My Unfortunate Luck

So, here I am.
The last couple of days have been quite… Intriguing.
First came the 12 hour commute. Initially, I had the 12th to the 24th booked off of work, but due to some fragile circumstance, I was called in to work right before my departure. Lucky me. So after work, I headed directly to the airport to catch my flight.
Almost missed it, I swear.

I flew into Washington as my first stop. From there, I had to go to another airport across the city to catch my flight to Dublin.
I had booked a shuttle about a week ahead of time through some company online.
With my bad luck in effect, it didn’t show. I complained and made call after call after call, and I got nothing.
Last minute, an hour and a half before my flight, I had to catch a cab.
Thank god I didn’t have to go through customs again to get onto the plane.
I printed off my boarding pass and hopped on right before they closed the gate.
I was stuck in between an old man who snored all through the night, and a young teen who was overly obsessed with his girlfriend. 7 hours of that, and I was about to go insane.

Finally, the plane landed, and I missed an entire night of sleep.

Off to the hostel.

I arrive, I find my room without a problem, and it was empty when I showed.

I went downstairs to meet some people, grabbed some drinks at the pub, and laughed all night.
I arrived back up at my room to find a couple of non-english speakers having sex in the bottom bunk. I rushed out as quickly as I could, and ran to the washroom… The men’s washroom.
I need my bad luck to change, fast.
Currently, I’m sitting in the lobby waiting to find people that actually speak English. No luck so far.

The Life of Spontaneity

Recently, I’ve found myself completely miserable. All I do is try to keep myself busy, so I overwork everyday just so I don’t have to sit alone with my own thoughts.
I’ve always been capable of coping with my own problems, but recently, I just can’t get it out of my head.
When I got home from work last week, I started building; doing physical labour is totally out of the ordinary for me. I don’t like to do it, but it keeps me occupied for hours.

So, I decided that I needed to escape. I wanted to find myself. Not stay in a hotel uptown for a few days, but really escape.
Last night, I planned something spontaneous. I booked myself a 14 day trip to dublin, leaving on December 12th.
I have family there, but I’m not going there to visit them. I’m going there to find me. I’m staying in a hostel with university students just like myself, exploring what the world has to offer them.
Although most of these people are travelling in pairs, I’m travelling alone. I don’t want someone by my side 24/7. I want time for me. I want to be spontaneous and act on impulse. I want to meet people I would have never met, interact with friends I would have never interacted with. I want to live recklessly, only so I can come home and say that I’ve done this, I’ve taken risks, and I’ve tried new things.

Hopefully, I return with a newer sense of what I want out of this life.
Maybe I’ll return a little less miserable.

Here’s to hoping!

Love?

I want to talk about love, and the extents we go to find it. But I also want to talk about the misconceptions rooted around the word that no one seems to understand.

It’s not love that hurts. Love actually fulfills the voids that you carry in your life. It lightens the moods you support on your shoulders, and it completes the circle that we apparently follow to achieve happiness. No, it’s not love that hurts you. It’s not being loved in return.

Statistically, we go through about seven major heartbreaks before we find our ‘soulmate’. Seven. That’s a substantial number; substantial enough to completely deter you from even wanting such a thing. I envy those who marry their high school sweethearts and their grade school romances. That, however, is not my story.

I have a story, though. It’s filled with ache, vulnerability, anger and hate that it really isn’t a good story. But it’s not over yet. As long as my pages still turn, my story goes on.

But I’m almost at the point in my life where I may not want to find my happily ever after. My ending might be different from most. Maybe, I’ll end with twelve cats, and not a lover to my name. It’s tragic, but not a tragic love story.

I don’t want to define my life around the person I find myself marrying. It’ll be what I make of myself. Maybe a husband and a family, maybe not.

But isn’t that what everyone is so afraid of? Being alone? Truth is, we’re never alone. And I’m not going to preach words of faith here; I’ll preach words of realism. These days, when someone says “alone”, they tend to mean “without a lover”. But in today’s society, does that really constitute being alone? I don’t think so. There are approximately 7.6 billion people on this earth. Wherever we turn, there are people late for meetings, children playing in the parks, animals running down the streets. These are all bodies and souls that surround us. We’re never alone. Contextually, you may feel alone because you might be lacking something you think needs to be fulfilled, but literally, we never are.

That’s what bothers me. You don’t need to be in love like the tragic Romeo and Juliet. You don’t need to have The Notebook romance. All that you’ll ever have in the end are memories, and yourself. It may not be the same body you had when you were 25, but you’ll still have you, and every experience that came along with you.

Stop thinking that we must have love to feel complete. Stop joining dating sites to speed up the process, stop going to bars just to get some human affection from the horny drunk two stools down. Stop throwing yourself out there because of a fear that you may end up not finding someone to spend the rest of your life with. The only love you should ever move mountains for is the love for yourself. And that, I would quote.