or some life we want to lead that never really was what we wanted or should have pursued. The stories keep us from seeing the truth for what it is – that something happened, and event with times, dates and place, but absolutely no meaning, unless we want to give it some.
These days, that’s what the Floridaze are – a bunch of dates, places and times. Things that happened without judgement and without context. Just unconnected, random events that no longer have to affect me the way they did.
I will have you notice that I didn’t say anything about the people I met. Some of them are still near and dear to me. Some have slipped away with the passage of time, as they should as they were based on geography, not commonality. I don’t even really give that much thought these days.
Suffice it to say it was a long escape from reality. I’m hardly the first to slink off in the dead of night to find a life among the palm trees. Nor am I the last. But you can’t escape reality forever. Somewhere down the road, it has a way of finding you and you come to discover that it was always there waiting for you. You only had to want to greet it once again and be willing to embrace it.
To those of you still on the run, I congratulate you, for you have far more energy than I do. To those who actually found their bliss in the palms. Congratulations to you too. And to those who are finally out of breath, tired of running from the reality that is always waiting in the wings, raise your glass to me. For I have stopped my run and managed somehow to pick up where I left off, living a grand life back in home waters, appreciating what I have rather wanting someone else’s supposedly carefree life.
And someday, somewhere, perhaps our ships will pass again. We’ll toast to good times and fond memories, of those crazy days when I was on the lam, running from a life that really wasn’t all that bad to begin with.
In the Emerald City, enjoying life among the palm trees (I found out they grow here, too).
– Robb