The 2010 Year in Review: The Bachelor's Archive "Time is on My Side"

The 2010 Year in Review: The Bachelor's Archive "Time is on My Side"

Calendars are for careful people, not passionate ones.

Chuck Sigars

I’ve been in the right place at the wrong time a time or two too many, leading me to believe that when the next time comes it will be just like the last time, and never quite my time. It’s funny how we can live life according to our own rules and never expect to experience the consequences when we’ve decided to play fair, like everything is going to be all to the good because I decided this is what I want. Funny. Yet no one’s laughing when you’re thinking about what could’ve been, or could be, but isn’t, and you’ve extended your heart and your hand only to have them turned away due to “bad timing”.

I once spent a week with someone that for those seven days made me feel like I defined the word forever. However, she had already decided she would spend the next part of her life at sea and at that time I was too selfish to understand that she had dreams of her own way before she had thoughts of me, so her summer of letters went unanswered, but I still wondered what if? A few years later a friend introduced me to a beautiful woman that for ten years I’ve never been able to get on the same page with, I’m starting to wonder if we’re even reading from the same book, because we’ve played a game of tag through numerous failed relationships and we keep ending up in what seems like that small room where she first said hello. I’ve even fallen in love once (read “A Dream Then…”), maybe twice (coming soon), but the alarm clock known as reality doesn’t allow me to dream long and I’m left with nothing but smiles, memories and questions to show for any of it.

There are times when I think the peanut gallery is correct, that the hourglass on my life will have no company on the shelf, and I’ll never really know love. Those moments come and go, because I decided a long time ago that I was ok with that, but every so often a woman walks into my life and stops time…or at least it feels like it. I suppose I truly live in seasons, because it seems as if I’m four lifetimes away from love. I’ve been waiting for moments that feel like fate, when I should’ve kept a lookout for karma, because of all the minutes I’ve stolen from women on the countdown to true love.

So I take my licks like a grown man, then say I’ll never open my heart to another woman and the next thing you know I’m sitting at my desk listening to Lyfe Jennings ask if he’ll ever fall in love over and over again until it’s 20 minute past quitting time. Then I remind myself that I’ve been here before, didn’t like it then, don’t like it now, but I’d like to be here again. I’m not quite sure when that will be, I’m not in a rush either, I’ll keep working on me in the interim. But when hour strikes, I’ll know, even though I’ve stopped wearing watches and unplugged all of the clocks in my place, because I’ve learned to tell time by the Sunshine.