First of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to any one I might have known or met between the years of 2002 and 2014. I had no idea what I was doing. The list includes, but is not limited to:

• My poor realtor during the spring of 2014
• The dog during the food-diet switch the first days we brought him home
• My mom
• And lastly, any person I was romantically involved with under the age of 25 (including the poor soul I convinced to be my husband.)

You did not deserve the expectations I put on you. You likely did not understand the reasons behind my intensity. My overwhelming desire to be “grown-up” was probably traumatizing to all parties. I was SUPER intense. For like, no reason, other than I thought perhaps I was some manic-pixie girl who was weird and artsy and different. It’s just youth that does that to girls, and it will repeat until the end of time.

I won’t give detailed examples of the VHS corner-dated scenes that play in my mind when I am alone. This isn’t that kind of over-sharing post. This is just an opportunity to continue to take this format in a new direction. I will still write about food. Sometimes. But I need to write about other stuff, too. I need to relieve the pressure valve that I’ve left on my brain since 2012.

It’s no cliché – we get older, we learn from our mistakes, and we become different people. It’s disheartening to think that choices I had made or things I have said in the past will forever mark the way I am perceived by some people. I also accept that those things had to happen, and they happened in that space of time, and I should not be weighed down by those things. BUT THEY STILL SUCK. And there’s nothing I can do to change what I did. I sometimes wonder who the hell I was and how these same hands did those things. I don’t even know that person.

I think often of past relationships, and think how strange it is that I could have known someone so intimately, and now not at all. Even if you wait 10 years before talking to that person again, is it really the same person? Why does it feel so other-wordly and bizarrely familiar? Why can’t we get a hard reset button for these people who we’ve put so much distance between? Caged up in these thoughts, I’ll spin around and reach out to someone I used to know and wish I could apologize to, and for them to sincerely forgive me and recognize that who I was then is not who I am now. I also turn the other way and wish I could erase some people I used to know.

But here I am. And there they are. Good thing I don’t have the threat of bumping into people I knew from high school, as often happens to my husband. (I can’t say that me settling so far from where I grew up was entirely an accident.) But, let’s treat this is as the final sayonara to those past relationships and move onward.

Cheers to not having dinner reservations tonight at the same restaurant as your ex does.

Happy Valentine’s Day. ❤

P.S. Here’s a poem.

Heed, the day o’ Saint Valentine,
(The feast to-day is nigh)
Let us simply not forget,
The child-bride of time.
Who, in my youth, could have seen,
The many faces who drew -
A breath so salty and so sweet
Could have belonged to you.
And here you are, a bald'd man,
Your trousers needin' mending,
Share your needle and take my thread
Our lives forever blending.