When you least expect it..

By my own admission, I have no idea how I got here.

Ok, maybe that’s not entirely true but the last year certainly feels like a blur.

 Try as I might to not fully realize it, it’s been a year since I packed my life into a yellow truck and drove from Destin to Beaufort, a place I’ve called home since April 2008. Kind of hard to believe that at this time last year, I was packing up my CDs, DVDs, kitchen stuff into boxes for a move to a place I’d seen only once. I remember sitting in my then-empty bedroom, only one more box to load up before spending the night in the Residence Inn at Sandestin, thinking about how fast time can fly when you’re not paying attention. Time is funny that way. It seems like when you’re younger all you ever want to be is older, and once you get there, all you want is to go back to when you were younger. A time that seemed, by comparison, a lot less complicated, frustrating and downright scary. 

I still miss Destin and don’t know that any part of me will ever look back on that experience, at working at The Log and the relationships and friendships forged in that unbelievable place with anything but the fondest of memories. Truthfully, it’s where I cut my teeth and as I look around at people scrambling to justify the extra money they spent on more education after college, I become increasingly appreciative that Jim Wagner took a chance on a kid from Indiana University with only a few clips to his name and hired me to work at The Destin Log. That year and a half in Destin changed my life and I will be forever grateful for that opportunity and my experience – both professionally and otherwise – there.

Despite how fast the last year has gone, it is the past month that has provided the great amount of change.  Changes, both for what I hope to the better and what – for now least  – feels somewhat the like worse. To cut to the chase, after more than two and a half years, my girlfriend and I broke up. It feels weird saying that outloud because some part of me feels like it didn’t actually happen and when I look at my life it’s hard to see the physical changes. Inside though, the familiarity and comfort lost in not having someone there who was, at one point, such a central focus of your energies, effort and attention is pretty clear.  Though I’ve always been a man of the details, a guy who notices the small things, it’s amazing all of the intracies, idosyncracies and mannerisms about someone that kind of crystallize in your mind when you miss them. Truthfully, it’s been all I can do to try to not think about it. 

Sometimes that’s easy. Sometimes it’s not.