2026: Chapter 13

I quit running and started walking — something I’ve never done intentionally on a treadmill because it lacks in the one aspect with which I go on the treadmill for in the first place: The challenge of it. I am a runner. I am not a walker. But running is something I am no longer doing (for now), and walking is (for now).

The purpose of it is symbolic of my current position in life — my intrapersonal dealings, my current emotional state, my months-long spiritual endeavors, etc. My everything-that-has-to-do-with-me, in other words. I am walking because I need to rebuild myself. I need something to start.

To put it in different terms, it feels like I am going through a strange and sort of prolonged season of my life, and I’m afraid it all began when Niña passed away a year-and-a-half ago. I don’t know what else to call it. Since then it’s like every corner I thought I turned and every obstacle I either avoided or believed earnestly that I had overcome has continued leading to the same place. That being: Not where I want to be. (And not particularly close, either.)

This too shall pass is a mantra I trust, mainly because I have no choice. In this fucked up jungle all of us operate in and navigate through we are forced every day to pick the option of whether or not to be. I made mine a long time ago — along with every day since — and the consequences borne are both obvious and universal. It can be a painful thing, being alive, and as much as I would love to deal with all the bullshit no longer I have decided that particular way is off the table.

So it’s a season. That’s it. Niña died on December 11th, 2024, and it is currently May 26th of 2026. That’s a nice little chunk of change as far as time goes. I got drunk and partied and gambled and whored for about six months, and then I got sober for another six. Then I drank again and gambled again for a few months, and then in March I got sober again. All thereof has transpired during this season.

During simpler times the weight of my heartbreak was enough to be depressed for a year or two. I went through the motions in a different way, as a 19- or 20 year-old does. Back then I wanted only to feel normal again — whatever that meant. Almost as depressing as the depression itself was how goddam stupid and insignificant the moment arrived when I realized I wasn’t depressed anymore: I was just on a walk one day with my friend John, smoking some weed. That’s when, suddenly, it was settled.

I thought at some semi-recent juncture I would have received some cosmic reward for getting clean and being on my best behavior. I believed sobriety would lead me to a destination where I could find peace with Niña taking her own life, and that I would be able to transcend the guilt I felt for not being there enough, for her, as her clock inched ever closer to midnight. Neither my reward nor my peace have found me just yet.

Someone who has the capacity not to be an over-thinker is and always will be a happier man than I am. I’ve always known it, but only during this season have I truly realized. I could read all the books on Buddhism, and start for the first time using on myself all the clear and objective advice I offer to others, and I already know none of it’ll work. Not on me. My ongoing intellectual struggle is one of endurance. It is rejecting everything that always worked: Quick, painless, easy.

To that end I neither know nor care whether I am somewhere in the middle of this season, towards the end, or, regrettably enough, if it’s only just begun. I know only that I am in it.

Sometime during the summer of last year I closed the so-called book on everything that had been holding me back insofar as coming to terms with Niña’s death. But I closed it by leaving it open-ended, understanding that nothing could be done to bring her back. I knew as much as I needed to, via her mother, mostly, about the details concerning her final hours. Where she was and who she was with. What happened immediately before her permanent departure. Things like that.

And I had to accept that there was nothing that could have been done on my end. It’s such a cliché to say that death brings with it a certain finality, but still I had to fight my instincts that told me it would have made a difference if I had been more present in the final month of her life. That my voice and my voice alone — as the man she loved, still, more than any other — not only could have but would have kept her alive.

It’s a balancing act, pitting such a sentiment on one side of the scale versus the reality that Niña had made at least one attempt on herself before and, thus, completing her suicide was not merely a mistake of impulse. In other words, I have battled my own arrogance and selfishness in believing in my powers against some force more closely resembling inevitability. It has brought me, in equal parts, to be both upset with Niña (for not allowing me in at the end) and proud of her (for finishing the job she for so long sought out).

