Grief and Regret

"Grief and regret.  What else is there?  Those are just other names for love.  You can't feel bad about losing something if you don't love it first.  And if you don't love, why else would you bother to do anything at all?"  -Thomas Covenant

If it isn't obvious by now, I'm still slowly making my way through my final Thomas Covenant book.  I like this quote.  I've done quite a few things that have caused me grief and regret, but one thing stands out in particular.  I let someone get away.  I let someone get away who meant more than the world to me.  People on the outside don't understand.  To someone looking in, it would appear that I'm insane (or severely misguided at best).  I suppose that this person and I were dancing to a tune that nobody else could hear.  I miss her dearly.

But instead I find myself in this situation.  A friend and coworker dared me to sum up my life in a paragraph.  Here's my attempt:

Plagued by social anxiety from a young age, I went through much of my school life as an unknown.  Aside from a small group of close friends, most people didn't know that I existed.  Later I stumbled onto my high school sweetheart who introduced me to the Pentecostal church.  Bolstered by a new group of friends, I joined the church and the ministry, marrying the girl in the process (at the ripe old ages of 17 and 20, thanks to a "prophecy" from her father).  Four years later, I began to reexamine my life and became dissatisfied with what I had become.  I mentally left the church while physically staying active to please my wife and save my marriage.  Along the way, I met the woman who would be my life's greatest treasure and who would make me happier than anyone else could ever dream of.  Unfortunately, she was married.  Crap.  My wife eventually divorced me, at which point I consummated my romantic relationship with my love.  This went on for months until, in a fool move, I left her behind and tried my hand at an online dating site.  It was there that I met a woman who was seemingly being destroyed by a multi-millionaire after she left him while she was pregnant.  Feeling an urge to help this family, I jumped in headfirst, marrying her and fighting on her behalf.  I spent the next year fighting court battles and dodging private investigators while valiantly trying to remain sane.  And then...  surprise, here comes a baby!  That would have been great and all, but about that time my wife decided that she no longer wanted to work, so she left me and quit her job in the space of a few days.  And so here I stand, tricked into having a child and feeling like a fool for being used in such a way.  I now face the daunting task of being a single dad and figuring out how to raise a child.  Oh, and my soulmate is back in town.  Rock on.

Honestly, every time I think that something can't happen, it does.  Usually I think of it in the sense of "I wonder what's going to go wrong next," but lately I've been trying to wonder what could possibly go right.  I don't consider anything to be impossible anymore.  Everything might have gone horrifically wrong, but against all odds, I had the strangest period of happiness that a guy could ask for.  If I was a betting man, I'd never have bet a cent that that would have ever happened...  but it DID.  The part of the story that I spend all my time thinking about isn't all of the bad stuff.  It's the one bright spot in the patch of rough.

I can't fathom how much pain will be coming up for me in the next few months.  The holidays will be hard to bear.  They always seem to be over the past few years.  But by God, maybe something good will happen.  I'm tired of regrets.  Let's see some miracles happen.