I Love You

When I started this blog, ten years ago today, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in my late twenties and single. I had friends near and far. Family I saw at Thanksgiving time and Christmas. I worked a respectable office job, but as I came to the end of five years of chipping away at a master’s degree in writing, a class at a time over night school and weekends, I knew I wanted a different life.

For the immediate future, I wanted to go to a full-time MFA program in creative writing. One last shot at chasing a dream of being a writer that I’d deferred and pursued in cockeyed ways like a daily fictional blog project and starting a website about a cappella music.

There were other things I wanted, too. A lifelong romantic, I still wanted to find a more permanent, loving relationship. I’d had two long-term relationships that, against the odds, I’d called off, as age and experience showed me not every relationship could be happy, or had to be the one. I wanted to be a father, too.

So, when I started this blog, I didn’t know what I was doing with my life--professionally, artistically, or personally--only that I wanted more and starting this blog felt like a step in the right direction.

I described the project of this blog to a friend early on, tellling him it was the one writing project that might last a lifetime because it could be whatever I wanted it to be, not beholden to a specific topic or format, no pressure or expectation it would ever reach an audience beyond my family and friends.

That was all ten years ago.

I’m ready to stop now.

Looking back, I can recognize some overlap between starting to this blog and when my relationship with my wife first started, or perhaps even more apropos, when our son was born. There are intentions and there are realities. A planner like me can lay out what I expect and what I want, but there’s also the reality of the day-to-day and the way a life changes the more time goes by, the more you do, and the more people you invite into it.

I’ve used the space of this blog to reflect on my people—my difficult relationship with my father and my joyous relationship with my son, bits and pieces about my mother and sister and grandparents. I’ve written about my wife, but also about ex-girlfriends. I’ve written about friendship and travel and writing, about books and music and television and films and sports I enjoy. I wrote about a lot of steps I took all alone. Indeed, in the last few years, my thinking about the blog has shifted, and I consider that part of it's legacy may be as a way for my son to know the person I was before I was his father and in these first years. In other words, if something were to happen to me, this blog might be a vehicle for him to continue knowing me after I'm gone.

One of my favorite quotes about writing, courtesy of Flannery O’Connor, suggests that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write about for a lifetime. I hold that to be true, particularly as elements of my past seep into my creative work, but all the more so in this blog where one memory leads to the next until I have an entry written, or sometimes several.

But the story I set out to tell here is done. The reality of this blog is that I typically had its contents written well before I posted them, always ahead so I’d never fall behind or grasp at straws to write something at the last minute. It was a joy to get six months, a year, a year-and-a-half ahead at given times. But, if I’m being honest, for the last couple years, this blog has at least equally often felt like a burden, as opposed to a pleasure.

I called this blog Three Words That Became Hard to Say after an Avett Brothers song that uses those lyrics. The words they’re getting at are the title of the song, which they don’t actually sing until the final stages of “I and Love and You.” I used that title as a gimmick, titling each post itself with three words. But I also hope the undercurrent came through, in a blog about me and people in my life, past and present—maybe even future. This blog was for me. This blog was for you.

I love you. Be well, and I hope I’ll see you down the road.