As a self-interested, self-serving and self-loathing individual, however, it has doubtless led to complications in my life. Not only did her death make me reevaluate our relationship — and how I came across towards her while it was happening — but it’s made me reevaluate how I come across to everyone, most notably women. I like to imagine it has done me some good, but at the same time Niña was my most recent girlfriend (with our breakup having occurred some five years ago), and whatever grand ambitions I have to be a better man the next time around are stuck in realms only of the hypothetical.

I have a good idea of how much better, and stronger I am and will be moving forward, but it’s kind of like being taught a lesson and practicing it in private, over and over again, without ever knowing whether or not I have been doing it properly. I am instead banking on my experience and abilities to calculate left v. right, yes v. no, and so on. Still my brain is far too small and adrenal glands too large, and inasmuch as I would bet on myself any and every day of the week, I can’t compete against my own track record and history of poor decision-making, thus making it just as likely that I have been ‘practicing’ in the wrong direction this whole time.

And perhaps the most deflating aspect of my attempts at being a more righteous man is that none of my current intentions have brought with them any concrete payoffs. It makes a man wonder if he might not be better off reverting backwards into the loose politician, and massager of the truth, that delivered so many of the fruits that got him here — in a relatively advantageous position in life. It surely is a scummy sort of philosophical dichotomy, but anyone with any brains whatsoever knows which general place in line the nice guy finishes.

There’s a silly saying that’s been stuck in my head, the one that says We Didn’t Come This Far Just To Come This Far, but that’s kind of where I am. I’ve had a hankering to just say fuck it and go to a bar and sit and throw down like six Corona Extras, but what’s that going to do for me? How is that going to advance my interests? I felt the other day while driving home from getting my haircut in Redlands CA that I had crossed the 50/50 tipping point, or like threshold, where I believed I had convinced myself that sobriety didn’t matter anymore and that eventually I was going to break it anyway, so why not now? But I didn’t do anything about it. I just got a pizza and watched the Thunder vs. Spurs game at my condo.

I’m not sure what invisible hand kept me away from the bar that evening, but whatever it was reminded me how goddam annoying it is to start back at the beginning. That all it would have taken was a single beer to make me feel as if I was on vacation from my do-gooder program. That once the die is cast I am liable to end up at a blackjack table. That it would make it a helluva lot easier to buy a 12-pack next time I go to the store. Things of that nature.

When I put it in those terms it does, indeed, make me sound like a raging fucking alcoholic — even though I argue that I’m not. It’s not a physical addiction. Like I don’t need it, and I’ve proven that I don’t need it. It’s a mental sort of addiction, one that persuades my brain into believing that nothing is ever worth it, and brings with it a slippery slope of permutations that follow subsequently. Every step I take closer to any number of those harmful potentialities leads me further away from the quite responsible quite boring homeostasis I find myself in currently.

Which is to say: This, right here, is where Niña’s death ultimately brought me. I fail sometimes to remember or give like proper credit to the idea that sobriety wasn’t my own doing; it was for her. Or her memory, anyway. I told myself after she died that I would have wanted her to be proud of me — and what I did/do with my life. That I was going to ‘make it’ in life for the both of us since she was no longer here to share with me in the human experience.

And part of that was to realize my dream of becoming a lawyer, to make all sorts of money and purchase all manner of meaningless material bullshit that her and I were always so fond of. But another part of it, one I did not and could not see while she was still alive, was beginning on a different road where I became the kind of man she would have appreciated so much more than the one I happened to be when the two of us were together. She loved me more than I deserved, and I will always regret not reciprocating in the way Niña needed.

While I obviously miss her and still think about her every day, I miss also the feeling of not being, like, stuck. Over the last year-and-a-half — but more specifically the last handful of months — I have made several changes for the better insofar as my daily routines and habits. It’s undeniable that I now consider my life (in comparison to the months immediately following Niña’s death) filled with meaningful wins.

I guess what I’m saying is they just don’t feel like wins, because I find myself in mental space that seems limited. I’m not sure how to quite explain it, really. I just know I have yet to reach that time, or place, or emotional position, similar to that day when I was on a walk with John, smoking some weed, where all this weight I have been carrying around quietly up and vanishes. I may have been wanting it for too long, and too consciously. What you want never seems to come that way.