You don't have as much time as you think you do

At the start of 2025 I was plugged in. Domesticated. I was living with my girlfriend at the time, I had a dog I loved, a job I was good at, a parish I belonged to, and a routine I never once questioned. I was Neo at one point, I came out of the Matrix, and then I turned around and walked right back into it. I was in a bubble of peace where everything that mattered was whoever happened to be standing in front of me. I was deactivated, taking all of it for granted, because underneath everything I assumed there was always going to be another tomorrow.

We had our problems, mostly in how we communicated, and we took a trip to Italy to work on them. We walked the streets of Venice and I spent a good part of it feeling like the walls were coming in. She wanted a house, and a house meant marriage, and I panicked. Which is the stupid part, because I want to be married. I want children. I want a whole life. But getting that close to somebody makes me afraid of losing them, and somewhere in Venice I understood that I’m going to lose everybody eventually, that’s just what this is. Life is like one long goodbye.

Things got better after that. I picked the guitar back up for the first time in a long while. I had been locked into work, focused on the next rung of the ladder, because I wanted my career solid enough that I’d never have to think about money again. Growing up we didn’t have much, and that does something permanent to how you think about security. And I was going to church, which for me was not a small thing.

I struggled with the big questions for years, faith, God, all of it. So meeting Father Ted was one of the more significant things that has happened to me. I met him when I was vulnerable and lost and looking for direction, and what I thought I was looking for was not what I was actually looking for. He was one of the first people who just looked at me with love in his eyes and didn’t judge me. He asked that I stay faithful and truthful and do my part, which is a lesson on its own, because somebody like that in front of you means nothing unless you show up for it. We’d talk for hours. He’d instruct me in the faith, but we got into everything, music, comedy, politics, philosophy, whatever was on the table. He became one of my best friends. Life felt like it was moving forward.

Then one week we were all together for a movie night, and the week after that he got sick, and then he died.

When he was in the hospital it didn’t register. I thought, he’s in the hospital, he’ll be fine, he’ll be back in a couple of days and we’ll be laughing about it. I paid it no mind. I didn’t even think to go visit, because I was so confident and so sure that he’d be okay, that he’d never leave, that he’d always be there. I’ll see him again, is what I told myself. The next time I saw him, I was wearing all black. I walked into our little parish and there his body was, his face still and peaceful, no more stress on it, no aches, nothing left to worry about. There he was, a statue of my friend.

I hadn’t cried like that in God knows how long. I think the tears from that day reached a part of my soul I forgot about, a part I had buried because it hurt too much, a part I decided I could live without as long as I stayed strong and didn’t look at it. And it wasn’t only about what his loss meant to me. It was seeing what an anchor he had been for everyone in that room, family, parishioners, children, and feeling all of it at once. I had never been that vulnerable in my life.

They took him to his home parish after. That service was different, lighter somehow. The sun came through the stained glass and landed right on his face. He was so cold, and the singing was beautiful, and I’ll always remember the Jesus Prayer going up in that room, my brother and I standing there with tears running down, looking at our friend and our spiritual father, and still rejoicing, because we knew where he was and it was better than here.

We stayed for all of it, the last rites, everything. Then we watched him get lowered into the earth, and that’s when I broke.

I hadn’t been drinking much for a couple of years. Socially, if it was around, that was it. But after the funeral I was at the restaurant and I started in on whatever wine they had, and then I went home and kept going until I couldn’t remember. I fell back into old patterns and I’m not going to dress that up. It took me until recently to stop again, once I could see what it was inviting into my life. Losing him shattered what little innocence I had left. It made it real to me that nothing is promised. People walk around acting tough, like they have it figured out, and sure, we can do the math on the stars and the sky, but who put it there? Live from your heart for five minutes and you know we don’t know anything.

After he died I stopped believing in extra chances. I had been living like I had all the time in the world, plotting my way out to eighty or ninety, when my number could get called next week. My sense of time got destroyed and it never went back. When you’re a kid time feels one way, then you’re an adult and it feels another way, and this was a third thing. When time changes the whole world changes with it. Think about somebody with thirty days left. Are they thinking about the nonsense you were thinking about this morning? Time is a tool, not something you should bet on. You use it to keep track of things, you don’t live inside it. And if I could see him one more time there are so many things I would say.

