Lives Formerly Lived

Lives Formerly Lived

The last few days, as I’ve been building this website, I’ve been scrolling back through the years on my phone’s camera roll looking for different pictures to upload.

The funny thing about your phone is that it kind of keeps a permanent working history of your life and what you saw. At least through the photos you snapped.

You go on day to day, and they build up over time.

Currently, my phone says I have 57,039 pictures and 4,346 videos, and countless audio notes that I’ve recorded this last year as a working audio journal to myself.

That’s kind of an incredible amount of life documentation over the last 16 years.

I got my first iPhone in 2010, and while I don’t think I have literally every picture I’ve ever taken since then on my phone, from about 2014 going forward, I have the majority.

I’ve always been interested in photography and enjoyed taking pictures. While I have some nice professional cameras now, I never had anything like that growing up.

I went to many concerts as a kid with my Mom packing a 24-exposure disposable camera in her purse so I could snap a few pictures of the show and get some pictures with the band after.

These were Christian concerts, mind you, and it seemed like the bands were more typical of doing meet-and-greets than “secular” bands, as I learned to call them.

I still have photos of me as a kid from my first rock concert, which was the band The Newsboys back in 1996, when they were the original lineup before they became this weird, never-ending Christian band that won’t quite go away now.

They were awesome back then, though!

I always wanted a video camera, too. They were always too expensive back in the ’90s, but Mom did finally manage to get me one.

I’d love to find all those old recordings and look at them again. I don’t even know what all would be on there except a movie I made with my childhood friends called Lobstro, the King of the Crustaceans—basically about a lobster that destroys a city.

We had a lobster and a cardboard city that we recorded him destroying. Then we lit it on fire to symbolize the destruction.

That was probably our best scene.

It’s still a very fond highlight of my childhood, though. Being silly and creative with my friends.

It’s funny that a quality camera and camcorder fit in your pocket now.

My yearbook teacher in high school really affected a lot of my enjoyment of documenting things. I think I already enjoyed it, but that class gave me the means to expound upon it.

My teacher was also a coach, so I’ll refer to him as “Coach” in this writing.

Coach taught us that candid shots were what he preferred the most.

I think we kids always tried to pose people together, then snap a picture of them all looking ahead at the camera and whatnot. While Coach would say those were good, he preferred us getting some candid shots—where people are in the moment doing something.

I didn’t realize it then, but candid shots would become my favorite way to capture a person.

The joy I get from getting a nice picture of someone smiling in a genuine moment of emotion, for whatever they’re doing at that moment, is priceless.

Yearbook class taught me so much and was just genuinely fun. Building the yearbook from scratch and seeing it come together was such a joy.

In another life, I think I would have been a good archivist because I enjoy stuff like this so much.

But maybe that’s what I’m doing now.

In high school, I carried those 24-shot—or 27 if you were lucky enough to get one with three bonus shots—disposable cameras around with me at all times.

That carried on into college.

I was never without a way to capture a moment.

Not all of the pictures came out great and perfect. Sometimes it was too dark to get a good image, or too bright.

You just got what you got.

Somehow, those pictures seem so much more special because they were limited.

Now, on smartphones, you can take photo after photo until it’s perfect. And that’s great in its own way. I would have loved for an old picture from back in the day to have been a little better than it came out.

But the photo is the memory.

Not how perfect the image came out.

Now, you never run out of shots either.

Clearly, as I have 57,000+ images.

All this leads up to what I want to say now.

I started this with the intention of writing about my dog Piper, whom I shared with my ex-wife in my former marriage and haven’t seen in three years now—and unfortunately probably never will again.

I was going to write about how that’s affected me.

But I think I will save that for later, as the precursor to that story is this one, I think.

My phone is like a time capsule.

Holding lives formerly lived in my pocket.

That’s crazy to think about.

I can scroll back through all the years and see how I’ve changed and what has changed me.

There are happy memories and sad memories.

There’s life.

Life lived.

I guess we all have this in some way now, no matter your age. Whether you’re young or old, we are all carrying a smartphone around and collecting memories through the images we capture.

Birthdays. Weddings. Dinner. Celebrations. Concerts. Sporting events. A random ass sign on the road that makes us laugh or say, “That’s weird.”

And so on and so forth.

I haven’t encountered a lot of literal death in my life involving people who truly matter to me or that I’m close to, but I have experienced a few.

