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This is how it happens: you turn 40, in the fall of 2013. You write a cute post about turning 40, about hitting parked cars and falling down for no reason. It’s funny, but inside you’re actually still a little sad. You realize the earth is spinning through the same space it was a year earlier and it’s the exact time of year he told you no. You still think about him sometimes, but then you realize that he probably doesn’t think about you since the three manifesto-length texts you sent him probably forever sealed in his mind that you’re a creeper. You thought your 40th birthday would be a blowout, but it’s the opposite: friends can’t travel around Thanksgiving except to their families, the timing is off. You have a quiet drink with a friend at a bar you now don’t even remember. You realize you’re in for a long winter, or what you later call “Olive Garden’s Endless Heartbreak.”

You buckle down, delight at the first snow. You dive headfirst into your day job that you love, make it through the holiday season, make some fun art. You enter the new year full of hope and optimism, but this is your first winter in Portland, and you’re underprepared for how long it lasts. A guy from Los Angeles, from the city that represents your past, woos you, comes and visits you with promises of a future, but this time you’ve been through this before and see through the bullshit. He fades away quickly when he realizes you know he’s just catfishing for fans, not for a boyfriend. Oh, and your phone now autocorrects “catfishing” into “catfisting”.

Then suddenly it happens, and life shifts into fast-forward: you see a friend posting about their apartment on Facebook, you message them and make plans to see it ASAP. It’s great! You eagerly see the place, meet the landlord, sign the lease. The stress of your prior living arrangement is too much for you and another friend, it breaks a friendship forever, and the move into the apartment is bittersweet.

You make it through February, write something fun about Valentine’s Day, and emerge into the wan March sunlight. You’ve been decorating your place in a whirlwind all this time, and finally see the fruits of so much labor: your place gets onto a popular home blog, you release your book, and you announce your intentions to make a webseries all in the same week.

You take April off.

Portland explodes in the spring, and you’ve never felt anything like it. As a friend of yours put it the year before, witnessing spring in the Pacific Northwest is like watching Mother Nature orgasm. For the first time in a long time, you know you’re going to be alright. Maybe even better than alright. Your friends from New York keep bugging you to visit them, you miss them a lot. You miss your friends in Los Angeles, too. You know that’s not what this year is about, this isn’t the year for traveling. That’s 2015.

You hike and bike a lot. You set about writing and writing, and the writing gets more sincere and authentic. You get rid of a couple of social media apps, just to simplify your life (seriously, if I wanted dick pics, guys, I would join LinkedIn). You start writing for PQ Monthly, a local gay rag with a decent circulation. You enjoy the hell out of summer, go to the river a couple times to float, go up to Seattle a lot. There’s a ghost who lives there, and once you even think you see him walking down the other side of Pike. No, no, that’s not him. As you go up to Seattle again and again, the ghost fades a bit, the fear of running into him diminishes more and more.

You date a bit, and it doesn’t click, until it does…the catch is that he’s in Florida. He’s auditioning to play in the Portland Opera (I never thought I’d describe anyone to my friends as “this really hot oboe player from Florida”), and he doesn’t get in. He visits a few times though, and just when you’re ready to visit him in Florida, he tells you he got the internship in Kansas City, will be there for a few years. It’s not meant to be, and the two of you keep in touch, become good friends, even now.

Then another boy, this time in Chicago. Whether they find you though the blog or through Scruff, the dating pool is now a national one, distance doesn’t mean much anymore when the stakes feel higher. An amazing weekend, but the chemistry isn’t enough to sustain something long distance. You tell him after he leaves, after he’s back home and safe. Your paths might cross again, you could try again when you’re closer. You can’t help but feel the similarities to what happened to you a couple years ago, but this time you do it differently than he did. With the benefit of knowing how it feels on the other side when it’s done wrong, you do it right: “Let’s stay friends. Anything you need, anything you want to make this make sense to you, ask me. You can talk to me about it as much as you want.” He does, you talk a lot about it until he’s okay. You see his pain diminish, and you know you did well by him, you didn’t make him the monster you became for awhile. You broke the cycle, finally.

You wake up one fall morning, get on your phone (Scruff and at ’em) and realize you’re happy. Genuinely, sincerely happy. You know you’re ready for what’s coming: ready to wrap up some projects you’ve been putting off because they felt too painful, before now. Ready to travel again. Ready to jump to what’s next.

You hunker down again for the winter. You write and write, and you realize you feel like your life has been rebooted in the past couple of years. It was a tough run the past few years, but you have so much more than so many others who are less fortunate. As your 41st birthday dawns on the morning of Thanksgiving, the only thing you feel is a full heart and so much gratitude. Gratitude for amazing friends and family near and far, ready for new love in your life, grateful that you found what you were made to do. Grateful.

Grateful. Humbled. Heartbroken and hopeful. Optimistic. Silly. Dorky. Wide-eyed. A little clutzy. Well-intentioned. Sharp dresser. Sometimes hard of hearing. Basic butch. Spanking your cat’s fanny like it’s your goddamn job. Passably human. Occasionally stubborn. Hopeless romantic. Compassionate. Fiercely protective of the ones you love. Less control-y than you used to be. Never not covered in cat hair. Happy. Happy. Happy, like 1973.

If you liked this, then you’ve moved the bar to new lows! Indulge my weirdness and read the Single Gay Time Traveler posts. Let’s be horrible people together!