Boy, do you guys like drama!
Not that this is a complete surprise, judging by the comments on my recent post in which I wrote about being the third wheel on a vehicle I thought only had two. And my stats back this up:
Wow. Maybe I need to dip into the drama well more often! Trust me, there are plenty of untold stories I could mine. Who knew you had such a salacious past?! The Travel Architect commented.
Well, Tara for one. But she’s not exactly a Girl Scout herself.
I’m not judging you at all. Hell, I love drama, too! The more scandalous, the better. Though I do prefer reading it to living it.
In an effort to feed your hunger (and, okay, boost my stats some more), I’ll share one more follow-up to my experience dating a married woman, and this is perhaps the most surprising and unexpected outcome of all: her husband and I later became friends.
After she passed away, he reached out to me. Though the fact that she had been married to him the entire time we dated was an unpleasant surprise, his existence was not—and neither was mine. We knew about each other from the start, but she fed us both false information. To me, he was the ex; to him, I was the guy she went out with a few times after they separated.
Let me make one thing clear: I never would have kept the “relationship” (which it was only in the very loosest of terms anyway) up had I known she’d lied about divorcing him…and he wouldn’t ever have taken her back if he’d known she was still seeing me.
For several months, he and I emailed back-and-forth, gradually filling in a lot of blanks. In doing so, we were able to reconstruct a three-year timeline of deceit. It was pretty clear we had both been bamboozled, and he held no hostility toward me. I felt terrible for the guy. Still do! She had painted him to be a monster, but he was really just an unwitting victim of a deeply disturbed woman who obviously loved cake, because she wanted to have hers and eat it, too. He’s a nice guy. We have a lot in common.
So, all these years later, we’re friends. We’ve never met in person, but I have a standing invitation to grab a beer with him anytime I’m in Vegas. That would be the wildest thing ever.
And I’m pretty sure she would roll over in her grave.
Strange how I falter to find I’m standing in deep water
When I built a backyard fire pit last year, I envisioned many cool evenings spent around it. The romantic in me pictured starry nights, a glass of wine, marshmallows on a stick.
Sixteen months and a million opportunities went by, but for some reason, this never happened. Summer 2024 bled into fall and winter and spring. Suddenly it was summer 2025, and then fall again. The fire pit got plenty of use–it’s very handy for burning our slash pile of woody debris–but not once had we ever sat around it to actually relax. There was always an excuse: it was too cold or too hot, too light or too dark, too early or too late, too windy, too many mosquitoes, yadda yadda, the list goes on forever.
Saturday night we were playing cards, as we do, when Tara said, “We should sit around the fire pit.”
“Yeah, sure, sounds great,” I replied, not really believing we would actually do so because I could’ve rattled off several of those too excuses I just listed. It was 11 p.m. We hadn’t eaten dinner yet. The mosquitoes were still annoying.
And yet, for once, we didn’t listen to those little voices inside our heads.
What do you know? This turned out to be the highlight of the weekend for me. A crackling fire, the Big Dipper playing hide-and-seek with clouds drifting lazily by, Enya serenading us from my phone. A total déjà vu moment: I listened to that same Enya song, “On Your Shore,” while gazing at those same constellations on many a long-ago night when my life was in turmoil and I needed an injection of cosmic serenity. Enya’s ethereal vocals and those impossibly distant stars and planets always made me feel tiny and insignificant, and yet, oddly at peace. Like for one brief moment a black veil had parted and I’d been allowed a glimpse into the beating heart of the universe, revealing its deepest truth–that we are all made of stars–but instead of spiraling into an existential crisis as I did Tuesday night, I always found this comforting. It brought about a healthy does of perspective, the feeling that, while I’m no more than an infinitesimal galactic speck (and if that’s the case, then how truly small my problems are), I’m part of something vast and limitless. Something that has no end.
Saturday night was no exception. Sitting beside the fire, gazing heavenward, listening and thinking and feeling, I shared these memories with Tara. She had never heard them before, and I think she found my vulnerability moving.
We may not have eaten our tacos until midnight, but an empty stomach is a small price to pay for a fleeting connection with the cosmos.
To be fair, a hot dog and a long stick would have solved that dilemma, so we’ll be better prepared next time.
Mark My Words 
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