nostalgia

A year ago to the day I was living in the Lehman House, in the heart of Cincinnati. A year ago today I found myself overcome with a deep sense of unsettledness, and I left the house and drove through the Kentucky highlands and found myself at the baseball fields in Ludlow right by the river. I sat in the dugout and it was night-time and quiet and cold, and I prayed, "This is where Courtney and I confessed that in one another, we found our dreams coming true. Her dream came true. Mine didn't." And then: "Please bring me a wife soon. A woman I can love and be loved by. And please bring Sarah a wonderful husband. And if at all possible, please make me that husband be me. I want to give her everything she wants. I pray she'll accept it." That's word-for-word my heart-wrenched prayer. I know because it's written in my journal on this very day in 2009. A year later I find myself praying the same prayer, in a sense; Sarah isn't a part of it, but the prayer remains: "Please bring me a wife." It's a selfish prayer, really, but let's be honest: most of our prayers are selfish. That doesn't mean God doesn't care. And I know that marriage, no matter how badly I want it, isn't a guarantee in this life. I don't believe that God sets aside people whom we're going to marry and then makes it happen. I think it's much more complicated--and serious--than that. But nevertheless, if my perspectives be wrong (and, in a sense, I hope they are), then perhaps my prayer will find fruit.

I miss those drives I used to take. Tonight I went for a drive down the winding back roads. Empty roads with fog hanging over everything. A beautiful mist. Man, I really do miss those Cincinnati drives. My most frequent was the OH-50 turnaround, but sometimes I would go downtown and drive around the stadiums where drug deals went down once 3:00 AM hit. Sometimes I would go across the Brent-Spence to Ludlow, Kentucky and sit on the bleachers in the old baseball field and across the river and up the rise was the Lookout at Mount Echo where many painful memories have been forged. And other times I would just get lost--on purpose--in the hills of northern Kentucky, sometimes arriving at abandoned graveyards where I would park and lay out amongst the overgrown tombstones and just look at the sky where the city's smog didn't block out the stars. I miss the drive through Eden Park, around the fountain and out through the ritzy district of Mount Adams; when going through the park, I would always slow down by the gazebo to see if the wailing ghost would appear (she never did). I miss how the drives would often result in me sitting on the patio at the Mariemont Starbucks, or when I'd find myself sipping coffee at The Anchor Grill in Covington. I miss my eggs and coffee at The Anchor, I really do. I can never make it as good even with a French press and constant practice flipping eggs. 

Most of all I miss my life back then. It was a simpler life. Things were black-and-white. I would wake up, go to school, work twenty hours a week. The rest of my time would be spent hanging out with my friends, too many friends to count. I miss how we would sit around the dining room table and laugh until our sides were splitting, and I miss how we would congregate on either the back or front porch and drink beers (or wine for the more ritzy girls). I miss how the nights were cold and I would crawl into bed with the heater blowing and just curl up in my blankets and be sang to sleep by sirens and city traffic. I miss all of these things, and more. Were those days any better than these? No, not at all. In fact, these days are far better. Emotionally, I'm healthier; physically, I'm WAY healthier. But I do feel lonely a lot. Dylan, Tyler, and Dewenter are wonderful friends but I don't see them as much as I would like. Everyone's so busy. There are many nights that I just sit on the front porch and watch the moon rising above the trees and I wonder if my life will always be this way. And I know that there will come a day when I'll look back on these days and wish for them again, but they'll be gone, and I'll romanticize them, turning them into something they weren't; it's the same thing I've done with Cincinnati. Those years in Cincinnati were (a) the best years of my life and (b) the worst years of my life. But the human mind is a strange thing, and except for traumatic events, generally we only remember the "good times" of the "old days". And maybe that's why we miss them so much--we don't miss those days as they are but those days as they have become in our minds.