All the Best I Could Be

I’m in love with a married man.

Stick with me.

Twelve years ago, I kept steady company with a male friend I made in college. He was an insane musical talent. I spent hours in his presence while a guitar surrendered under his fingers and the masses submitted to his smooth velvety voice. His charm was unparalleled. And his mind… He had the most beautiful and discriminating intellect. To say I was in love with his mind is a vast understatement.

He was from Georgia and though we met at university while in Utah, he had some best friends from home whom he remained in contact. I had a few opportunities to speak with and even meet a few. But there was this one.

He was above average handsome. Though he appeared in a few acting gigs in college, his handsomeness wasn’t overwhelming. It was less intimidating and more inviting. Charm seeped from his being. He had shiny happy blue eyes. He had warm brown hair, the kind that looked like it may have been blond in younger days.

He greeted me with all the earnestness of a southern gentleman. His kindness was sincere. He was engaging and benevolent. He was one of the most tenderhearted spirits I ever had the privilege of meeting in this world. And all of his honor was apparent in one breath of his essence.

He was Good.

I spent two worthy days with this man. He was the kind of nobleman who silently crept in, intoxicated you with his virtue, amazed you with his integrity, and left you forever changed by his morality.

He too was musically talented and incredibly sharp. He was a purer version of my friend. 

Upon his departure, we became MySpace (yes) friends. This has since included Facebook and Instagram.

For twelve years, I watched from afar as he bettered his mind with graduate school in Scotland. I watched him travel and observed as he broadened his sophistication. I watched his natural love of people immerse him while he surrounded and absorbed himself in the best of civilization. His exposure to all of this only increased his optimism in humanity and his faith in God.

His ethical convictions are rooted in an open love of God. Of all things about him, I love this most. He studies the writings of honorable philosophers, principled men, and clearly anchores himself in holy scripture.

I believe this lends to his most attractive and most admired quality, his gift of perspective. He is the voice of reason. The antithesis of rash. The embodiment of brilliance.

He is grounded when others would float away. He is quick to differentiate what is now and what is good for now with regards to the future. He frequently reminds me what it actually means to be good and to do good. It has little to do with crappy bosses, material possessions, or fleeting trials.

I held my breath as he found love, lost love, and spoke of the restoration and healing powers of love. Propinquity is the only thing which for so long kept me from declaring my undying love for him. He is my soul mate. Or rather the soul mate of a girl who existed twelve years ago.

The truth is, time has passed. While he continues each day to become more and more the person I was supposed to be, I fear I have gone off track.

Still, there he is. 2000 miles away and without discrimination, he reminds me of who I used to be. Without judgment, he urges me to be a better person.

Tell Me A Story Pt.2

With every hypnotizing tale, there exists good and evil.  There is a building struggle, rallying around a side, a rising provocation, a moment of unquenchable and immutable conflict, and a resolution.  From all of this is delivered a purpose.  A lecture.  A message or a moral.

In this lies MY discovery.  For years, I loved the happily ever after.

Until I realized, every tale has a villain. Every legend meets a monster.  And every hero must conquer a demon.  In that lies my new curiosity.

There are great individuals in this world and the identification of them can be flagged by the hallmarks of a grand crusade.  You show me a man & tell me his story and I will glean most of what I care to know about him by how he handles his devils.

I look around me and see most fighting their evildoers by discounting the very existence of that which would define his journey, refine his nature, and bare a discerning harvest to all he has sown.

Most ignore this beast.  Most are afraid of him and cope often by hiding from him.

But a hero cannot hide from his villain and would not choose to do so if the noble god of perspective had imparted any of his wisdom on him.

His fate lies in the face of his demons and his triumph is predicated on his admittance of this.  His outcome depends on confession and acceptance of this fiend whose sole function is his opponent’s demise.

We do not speak often of our dark terrorist.  We would rather conceal his existence and feign an impossible purity in ourselves.

Except, no man is wholly pure.  This universe requires an opposition in all things.  Every survivor of humanity will disclose he has battled a foe, escaped, and barely lived to tell his story about it.

And from this, our inspiration comes from his conflicts.  His wars were not the immediate slaughter of his oppressor rather the grappling combat which spilt his blood and left him for dead in the trenches.

A hero is defined not by a single victory but by a repeated manifestation of his willingness to continually overcome his villain spanning many battles on multiple battlefields.

A hero will lose.  And we cannot be afraid to acknowledge our enemy for fear of a fight or worse, a loss.  We will fight and we will lose.

But strength lies in resurrection.  Our strength is rooted from our ability to lose and to rise above the loss... to wrestle our demons again in different scenery but with the same conviction.

“I will prevail.”

A hero may admit to not only having lost to a dark sovereign before but to having been seduced by him, conceded to him, and subjugated by him.

However, a story’s companion is time.  For no story is a moment but a collection of elements aged under perspective’s discerning eye.

So when in attack you feel your demise or you sense your imminent mortality, think only to respond, “how does it end?”

In this question there is choice.  There is freedom.  There is your story.

Tell Me A Story Pt.1

When I was a senior in high school, I would leave the noisy chatter of study hall and quietly tuck myself into a seat of our spacious silent auditorium.  The sanctuary built for nearly a thousand would house me in one chair and my then male friend next to me.

He loved reading and I loved being read to.  His baritone voice would lull me into a fantasy world of spells and magic.  A story of wizards before Harry Potter existed.  I vanished into a world of the supernatural and its mysterious far off places.

While the calm warm words dripped from his swarthy voice, a voice I was yieldingly mesmerized by, I found a piece of my soul in that auditorium which would drive my being forever more in this world.

I was unapologetically addicted to storytelling.

I am a slave to a good story.  Compliant.  Submissive.  Inclined to give in to an author who would hush my mind, captain my emotions, and silence my own raging journey to experience another’s.