All in.
So here I am, sitting at a poker table, my favorite dress shirt soaked in red wine and water (excused and cleaned up in a manner that miraculously noone noticed), with another glass of blood-red shiraz swirling in my hand, an angry and stoic face staring into nowhere (my easiest poker face), taking and losing large ballsy bets, but all the while coming up ahead fairly substantially. It becomes very easy to ask myself...
What the f*** am I doing here? (Pardon my inner monologue, he's quite vulgar). I look around the table and see a friend struggling with being single but now with a girl he loves, multiple friends who are happy in thier take-what-they-can-get single lifestyle, friends happily married with just the two of them, and friends married, happy with children. All celebrating these victories over little pieces of plastic. Who the hell cares?
There are so many other things that I want to be happy about but am not there yet. I so desperately want a family, a person to wake up next to, to love and accept their faults, a child to love and nurture, and see the woman I love in their eyes. I am so damn jealous of the people I know that have found that that it hurts.
I wonder very quickly how it is that those people that have all this find joy in plastic chips, and all the while savor the sips of red wine while the night goes on, yearning for the moment when so many pieces of my life line up so that poker chips are enough for temporal happiness.
It's easy to struggle as well; as I've met plenty a person who "desperately wants a wife / husband" or who "so wishes they had a baby right now", but that's worlds away from what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for a wife, or a person to start a family with. Far from it.
I'm looking for the person that inspires that burst of life from me, and from that, spawns the love, the marriage, the family, the waking up next to her and being thankful that somehow my life experiences brought me here.
But I guess I'm not quite ther yet. In the meantime, I suppose my joys need to come in the forms of little plastic chips.
What's life without a little risk?
"I'm all in."
