2

----*

I think back on those years now and recognize the waste. Maybe its the sudden burst of emotion that comes with hearing your father has cancer, but I can't help to ask, what was I so mad about? How many opportunities were lost? How high were my standards to expect something of a father who could only deliver one performance and why couldn't I see that he needed the freedom to change? What did I think I was holding onto with my holier-than-thou need to keep him around for my sake rather than his? Why did I act with such pride even if I hadn't been shown the right kinds of love? Why did I hold onto all of this anger for so long and leave it unresolved to fester and deform?

And yet, I see the necessity of it all. I see all I had to overcome and I'm dementedly thankful for it all.

The Buddhists believe that the path to balance lies in suffering, that pain leads us to forbidden truths we must first acknowledge and then discard in order to shape ourselves into beings who can accept peace and solemnity within our hearts. Far be it for me to even pretend to understand anything more than the idea in a nutshell when it comes to ancient Eastern faiths, but I do understand that there has only been one possible outcome. Regret is the only luxury that the dying still possess and I am not immediately dying like my father.

For all the missteps and misconduct, for all the times where I lacked traction in this world, I have come to be me in the end. I have arrived at this moment, just the same as my father, in his cavalier habits of drinking, chewing tobacco, and eating to excess without exercise, has come to his cancer diagnosis. His regrets will not cure him, will not make up for lost time and unrealized moments, any more than mine.

----*

Ah, but what of the heartbreak, you're asking? Well, if you've stuck with me this long I figure you're in for a pound.

A couple hours after speaking with my father I texted this girl I had been seeing recently. For the obvious reasons of protecting her anonymity, let's call her by her first initial, K.

I asked her to call me and, like the text my father had sent, stressed the importance of my need to speak to her. She was in the middle of something but promised that she would get a hold of me as soon as she was done. About an hour later my phone vibrated again.

I first met K. on an online dating site. Corny, I know (kids these days!). For two weeks I spied her profile from a distance, reading the words she had been transmitting to this small world of people seeking people and trying my best to discern the personality of the girl who had written them. After a few failed drafts of a message, I got blitzed on cheap beer and wrote through my inhibitions, producing this overwhelmingly long message that should have scared her off at the first instance. It didn't. She responded back and we began talking.

It turned out we shared a lot in common.

I had never met a woman like her. She was beautiful inside and out, confident in herself and articulate. She went to indie theaters alone, without complaint, and watched low-budget horror movies in an effort to find deeper meanings. She read books by the stack. She cussed like a lady and laughed, begrudgingly, at insensitive jokes. She didn't tolerate fools but had a soft spot for foolishness. She was everything I hadn't known I was looking for.

And also really, really, funny (the most attractive quality any woman can possess).

We were both underachievers despite being well-educated. She had studied history. I had studied English. She wanted to teach. I spent two years as a college instructor before being burned out. On paper and in loose conversation we were a great pairing.

But it is something altogether different to be right for each other in-person. So after a month of back and forth messages full of wry jokes and sarcasm, exchanging phone numbers and flirty texts with SFW pictures attached (no nudes, we both agreed), and the whole testing the waters of a budding friendship period, we decided to meet up.

I took her to this teriyaki joint I had frequented in high school – the kind of dive where the owner is still the primary employee and cooks his own food in front of you and, you just know, takes pride in the fact that his Spicy Chicken has fed a couple generations of young men who went to my nearby high school and frequented his place daily for lunch. She handled the situation perfectly, bantering with the kindly restaurateur and casually dropping in and out of interesting conversations after he had brought us our food. We made each other laugh and offered fatuous looks across the table. At the end of the date I hugged her goodbye and we both agreed that we would get together real soon.

Fast forward to the next weekend where we walked a nature trail to Alki Beach and sat together on a Byronic afternoon, watching the cold Puget Sound waves roll up in shades of gray, sitting on a makeshift bench made of driftwood with our hoods pulled up to protect us from the rain, and sharing concern for the men and women in wet suits who adventurously took to swimming in the freezing waters. On the way back to her car I stopped her on the path and, beneath a canopy of colossal Northwest trees, I kissed her. And she kissed me back. We shared pizza and beer when we got back to civilization and agreed, leaving each other with another shared kiss that she initiated, that we were on the verge of a good thing.

That Thursday, a little more than a week and a half before my father called me, she came and visited my friend's condo downtown. We looked out on the Seattle skyline from a high-rise balcony on Fifth Ave., and drank fancy martinis, then went inside when we felt cold and cuddled up to watch episodes of Golden Age The Simpsons. That night we slept in each other's arms and even made an effort to have sex on my friend's couch, something I had explicity promised my friend we wouldn't do (sorry, Seth, if you're reading this), but resigned ourselves, after realizing neither of us was in any shape to perform, to cherishing that intimate moment with one another instead.

As I walked her to the bus stop the next morning to see her back home, I couldn't help but wonder how I had been so fortunate. I had joined that dating site on a lark, more as an act of quaint experimentation than to find True (capital “T”) Love (capital “L”). And here I had hit a home-run on my first at-bat and stumbled into a romance with the most enigmatic girl I had ever met in my life.

I saw no opportunity for defiance.