I don’t really remember my first crush.

I know I had some crushes in High School, but I also remember feeling a little off because I never felt them as intensely as other kids did. One girlfriend broke up with me because I “wasn’t really there” and years later another girl dumped me because I was “this little ball of nothing”. I was quite the ladies’ man. This goes back into the whole idea of me being a little broken for most of my life. Maybe weird is a better word.

Whichever.

I do know one thing.

The first time I experienced that overwhelming “being in love” feeling where all I could think about was that one person and everything in my world began and ended with them, was Barbara.

I know, I’m so sweet!

Keep reading…

It was pretty cool, except that grad school faded into the background and was almost forgotten and I was slacking off on everything I should have been doing.

And, I was dating someone else at the time. And, they were one of my oldest friends and they hadn’t done anything wrong to me. They had only been really cool and great to date and were flying into Lubbock every few weekends to see me.

I know, I really suck!

Told you to keep reading.

It is one of the few things I really regret, and that is saying something with some of the shit I’ve pulled. For the record, B didn’t know. Not because I didn’t mention it on purpose, but because it honestly slipped my mind in the chemical bath of infatuation and being in love.

Here’s the complicated part: I really regret how I handled it, but, seeing as how we’ve been together for 10 years now and Max is sitting next to me quoting Zootopia, I cannot say I would change it. I would change how I let them know (or, I would let them know before they found out on Myspace). I would have shown them more respect and I would have addressed it directly.

I can honestly say I did not avoid it intentionally, I was just so caught up in the rush of being in love, that it fell by the wayside, as terrible as that is to say. This is not a reflection on that other person, but on my own immaturity and self-absorption.

Yep, do the math – I was still “that guy” at the age of 28. I just made a note to do a blog on chronic emotional immaturity.

Anyway, I wish it had been different.

Anytime we aren’t behaving mindfully and thinking of others, people get hurt.

This friendship has never been repaired, and probably never will. I did apologize, but one of the sad facts about this real world that Hollywood and Nicholas Sparks miss is that apologies don’t always fix things.

Just because you are sorry doesn’t mean you didn’t do what you did.

This is why a mindful intention about what we do and don’t do is so important. Because of pride, it took me a long time to become a person who apologizes for any of the things they do, now my job is to become someone who doesn’t have to apologize as often.

I’m working on it.