2026: Chapter 4.2

The number of times I’ve sat and stared in front of this blank computer screen is too many to count. Innumerable would be the word, or countless, but it’s hard to double down when already ‘number’ and ‘count’ were used in the prior sentence. We have to keep things fresh: the opposite of stale. We on Future Bets do not believe in repeating words, even if only in the root form.

I stared at my screen last night, too, and then I spouted off like a thousand words talking about how even the poorest among us support the ultra wealthy. (I.e. the opposite of their own personal economic interests.) I suppose that’s generally always what I default to, some form of politics. I even mentioned George Orwell, because I am a sophisticated and worldly blogger who knows the names of certain famous authors. I invoked a book that he wrote titled All Art Is Propaganda. And I did that for the same reason that my default topic is politics, because I argue that everything — all the time —is politics. It cannot be avoided.

Luckily, for both my sake and yours, I scrapped that stupid article about labor (that is: worker) issues. I deleted it because it was something I was never going to end up posting, anyway, since I am so acutely aware that nobody gives a goddamn how I feel about those items. Frankly, nobody gives a shit how I feel about much of anything, but I continue posting because posting is what I do and if I was not doing it then I don’t know what else I would be doing.

In my last article, I was confident that I would end up on the losing side of my current love interest. It just made too much sense. It was a logically forlorn outcome, destined tragically in the way in which the stomach knows the answer before the brain does. My brain has been working overtime of late trying its most mighty to rationally disprove the simplicity that my stomach has been signaling. Not always do you want to believe, but always you do know.

She’s a sweet girl, so she couched it in a way that made it seem like she didn’t want to keep me from obtaining my goals, and that it was the best decision for both of us. It isn’t. She is wrong. This was the best decision for her, and it had nothing to do with me. If she wanted to make it work, we would have made it work. I could not have stated my goals in life or my intentions with her any more plainly. I left the ball completely in her court, and this was the conclusion that she herself thought was best. For her.

I wish I could feel more bitterness towards her, or the situation at large. I wish also that her ultimate decision — which has been a long time coming, longer than I would have hoped for the sake of my feelings and psyche — gave me a greater sense of immediate freedom, knowing that I will no longer have to worry about how strongly I care about her. But, again: I think I always knew where this road was headed. Still I carried on.

If truth be told I think the real legitimate like no-turning-back End occurred on her birthday, almost four months to the day, in October, when she told me there was a rumor going around that I slept with somebody on a different shift. I didn’t know how to admit the truth point-blank in the heat of the moment to the woman I loved, so I lied to her. And I felt so awfully about lying that I decided the next day to call and apologize for lying.

Yet, the reason I was taken aback — and thus knew it was over so long before it actually was — was how cool she seemed when I called and apologized. She didn’t yell at me or curse at me or stop talking to me. She was measured. She told me a man has needs, and that I am a man, and so on. I obviously wasn’t anticipating her going all crazy hispanic woman on me (because that is not her style), but at the same time I was expecting something out of her. Something that told me she was upset with me, or bothered by the news, and to let me know that I was a piece of shit. On the one hand it was nice that she was so forgiving and adult and understanding about it, but then on the other hand it made me wonder if she felt anything about me at all.

And I will never know if lying to her was the right thing to do. If perhaps the two of us would be in a different place right now if in her mind it was merely a rumor without any legs to it. What I do know is that for the last four months I have felt terribly most days. More often than not. Like in my stomach. That for the last four months I have gone against every impulse of mine that wanted to reach out to her, and text her, and talk to her on the phone, with some kind of regularity. But I stayed away out of respect — thinking that it was the right thing to do.

In the meantime her and I have been out together with her kids, two young children, on multiple occasions. I have declared to her my wants, and feelings, and presented the image of what I wanted our future to look like. Me and her. Power couple. Me as a lawyer. Her as a whatever she felt she wanted to be. Money. Good lives. Comfortable lives. Me and her. Together.

And yet now I am here, back at a square one of sorts, because even though my stomach knew the answer from the very moment that she wasn’t as upset with me for sleeping with another woman and lying to her about it as I thought the situation called for, still I proceeded with the belief that she would come around. That the picture I painted for the future was a desirable one. That she loved me as much as I loved her. That my brain was more powerful than my stomach. That I could overcome the awful feelings and thoughts I had been experiencing.

The two of us were at different places in our lives over a year ago when the shoe was on the other foot. When outside of a local restaurant establishment I gave her my own sort of breakup speech. About how I, personally, was not available emotionally, and how I did not think it was best to continue when I couldn’t give her what she deserved. I guess one hand washes the other. Now we’re even.

It was not until I got sober, in June of last year, that we got back to some form of what we were before. I mean it was never the same as it was in those early days, but it was enough to where we had our moments. More than moments, we had momentum. We replaced the unsustainable sugar rush of our beginning with a slow burn that only kept rising. The flame grew higher and wider in the way that it was hardly noticeable. And there it was, at its apex, until fate shined on us even brighter around her birthday four months ago.

