Sometimes something so random and unexpected happens that the aftershocks can leave you reeling for days. Even as I sit down to write this, I have no idea where it its going or what I’m trying to say. I only know that I was tossing and turning trying to sleep last night, I knew that I would be writing about it this morning.

My past love life is something that doesn’t get much ink here. Mainly because, for the most part, they were all assholes and just flat out don’t matter. And why talk about all the crap when you end up with someone like Patrick? He is the answer to every prayer I ever uttered and washed away every doubt I ever had on all those nights when I would cry myself to sleep when I thought I was unworthy of love. In the immortal words of Metallica… Nothing else matters. I have everything I’ve ever wanted.

Recently I was contacted by one of those boys from my past; the only one, as luck would have it, to whom I bear no ill will (as I am a cold-hearted, grudge-bearing, mean and nasty bitch). The Irish boy was my first boyfriend. We first dated when I was only a sophomore in high school and he was a senior. Naturally, I thought I was the coolest thing since Shrinky-Dinks. I was, if you can even believe it, somewhat… innocent at the time. I hadn’t yet begun my downward spiral and my parents didn’t hate me any more than you would a normal 14 year old girl.

It was kind of an idyllic high school relationship. He (although he seems to not recall this) was kind, considerate and attentive. But as every person who has a self-destructive idiot hiding inside them does, I broke up with him that summer when something that I perceived as more exciting came along.

We went our own ways and made our own journeys to lead lives that, I have recently come to learn, had shocking similarities and I’m surprised to find that it took us so long to cross paths. But when I was 20 or 21, those paths did eventually cross and as hard as I try to remember how, the circumstances escape me. For a couple of weeks we tried again to date but we were both looking for things that the other couldn’t give and so we just… gave up and headed back to our individual paths of self-destruction and self-loathing.

I have recently found out that he is married and has a little girl. (Karma, as he now knows, is a bitch) And that after many years of being angry and searching desperately for something he couldn’t identify, he sounds… not yet happy but much closer. Like me, he found art to be an outlet for the things that made it too loud inside his head. Unlike me, he was more honest about where they were coming from.

But he wrote to me about his fight back from the brink with such honesty and rawness that I found myself shaking as I read it. He told me about what should have been the last week of his life; how fortunate he was to have his wife, who he credits with keeping him from falling over the edge. And I could tell that it was going to be alright. He was going to make it.

We both are.