JT’s life…

Have you ever wondered which hurts the most?
Saying something and wishing you hadn’t? or saying nothing and wishing you had? I guess the most important things are the hardest things to say. Don’t be afraid to tell someone you love them. If you do, they might break your heart…if you don’t, you might break theirs. Have you ever decided not to become a couple because you were so afraid of losing what you already had with that person? Your heart decides whom it likes and whom it doesn’t. You can’t tell your heart what to do.
It does it on its own….when you least suspect it, or even when you don’t want it to. Have you ever wanted to love someone with everything you had, but that other person was too afraid to let you?
Too many of us stay walled up because we are too afraid to care too much…for fear that the other person does not care as much, or even at all. Have you ever denied your feelings for someone because your fear of rejection was too hard to handle? We tell lies when we are afraid… afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger. Life is all about risks and it requires you to jump. Don’t be a person who has to look back and wonder what they would have done, or could have had. * What would you do if every time you fell in love you had to say good-bye? *What would you do if every time you wanted someone they would never be there? *What would you do if your best friend died tomorrow and you never got to tell them how you felt? (even if it is that you don’t care anymore)*What would you do if you loved someone more than ever and you couldn’t have them? *What would you do if you never got the chance to say I am friends with all of my family and they know I love them?* People live, but people die… So fear not to tell how you truly feel with person you love before it’s too late… we can never tell how long they’re gonna stay in our lives…

This is a story about love and confusion and pain and snack platters. It starts in Chicago, when I was on tour promoting “Bird by Bird,” every home should own one, and I took my six-year-old son Sam along on the tour.

A woman came up to me at a bookstore reading with a boy, her son, he was exactly Sam’s age, the same birthday, and it turned out she’d made her own Play-Doh for her son. From scratch. And she asked me, “Do you make Sam’s Play-Doh?”

And I said, “I don’t make Sam’s dinner.”

I think she was taken aback just a little. She said: “What does Sam eat?” And I said, “Snack platters,” which is true.

And it happened that this was the very day in October when daylight savings ended, so we gained an hour the next

morning which made Sam and me very happy, but then we had to fly to Indianapolis which is about 25 minutes away and we lost the hour right away, like we never had it at all, and that made us both deeply confused and depressed. And then we spoke before about a million people at the Indianapolis Public Library where I discussed my personal problems which are legion, and then I signed books and by that time I was channeling Tricia Nixon, I was Tricia Nixon, just smiling and smiling no matter what. Then we went back to the hotel and I did the only sane thing to do when you are very tired and confused and you don’t know what time it is and you still have bits of Tricia Nixon on your shoes: I over-ordered room service.

This is how Sam gets his snack platters. I order two entrees for myself and then I make up bits from both entrees and that’s Sam’s meal. Club sandwiches are really good for that. And I was so tired I could not brush my teeth or take off my clothes, I just lay there boneless on the bed with the entree crumbs desperate for sleep.

And Sam said, “Can I ask you something?”

And I said, “Honey, can this wait?”

And he said, “Have you ever loved anyone who didn’t love you back?”

Sam was undergoing a spiritual crisis because the girl I like to call “the slut who broke my child’s heart,” who was at that moment two or perhaps four time zones away, had chosen someone else to be her boyfriend.

So I dragged my pathetic body up into a sitting position and said yes, I had loved someone who hadn’t loved me back, and how it felt like a knife in my heart and I never learned what to do about it, and I was hoping that my willingness to tell the truth and say how messy and inconvenient and confusing love is would somehow match this Shakespearean level of despair he was feeling at whatever time it was in Indianapolis.

So he said, “Can I ask you one more thing?”

With great dread I said, “Yes.”

“Do you think you and me will die at the exact same moment?”

And I thought that was the question that we always want to ask but we never do because we know better, but it’s the question that really does paint a map of the human heart, how terrifying and touching it is to love another person.

So I told him no, we wouldn’t, and the next day we went to the zoo, and it was the happiest day of the year.

GOD REALLY WORKS IN WAYS WE CAN NEVER IMAGINE. HE MADE ME GO THRU ALL THE WORST THINGS IN LIFE BUT IN THE END, HE GAVE THE BEST OF IT ALL. HAVING THIS NOTION OF BEING DESTINED TO LIVE IN SOLITARY GAVE ME THE STRENGTH OF ACCEPTING THE FACT OF TAKING CARE OF MYSELF AND NOT DEPENDING ON ANYONE ELSE… IT NEVER DAWNED ON ME THAT SOME TIME SOON; I WILL BE CAPTURED BY THIS SPANISH EYED TALL GUY NAMED “RV” WHO TOTALLY BROUGHT MY HEART INTO MELTING POINT… I CAN NEVER THANK GOD ENOUGH FOR GIVING HIM TO ME. NOW MORE THAN EVER, I REALIZED THAT INDEED DESTINY AND TRUE LOVE REALLY EXIST… BELIEVE COZ THEY TRULY DO…

if i could just say no… if i could just say no then surely the pain will go away… but how do you get out of something you are completely and evil-ly drowned into? i am too lazy to choose between my heart and my mind… i know i won’t like the outcome but i know it’s right… it’s just but right… it’s hard to say no to happiness, hard to say goodbye to the addiction of it… too hard to let go of one thing that made me alive… it is so selfish of me, i know… but i have to learn how to… still, i jst can’t let it go…