Over the course of my life I have very, very rarely considered myself a person a faith. From time to time I have had certain encounters with the supernatural that have left me standing alone, blood dripping from a borrowed razor, staring at a truth that I could not grasp.

The most recent of these came after my last breakup. It still has me reeling. I am not sure that this is one that I will be getting all the way over ever. I wrote about it here, my friend, but in case you don’t want to go read a bunch of incomprehensible drivel from a broken man (you are doing this at present regardless, I suppose), I’ll give you a stout and messy.

The days following the breakup had me quite, quite messed up. Two days after he had said that he wanted to break up with me, I still had a delusion that things could be mended from here, or at least that I would do something totally insane and asinine, and in doing so demonstrate some sort of like, cosmic-level thing of signifcance about either myself or our relationship. I was (and, frankly, remain) convinced that there is something significant in this relationship that is worth fighting for.

So as a part of this delusion, I decided that the asinine and insane thing that I would do would be to get my passport as quickly as bureaucratically possible, purchase tickets to somewhere near his place of residence, and proceed to spend maybe like, two weeks or so homelessly marching up and down the island until I found him, or something else important happened.

I also decided that I was going to go for a run in order to help clear my head, so that I could think more clearly about this plan I was incubating. I started running and I never really felt like stopping. I made it about seven miles from my house and figured a half marathon would be just about fine, so I turned around and headed back. Around three hours in, at just about the thirteen mile mark, I’d more or less got it all mapped out. I had just about figured out all my gear, more or less made a plan for transport, for getting in contact with some relevant parties in case my solo venture didn’t work out as romantically as I had been planning, and basically got the whole thing outlined about as well as one can while jogging through suburban greenbelts. So I decided, as part of the home stretch, I would do what I’d stopped myself from doing all day. Something I’d been doing obsessively pretty much since the moment he stopped texting me back. Check to see if he’d messaged me, and check to see if he’d blocked me.

I was about six blocks from my house. I hit the power button to turn on the screen of my phone, and brought it up to in front of my face so that I cold unlock it and open the messaging app we’d been using. Before I could finish unlocking the phone, I stepped off the curb of the sidewalk, twisted my ankle really bad, heard it pop louder than you ever wanna hear any part of you pop, and dropped my phone in the grass. Next came much shouting, and cursing, frequently at the same time.

I eventually called my dad to come and pick me up because I could not walk. It was when I was waiting for him to come and get me, sitting on the sidewalk nursing a clearly messed up ankle, when I decided that this must have been a message of relevance. From a higher power. Which had I also decided that I believed in at that moment. I told my dad this and he had very few comments. I told him about my asinine plan and he agreed that it was totally insane. We had the most productive talk we’d had since the breakup on the car ride home.

The next morning I checked my phone as I lay in bed with an ice pack on my ankle and all my plans thoroughly canceled. I had decided instead to focus on picking up the pieces as best I could and getting my life back on to a good, solo course again. He had not only not messaged me over the night, he had blocked me as well, on everything.

I felt like the fever had broken, finally. The frantic, uncertain part was over now, and now it was time to be simply very, very sad. Things did not immediately get better, but now I knew that they would, eventually, and that made me very, very angry. Nonetheless, I still believed that I had been told, quite unequivocally, that whatever plans I was making were a mistake and that I needed to let sleeping dogs lie. So I did. I still wallowed in my misery, alternating mostly between despair and existential rage. But any plans for fixing things I had left on the sidewalk about six blocks from my house.

This was the first time in my life that I thought I might have heard a message from above, and heeded it, and things haven’t worked out so bad since then.

Since then, of course, I have been on high alert for things that might fall under the category of ‘Divinve Intervention’ and they have been, as one might expect, far and few between.

Before I arrive at the latest head-scratcher, I do want to touch on one more that came after the break up.

The breakup left me reeling, and the ankle made me reconsider my faith, or lack thereof, and in both, my grandmother was tremendous help. She was someone whose importance in my life I hadn’t really considered until quite recently, but upon reflection, the effect she had on me was tremendous, and I remain forever in her debt for helping me become the man that I am today (and, God willing, the better man that I will be someday). Talking to her about my relationship was not easy, mostly because of failings on my part. Even so, she listened tremendously well, and knew when to offer the good advice, and when to let me sit with something for a while. I’d been moved back in with her for not that long before the breakup, and I hadn’t planned on staying for very long anyway, but now that I was heartbroken and totally lost, I was glad to have somewhere familiar to stay, and someone smart, and kind, and who loved me without reservation, to talk to about all of it.

