Today marks 18 months since Lindy’s life vanished before the dogs and my eyes. Time has all but frozen around me. Sure. I live day-to-day the best I can manage. I’m productive…somedays….somedays not. Who’s watching? I mostly just sit and think about where I am now and how I seem to have just jumped tracks. I now seem to live on a track parallel to reality. I sit and wish my life was still on the old track, a LOT! Grandpa used to tell me to wish in one hand and shit in the other. (Wonder if Lindy has met him yet? They share a similar sense of humor. Hope so. She would like him).
Told a friend today that it has been hard to move, or even touch anything in the house. I secretly fear that one day I will wake up and she will have come home. It wouldn’t be pretty! She would have my, you know whats!! I haven’t lost my mind, at’all….I know she isn’t coming back. Maybe it’s just me being respectful and just letting my mind unwind all I have been through in its own time; let the natural course of things take its course. When I’m ready, I will make a major move or changes. The first thing to go, I tell you, will be the old “tube tv” she hung onto for 20 years that stares at me in the family room like an angry old lady . Until then, I will just bask a little bit longer in who she was, is, and is in my spirit now. She is still the most special, remarkable person I have ever known. That deserves a little more time in and of itself.
I was up at 3:30 A.M. the other morning restless. The steroids I was on for my MS episode didn’t leave a sliver of sleep for 3 days. I rummaged through some old journals wanting to find and reminisce on the first few months Lindy even became a thought to me. I flipped too far and went back to September of 2004. Tis the first month of my post break-up with the fraud that I had wasted 3 years of my life with. I thought I would marry this excuse-of-a-serpent woman. (God truly did have things in control at the time). My heartbreak at the time found me vagabonding in New Orleans at my now favorite daytime drinking spot, The Chart Room. (Side Note: 5 years later I would share a beer with Lindy at this bar right after I proposed to her in Jackson Square). It’s on the corner of Chartres and Bieneville in the French Quarter. It was here I decided to put my raw feelings into permanent written history in a journal, while drinking several fifths of Mr. Daniels. For 3 straight days I wrote [and drank] while staring at the passerby/drunkers through the open french doors that viewed a 300° angle of the corner of this intersection. On the 3rd day, I wrote about what I was yearning for in my next girlfriend-slash-companion. It was the exact opposite [plus] of the society-snob I just split up with. Without going into detail, I basically described Lindy down to her last quality. (Wow. Reading this again made me realize how spot on she was in what I was looking for. Eerily nice). Only I didn’t know Lindy existed, yet. I put this journal up when I got home from NOLA and didn’t pull it out again for years after I started seriously dating Lindy.
I met Lindy in September 2005 at a bar in Dallas- Adairs. I wanted nothing to do with her on a serious level at the time, as I was still on my single-datem-all rampage! I had finally embraced LSD, aka, Lead Singer Disease, for the first time in my life and there was no stopping this ride! I didn’t no have-a- the time for monogamy. As one of our band’s songs at the time correctly pointed out, “Short Fat Big and Tall, It Don’t Matter I Wantome ALL” was all I could seem to fixate on. That is, until the day I sobered up and realized Lindy was the perfect woman for me in every way. Now the chase was on and she was hard to get!
It wasn’t until after we got serious 2 years later that I pulled out that journal and happened to read what I wrote that day. I realized, subconsciously, I had wished the perfect woman into my world. Did I really? Or, was it just happenstance? Who knows. It’s all water near a bridge now.
It did get me thinking about what’s in store for the next 40 years. I feel like I am in the hanger waiting for the day I can hit the runway and fly again. While fueling up, I am trying to set the stage for a good take off and flight. Don’t get me wrong, I have really enjoyed the life experiences post and prior to Lindy, but the only thing that I feel I accomplished from all my wearisome efforts in 40 years is landing the woman of my dreams, and now she is gone. I have tasted tidbits of success in lots of other areas of my life I hold dear, but never have I accomplished the end goals of my dreams, except in love. Now that I know what real love feels like, I will patiently wait for it to surface again.
With this new knowledge, I am making every effort to create a life of fulfillment and significance. A life of the highest adventure and relative happiness. I will carry forward a piece of her in everything I do, because that’s the only way to keep her alive and with me. Some ask me when I will let her go, take down pictures, quit talking about us. The answer is never. Her love & loss will stay with me until the day I die. I need it to. I want it to. It makes me take a closer look at everything I do, say, and promise beforehand. This is something I have never done in 40 years. I am a pilot-my-plane-by-the-whims-of-my thoughts kinda guy. Not anymore. No more tuna on toast. It’s chicken salad on rye, untoasted for me!
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