But not all death is literal, as I have found.

The photos or videos I have of those individuals are priceless to me.

My friend Kyle, who I worked side by side with on a job for many months, is one of them.

We had become close on that job. We were schoolmates in high school but not really that close then. On that job, we had so much fun and talked about so many things.

It was a joy to go to work with him every day.

He killed himself on that job in the middle of the night.

It broke my heart.

I hadn’t cried for anyone in a long time up until that point.

I went to the safety meeting at the beginning of the work week after he passed. It had happened on a Saturday night.

I remember them sitting there talking about work and the agenda for the week going forward, all the while I’m wearing dark safety glasses and tears are rolling down my face.

I always have that mental image of what I must have looked like.

I’m a rather masculine-looking guy. A construction worker in a hardhat with a beard and resting bitch face.

Trying to look strong but cover up the fact that he’s crying.

They highlighted the fact that the job had a death over the weekend and spoke their condolences.

But life went on, and we went to work.

I will always remember that.

Life doesn’t stop when you or someone you love dies.

I wanted to scream.

Someone stop the world!!! My friend has died!! Stop and notice!!!

But life went on.

It kept moving full steam ahead.

My friend’s memory was left in the past.

Where he resides now.

That’s the funny thing about life. As much as we want it to stop for a while because we’re not ready to move on, or we need a break or a rest, it doesn’t stop.

It’s always moving forward.

Or so we think.

Linear time.

Time could be existing all at once, but that’s not the scientific possibility I’m exploring today.

Impermanence is a word I have discovered this year in relation to how I see the world.

It means nothing lasts forever, and everything will change eventually.

Second by second, things are changing.

And the harder you hold onto something to keep it from changing, the more pain and damage you will cause yourself.

It’s a hard pill to swallow when all you want is for things to stay relatively the same.

But you must adapt and change, or you’ll lose yourself and time will leave you in the dust.

I’ve seen the consequences of being averse to change.

Life waits for no one.

And if you live in the past, you’ll miss out on your future.

Your past exists as your present because you never let go.

Letting go.

Easier said than done.

Believe me. I get it.

Sometimes you desperately want to let go and something keeps you tethered to it.

I still struggle with that, but I’m trying to figure out what it is that keeps me attached to some things.

Maybe it’s my need to hold onto the passing moments and collect them so I don’t forget.

Maybe that’s a weight I don’t realize might affect me in a negative way.

Maybe I need to stop collecting moments and memories of a life in passing.

Carrying them around in my pocket.

Literally.

Smartphone, remember?

Maybe I need to live in every moment without needing to capture a moment of it to take with me.

All these things could be true and would potentially make me happier.

But they could also make me unfulfilled and more sad, too.

My camera roll can haunt me, honestly, when I scroll back through the years.

Sometimes I’m genuinely just looking for a particular picture.

I’m getting better at saving those photos to an album when I find them now, so I don’t do this searching song and dance over and over.

What haunts me are memories I wasn’t seeking to relive.

And yet it’s hard because it was my life.

It transports me back to a place and a time that existed but is no more.

I had to remove all the photos of my ex-spouse from my phone several months ago because there were too many unexpected reminders that would pop up randomly.

iPhone really likes to remind you what you were doing on a particular day ten years ago, and I don’t necessarily want to be reminded.

For some people, that’s great and a positive thing.

But for me, it wasn’t.

It was haunting me and torturing me in a way that would send me right back into reliving a hurt I’m trying to move on from.

So I had to remove the pictures.

I didn’t delete them all.

I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.

But I did move them to an external hard drive, off of my phone.

Unfortunately, there are still little sprinkles of reminders that I haven’t been able to remove because they didn’t get classified into her album through facial recognition.

So I still discover things.

And it’s maybe worse in a certain way because they aren’t photos of a big event like a trip or anything like that.

They’re a video of her making the bed.

Or a picture of her chopping vegetables with her face slightly obscured to where iPhone couldn’t recognize her.

But I know who it is.

And I remember the feeling of what it was like to share the moments of home and safety with her.

The little things that make a life a life and worth living.

I find the countless pictures of my dog Piper.

My special little friend.

And I miss her immensely.

My heart has been broken over that because I don’t want her to think I left one day and never came back and abandoned her because I didn’t care.

