Writing for an Unknown Audience

I opened up Open Diary yesterday, as I was in a pensive, reflective mood. At age 33, I feel like I’m too early for a midlife crisis. However, having gone through a wife with cancer, a lost child at the beginning of that experience… and pastoring a church for almost ten years, and in the middle of dealing with one member who was 100% invested, and is now “making shipwreck of faith,” perhaps a midlife crisis can come early. I don’t know.

And I’m being a bit dramatic. It’s not a mid-life crisis.

As I look over my old entries, upwards of a decade and more ago, I know the same friends will likely not come in to read these entries. I shudder now to think of my close friends, my new social circles reading a younger me. A cocky me.

What drew me to Open Diary yesterday, I hesitate to admit, was a friend I made from Georgia. Across the states from me. We were close. Until I blew it. In fact the first entry I found I had on this Open Diary account, was one I had created after the affair. I still have in the recesses of long, forgotten Facebook chats interaction with that reader. I also had her cell phone number. On that cell phone is where we had a schism, a fight. And words were said, and before I knew it numbers were blocked. Likely Facebook profiles were blocked – and either she carries a 100% private profile, or no profile at all anymore. Even after all these years.

I shouldn’t, being a pastor and Christian man, perhaps I really shouldn’t, but I sometimes catch myself of thinking past girls. How life would’ve been. I didn’t “have” many girls, and never would I classify myself as a womanizer. The only serious relationships I have had was a first girlfriend I thought I’d marry, and then my wife. Besides my wife, who is no doubt my best friend, I’ve been close friends – and perhaps for a season, in a place of hardly admitting in my heart, romantically interested with a girl or two. I may’ve confessed and took it back, and was friend-zoned, or I may have subdued the emotions. I can think of at least two primarily that fits this category. One of them was this friend made through Open Diary. (And if it’s needed to be said, I know not why, but of course I’ve never been romantically interested in and/or pursuing two women at the same time).

Part of me was ready to go to Augusta, GA, to meet her face-to-face in that day.

Since age 4, I’ve been a resident of Idaho. In 2004 after visiting family from GA, I was ready to move there. Then, around 2006, two years before graduating high school, I was close to wanting to move to CO. The school I ended up attending online knew its physical campus in CO. Alas I never did. By 2010, I was dating my wife who was born, bred, and desired to live off the land, the Idaho land. And so, I made do, because home was where she was. Home was always where she was.

…

There’s a road. Route 118. It goes from Montgomery VT, to Montgomery Center. It passes a Valero gas station. Etched in my mind, it’s a road that I’m strangely homesick for. The Google Maps Street View is in reality what has placed it there. And it’s been edited and is now on my office computer as the desktop wallpaper. The desktop is not graced by my wife, or two precious boys, or the church, or our scenic hills. No, just a normal, ripped-off-Google Streetview November late afternoon. Headlights of nearby cars are breaking the oppressive, oncoming darkness. Although it’s not oppressive to me, but strangely liberating. A small skiff of snow saturates the wet, short grass. The leaves are fallen off the deciduous trees, while the evergreens are hard to discern in the darkness. Only the hilltops spiked with limbs reveal they’re there. It’s a route, as if one I would’ve commuted for work – oddly, one I wish I was familiar with. One that I wish I was familiar with like I got familiar with driving back and forth between Moscow and Pullman for a year and a half after my wife and I married and we lived in Moscow then.

I don’t know where I imagine working. A church I suppose, or perhaps something less exciting. I could settle down with a hardware store or a grocery store. Maybe even a Dunkin donuts, if I wasn’t such an introvert. Wherever she worked, perhaps she was off before me at home, with the boys. Making dinner. A sermon could be playing in the car, earbuds in my ears. But I imagine, if I ever had the luck, the fortune, the dream brought into reality and fruition – I imagine just the purr of the car, the rumbling of Vermont’s highways finally under my tires, the darkening Vermont sky through the windshield — yes I imagine I’d take many drives. Many ordinary drives in Vermont with nothing but the Vermont air to hit my windows.

“It’s like being homesick for a place I’ve never been to.” I’ve told a friend I made on Facebook. It’s been almost 9 years, since I looked at an Atlas while on a vacation drive. My wife and I less than two years married, no kids, and braving a road trip with my parents to Kansas. Out of fifty states, one state stuck out to me like a sore thumb. An indescribable, unexplainable draw, curiosity washed over me. When we made it to the hotel that night, I downloaded the entire Wikipedia article of Vermont for reading the next day of the final part of the drive into Kansas to visit my sister and family. I read the entire article, all of it. Demographics, climate averages, all of it. Since then, coincidences too coincidental to be coincidences have continued to beckon me.

But I married a rancher, a farmer, one tied to the land.

And all that Route 118 remains is a dream. A dream unfulfilled. A road I drive many times a year, but never able to feel or breathe the Vermont air. Google maps tells me that the gas station is still there, but part of me – settled with the fact that visiting, let alone moving there will be out of the question – part of me I guess wants to be content with having my Vermont life somewhere in my memory. The anticipation might be dashed by the reality. I don’t know.

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Will this diary continue? I don’t know. One thing I recalled as I perused my decades-old posts yesterday, was the remembrance that journaling relieves something in me. I’ve written a lot since my Open Diary days. Prayers. Literally an entire book’s worth of material on this Vermont infatuation / calling. I’ve written sermons. But is there some sort of relief that comes when writing to an audience who doesn’t know me? Some sort of salve that anonymity brings me, as I disclose the hidden parts of my life, that truly only God knows, until I share it? I don’t know. Maybe.

Maybe I want direction. Guidance. Input. Maybe, I just need a valve to let off steam.