Then the relationship ended, and when she left I gave her my dog. I love that dog. I still remember walking into the store and looking at him and saying, yep, that’s him, no second guessing, I just knew. Letting her go, letting him go, and then being alone in the aftermath of the funeral, I was in a dark place. Those were the two closest supports I had and they were both gone inside of a few months.

And it was right there that I chose to find myself on the fretboard again.

That’s my Theosis. People go looking for peace in all kinds of places. I don’t need a place. I just need a guitar and a pick. It’s always been where things become forever. I can play for five minutes and tap into something that doesn’t have a clock on it, and creating brings me here, not tomorrow, and not yesterday, but now. What I didn’t expect was who was waiting for me there. I’d start playing some little tune I wrote years ago and the whole feeling of being that age would come back with it. Those couple of months I was locked in with the guitar let me confront and transmute my past. There is some beauty and cohesiveness, some golden thread that weaves through music that ties everything together. It has always made sense to me even when nothing else did.

Which is the same instinct as everything else, because here is what I figured out about fear. If you don’t really try, then if you fail, you always have that excuse. That’s the trade. You keep the excuse and you never find out. I lived like that with music for years, playing for a girlfriend or one or two people, keeping the recordings to myself, writing songs I never wrote down and then losing them. Melodies that made people smile, gone, because I never thought they needed to leave the room. There is treasure behind fears we willingly confront. When I find the fear and go into it and come out the other side, I’m forged by it.

I started posting in January, right after Christmas. It just felt like, let’s try. The first one was called Angel Tear, a fingerstyle piece, progressions I was proud of. It was recorded off a webcam in a dimly lit room and the quality was not good.

Angel Tear, off a webcam in a dimly lit room

Around that same stretch I bought the Black Pearl. My father walked out when I was a kid. He gambled away what we had and he took more than money with him. When I was a child he promised he would get me a BMW or a Lexus, and I believed him. He only ever took.

So I bought it myself. A Lexus ES 350, black on black on black, which is where the name comes from, along with the fact that the Black Pearl could never get caught. I always liked that Jack Sparrow didn’t care about the things everybody else cared about. The first real trip I took it on I drove down to the beach, and there’s a stretch of the Parkway where the limit goes to seventy five, and it was the smoothest ride I have ever had.

The Black Pearl

I know how a car sounds in a story like this. For most of my life I told myself I didn’t want any of that, luxury doesn’t matter, you don’t need it, I don’t need it. What I eventually understood is that it let me finish something. A father tells a son he’ll do something for him and then he doesn’t, and that stays open forever unless somebody goes back and closes it. I completed that story. And something clicked after that. I’m not at the mercy of fate or circumstance or how I was raised. The only question left is, in this moment, who do I want to be?

after that, the shot got set up on purpose

Once I was actually asking that question, other things followed. I went back and made amends for my wrong doings. I also had to look at something less flattering, which is that I had spent years overextending myself for people who would use me as an emotional sponge or punching bag. And underneath that, for the first time I was honestly able to weep for myself. I could look at what actually happened to me and grieve it instead of managing it. I had buried that kid a long time ago, put him somewhere under concrete where he couldn’t reach me. Those tears reached and healed him.

And the biggest thing I did this year is the thing the old me would have avoided completely, which is putting myself out here in public. The old me recorded videos and hid them and showed two people. The new me has nothing to hide. I don’t mind being who I am anymore. I find peace in my vulnerability. I find strength in my weakness now. All that fear was an illusion and it was only ever in my head.

now

So that’s where I am. Engineer, musician, reader, whatever else comes. I use the tools I got from all of it, and I architect my life, and I build it on stone, on rock, not sand. Whatever comes next, I’ll be ready for it in a way I wasn’t before. I choose to live.

We don’t have as much time as we think. Live now, not tomorrow. Tell the people you care about that you care about them, look them in the eyes when you do it, and hug them as hard as you can. Smile at them. Listen to them, really listen. That’s the only thing that really matters. Everything else can fall by the wayside.

- th3os1s