I wasn’t allowed to see her again, and the not knowing of what happened to her—or if she’s even still alive—is traumatizing to me.

Because I didn’t get to say goodbye.

To be there with her at the end of her life and for her to know she was not alone when she had to close her eyes forever.

These are the things I think about and feel that the memories of the past evoke.

It hurts.

Because, in a way, I don’t think I will ever heal fully from that.

My former life with my former person.

In dating, many people want someone who is “completely over” their ex.

I think that can be an unfair mindset.

Because when you’ve shared real time with someone—when there were good times and bad, when you built a life together—that was a significant portion of your life.

It doesn’t just disappear because the relationship ended.

To disallow acknowledgement that a former relationship has left you with scars you might not ever heal from entirely is like saying the life you lived in that timeframe was pointless and should be erased.

I can’t do that.

Because that time did matter.

It’s over.

But it mattered.

It was my life.

And someone who loves you again should be able to recognize that.

I’m 42 years old.

If you aren’t carrying some baggage with you by this point, have you actually even lived?

Did you ever take any risks?

Because love is a risk.

It doesn’t always work out, and it breaks your heart when it doesn’t.

But I will always think that love is worth that risk.

Even now.

I’m haunted.

But I know I’m capable of deep love.

I’m also capable of huge mistakes in all areas of my life.

But I am capable of deep love.

And that’s what I’m most proud of.

The Bible quotes:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

While I am not a person heavily persuaded by literal interpretations of the Bible anymore, this is a scripture I have always known.

It’s a feel-good scripture they like to quote at weddings.

It has a tinge of that fairytale mindset because this is not an entirely accurate description of love.

Keeps no record of wrongs?

Yeah right!

People are not built that way.

The last part is what I admire the most, though.

Love always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres.

If I love, then I protect with my life.

If I love, then I trust it is true.

If I love, then I hope for the future.

If I love, then I will not quit when things are hard.

If I were to add a portion, it would read:

“Love is hard, love is messy, love is imperfect.”

That’s a more real statement.

But that’s not the shit you want to hear when you just spent $25k+ on a wedding.

There’s a little snark for ya.

Earlier, I said that not all death is literal.

From what I have experienced, this is true.

Because divorce is like a death.

The loss of a person you thought you were going to share the rest of your days with.

The loss of the trajectory of how you thought life would go.

The loss of a person that mattered.

That you loved.

What’s been harder for me is realizing that this person is actually not dead.

They are still out there.

Living.

Alive.

Making a new life without you.

And by all accounts, you may never see them ever again.

You went from spending years together sharing a life to absolutely no contact.

That honestly blows my mind when I think about it.

Even now.

I can still hear this person’s voice in my head.

I still think of our inside jokes without meaning to.

I see a place we traveled to and instantly am back in that moment.

Unfortunately, I still have dreams that I’m assuming are my mind attempting to process a closure I never got in many ways.

I remember when our love was good.

I don’t remember as much of the bad, even though it was there.

I do remember how she traumatically hurt me in the end, though.

And that remains.

Not the hard or bad times from the marriage.

Those seem insignificant now.

Just the end.

But for a time, I was in love.

And I think I was loved in return.

I’m not always so sure anymore.

But I think I was.

Life, man.

There’s no rulebook.

No set-in-stone guide on how to do it right.

A lot of people live life by rules.

Playing it safe.

But that’s still no guarantee the bottom won’t fall out eventually.

For better or worse, I’d say I have tried to live as authentically as possible with the knowledge base I had in the moments I’ve lived through.

I’ve been a good man and a bad man.

A scholar and a criminal.

I’ve loved and lost.

I have lived.

I’ve experienced.

And maybe that’s all we can do.

Maybe there is no major payoff at the end of all of this, and our purpose should be to live every moment to the fullest.

That’s some basic-ass Hobby Lobby feel-good shit, but maybe it’s as simple as that.

Calm seas never made a skilled sailor, as they say.

There is no rulebook to life, and as soon as you get it figured out, it’s time to go.

So maybe all this writing I’m doing is to help someone like me out when they’re going through the darkness and lost.

To maybe find their reason and purpose a little sooner.

To find the way back to themselves.

Hell, I’m still not sure what my purpose is.

And that’s okay.

My goal is to just be a good human for the rest of my days.

And maybe that’s purpose enough.