I don’t find the the deterrence of my own goals, nor the idea that this is the best decision for both of us, to be all that acceptable. But at the same time this was never my choice to make. I resigned myself to her whims from the instant I made my own decision, more than a year ago, that the two of us could not go on. That was me making that choice. It was not her. Just as she had no right to lambaste me — which she didn’t — for the rumor that was going around about me sleeping with another girl, I never had a right to expect her to give me what I wanted insofar as a life with her.

Again, I don’t know how differently I could have played this for a different result to have taken place. Certainly it was possible to hold on to the lie, but then what kind of a man would want a future with somebody he loved aided by such nefarious means? I could have beaten her down with more texts and phone calls, and sought out more reassurance for myself, but that goes against every fabric of my own personal being and philosophy regarding attractive women who deal with men flying in at them from every possible direction at all times. If they want to talk to me, pretty girls, I mean, then they will reach out. They will let it be known that they want to hear from me.

So, yes, she was correct when she admitted that the distance between us had been growing. But it wasn’t a rapid growth like a hot knife traveling through a stick of butter; it was more in the way that every evening after the autumn equinox strikes in the latter stages of September there is just a little less sunlight than the day before. Two or three minutes, day after day, until finally the winter solstice arrives and it is the shortest day (in terms of daylight) in the calendar year. That’s what happened to us.

But it wasn’t me who created such distance. It couldn’t have been. Because the rules of the game were set in motion a long time ago, during our first iteration into a pseudo-relationship, circa the late-summer of 2024, when I came to terms with the idea that the time she was available for me was delicate, and fragile: the opposite of abundant. I had to respect that her children took priority over me. Our phone conversations were generally filled with apologies from her end because her son would be crying for her attention, or her daughter would need her. I followed the rules of the game, and felt honored in a weird sort of way that she gave me as much as she did when she didn’t have to.

And so it was a situation where I did not reach out as often as I wanted to, since I knew when she was free that she would reach out to me. This dynamic coincided quite perfectly with how I didn’t like to be the first one to text or call, anyway, given the pretty-girl-philosophy I have tried to maintain for the better part of the last two decades — since my first relationship. Following the beginning of the end (i.e. the night I lied about the rumor), I was even more cocksure that this was the right way to approach her. By being my most avoidant self.

Especially given that already I had issued my hail mary, so to speak. At a local Chuck E. Cheese one night while her kids were playing, I offered her my blueprint regarding what I intended for the future to look like. I said I loved her, and not in a fake sort of way. I told her we both make money and we would never have to worry about it. I told her we have that security. I told her I would love her kids just as I love her. I told her I am good at everything I want to be good at, and that one day I would be a good lawyer. That’s what we call the transitive property. I told her she wouldn’t have to work if she didn’t want to work. I told her all of these things.

And I never pressed her about any of this. In the moment she told me she didn’t know what to say, which I understood because I didn’t expect her to say anything. I would have appreciated it, of course, in retrospect, if she had let me down right then and there, because then at least I could have known that the dream I was selling was not what she wanted. I know that now — just as I knew it then — but it would have saved me multiple months worth of wonder and confusion.

Put another way: One does not simply pour himself out and then check in for any progress reports after that. The die is cast. Every hello and how are you and how’ve you been and other fake bullshit of the like is completely redundant at that point. She knew exactly who I was, and exactly where I was coming from, and exactly where I intended on going, and so all that was left was the binary proposition that was inevitable. It was either yes or no. And I wasn’t going to waste her time on anything else, even if it made me look like an asshole in real life when she wanted to make eye contact with me while I was doing everything in my power to look elsewhere.

And it hurt, damn it. Every day it hurt. It hurt to wake up and not see a text message featuring her name. It hurt every day wanting to talk to her for no apparent reason, just to say hello, and let her know that I cared. It hurt to ignore her when she was dealing on this table or that one, while I was mindlessly dealing craps, where I could very easily have been a showoff and blown her a kiss or acknowledged her in some stupid way as we were accustomed to at various points in our brief journey together. It hurt that I loved her enough to be honest with her when it might have been in my best interests not to be.

Becoming sober was my ticket both for understanding how much I cared about her, and for her to come back into my life after the doldrums that we had been experiencing following my pseudo-breakup with her. It was my deliverance that told me a good man does not simply lie and get away with it; a good man lies and then apologizes for it. Always I have been on a path striving for greatness, but it really wasn’t until I got sober that the crossroads felt like actual crossroads. And the stakes with her felt high enough that it demanded of me to put into practice the changes that felt so tangible to me.

It is thus how I cannot be upset with myself about how this unfortunate situation played out against my favor. More than being great by any reasonable measurement of success, I want first to be a good man. I want to be worthy of the women whom I hold in such esteem. I want to set a good example for future generations, most notably the children I one day bring into the world. For so long I have gotten away with doing the bare minimum and achieving, in most instances, maximum results. This is my burden to bear for being so goddamn good at what I do.