The first time that I asked her to pray for my ex with me was difficult. I wept, loudly. It is still difficult to not tear up thinking about it. It was beautiful, and sad, and one of the first times I genuinely felt totally at the mercy of something bigger than myself. She made me feel like things getting better wouldn’t be so bad, because they would get better for him, too. And that would be good enough for me to accept. Not happily, of course. I remain, even today, let’s say nonplussed about the whole affair and particularly the way that it wrapped up, but finding a silver lining helps the bitter pill go down (If there is a more tortured, more mixed metaphor out there, please, point it out to me.).

Shortly after all of this, as things were just beginning to feel not so existential, my grandmother’s health took a significant turn for the worse. She passed a few weeks afterwards. I was only able to see her a few times in the hospital before. The last time we did, my little brother, my dad, and I, went to visit and it made her very happy to see all of us. The next day, she decided, being fully aware of the consequences, to stop the dialysis treatments and move into a hospice care facility.

She passed the next morning. It was very sudden, but also fairly plain to see coming down the road.

This all feels very disrespectful. I’m sorry, gramma. But like I keep saying, I really do believe that there is something important in this relationship to make it worth talking about.

The day after my grandma passed, I received what felt like at the time was another instance of Divine messaging. Perhaps literal Deus ex machina. I was sitting alone, in my house, on the phone talking to a friend of mine about just how fucking beat up I was feeling about everything that’d been going on. And then, as happens often, my phone beeped out a notification. Looking at my connected smart watch, it was an email. But it was from someone unusual. Facebook. I hadn’t had a facebook account for a very long time, but I’d made one a few months before for the sole purpose of keeping an eye on marketplace, specifically to look for vans that looked convertible to living in. I hadn’t received any emails from facebook the entire time I’d had this account. But, on this day, I got a notification email for a friend suggestion. And it was my ex. We had never shared each others’ facebook accounts. I knew his full name, and he knew my full name, but we had more than enough ways to keep in touch that facebook never made the list.

All of a sudden, it all came rushing back to me. The panic, the uncertainty, the frantic need to do something to make it all work out the way I wanted it to. Anything. The moment I read the email I was overcome by the feeling that this was, once again, a fucking sign. That something important was happening.

I told my friend. After the moment passed, I stopped feeling so frantic, and started feeling scared. He told me, very blithely, not to take things so seriously. I’d set myself on a good path, and I didn’t need to go opening old wounds again, especially right now, on a hunch that God was telling me to reach out to some sick, poor boy across the globe and see if he would let me talk to him again.

Most people I would not have listened to. But he is the only person I know who is totally unashamed of his faith. He is a real believer. He doesn’t hide behind razors and swords. But what he told me helped me stop being so scared. He made me feel like this was less a sign pointing the way that I must follow, and more an unmarked crossroads with two equally uncertain paths before me. Except that one I had spent the past month planning for and mentally preparing myself to deal with. And the other looked nice from here, but I had no idea what lay around the first bend, be it good or bad.

So I chose the path I’d been preparing for. The one I had directions for, even if I’d never been down it before. Nothing on other path made me think that this would be a one-time offer. So I figured I would keep on the hard path I knew, and maybe one day when I was ready, I could see what lay around the other bend.

And that’s where things sat before today. Today I had another very odd run in.

My first ex broke my heart in a very, very peculiar way. It’s funny to look back on now, but it wasn’t very funny to live through. Since that first breakup, we patched things up and became friends again, started dating again, broke up again, and now we’re back to being good, close friends, even if I remain somewhat intentionally distant.

She’s another case of someone for whom I wish only the best, because she’s been set upon from many sides for a long, long time. About a year and a half ago, she met someone that she became very interested in. They shared several diagnoses, and met through various treatments. Eventually, they fell in love, started dating, moved in with each other, and seemed like they were taking the first steps in their happily ever after. I was overjoyed that she seemed to finally be getting something good in her life with no strings attached. They were more or less engaged by the time I first met my most recent ex. By the time we had broken up, so had they, and my friend was homeless all of a sudden in a part of the world she’d only lived for a few months.

I was much less homeless, but I felt just about as lost as she did. Over the next few months, we both slowly got better. She surfed couches and lived out of her car when she needed to, I moved into the apartment that I still can’t really afford, and life came back down to a tolerable level of shitty. We kept in touch through the whole ordeal, I kept offering her a couch to sleep on if she ever felt like making the drive across the country, and she kept saying she would if it ever got that bad.

Then, this morning, she calls me up and says, “guess where I am today,”

I replied, “on someone’s couch?”

to which she replied, “you’re never going to guess, so I’ll just tell you: My ex’s house.”

I immediately became overwhelmed with that feeling again. That something important was happening. That this was something that I was supposed to pay close attention to. And then those feelings started to bubble up again. The uncertainty, the need to do something to make everything work out alright, or at least try until my heart gave out. To leave nothing on the table. Etc.

She told me that her ex had messaged her to come pick up some package that she’d ordered to the house months and months ago, and when she arrived to pick it up, her ex had confessed to regretting breaking it off with her and missing her dearly. I, as any good friend should, advised cautious and very slow progress, which she agreed with. They are going to take things slowly, or so I’ve been told as of this morning.

Eventually the conversation came to a close, I wished her luck, and I sat down to read for a while to distract myself from this feeling that I didn’t want to indulge quite yet. After a few hours, I got up and went grocery shopping. When I came back, I decided that I wanted to hang out with my friends on the computer and play some video games that would distract me from thinking about these feelings of mine even better than lousy old poetry.

Then a second, much lighter punch, hit me again, and I knew that I was going to have to confront this problem sooner rather than later.

I play video games on a Windows PC. That means that I’m basically required by law to have a Steam account. I’ve had mine for a very, very long time, and since my time as a semi-pro gamer, I’ve gone through cycles of being somewhat reasonably well known, at least among the niche circle of people who care about prehistoric shooter games. As someone with a reasonably well-known account, and a valuable collection of digital assets to boot, I’m no stranger to bot accounts spamming my messages, trying various transparent ways to scam me.

So I wasn’t really very surprised to see a new message notification in my inbox when I opened Steam. What did surprise me, and would have made me sit down had I not been already, was what it said. It was from an account that I didn’t recognize, red flag number one, that claimed to be a girl, red flag number two, and claimed to be russian, red flag number three, and the message read simply, “still in love with you”.

Red flag number Four.

Had this happened on any other day, I would not have taken it very seriously at all. The account looks a lot like a bot account. Lots of free games with no playtime, it links to an Instagram account that’s almost certainly unrelated to the Steam account, private inventory and game information, the whole thing stinks. But the same day that my friend tells me she’s getting back together with her ex that broke up with her the same week my boyfriend broke up with me? The synchronicity is too much to take.

And now we arrive more or less at the present. I don’t know what to do. I have made some progress down the path I set myself on after the breakup. I’ve set myself up for an academic future. I started therapy to deal with all the problems that arise between the inside of my skull and the outside. I’ve been writing more. I’ve changed jobs to one that will specifically make it easier for me to do all the things that I’ve been saying for the past year that I want to do. But now I’m scared again. Now I’m scared that this is something important happening. And I’m scared because I don’t feel ready. I don’t feel like I’m good enough yet. But I know that if he were around to talk to me about it, my ex would tell me that there’s no such thing as being good enough for someone else. Because relationships aren’t about that. And then things all start to spiral again.

So you tell me, I guess. I’m genuinely asking for advice here. If you’re out there, and you’ve read all this, tell me what I should do. From where I’m sitting, it feels a lot like someone important has already made His opinion pretty plain, but I’m pretty sure He’s made the same point before, and now here he is making it again, and I’m not sure if I should keep focusing on the work, or see if the the business plan from here is a good enough pitch to pull the VC I need to get this little startup of mine off the ground.

I’m serious, by the way. About the advice part. You can email me at bytheriverbyhimself@gmail.com, or leave a comment here I guess, if that’s what you’re into. I don’t even know if I have comments set up on this website. I guess we’ll figure it out together, then. Cheers.