It seems like an infinitely long time since I last claimed to understand what love is. There was a time in what seems like another lifetime when I thought I got it. In nerd slang, I grokked it, once upon a time.

In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious it wouldn’t last. When you’re a teen-ager, in high-school, or in college, five years seems like a long time, ten years seems like forever. I never really thought of being older than 27 years old until it finally crept upon me, still surprising despite how inevitable it was.

And if that was the extent of my heartbreak, maybe it still would’ve been OK.

Looking back at all this lost time, I become more and more at a loss to explain exactly what happened. Why it mattered so much. Why it went so catastrophically wrong. Why I can’t seem to let go of it to this very day.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m just obsessed with the idealization of it all. The more I think about it, the more I can’t help but feel I would’ve inevitably screwed it up anyway, and I would still be exactly where I am today, except I would’ve made one more person that much more miserable.

Saying “It’s better this way” is such an empty rationalization, though.

But despite my repeated failings and disappointments with regards to romance, I still thought I had at least some inkling of what love is. I was inculcated with C.S. Lewis’ description of four types of love: affection, friendship, eros, and caritas, and knew that eros was just a single aspect of it all, a small facet of life in general. Despite my failings and disappointments, I strove to at least be better at friendship, and especially with caritas.

The highest order of love was described by Lewis as caritas, or agape (a Greek word that Christians are probably familiar with.) I figured if I couldn’t handle eros, I could strive for caritas. Unconditional love. Love without limit, without hope or expectation of return.

In a way, my career decision has been influenced by this aspiration. Even in high school, I took the exhortation to be “a man for others” seriously. To help other people out without hope of reward, or even recognition.

In all seriousness—I’m not just bullshitting—some days, some days, it feels like it might be enough. A lifetime of service. I could get into that. There are days where I seriously dig it.

Today is not one of those days.

I learned a long time ago that, for ill or for good, I am not a normal dude. I mean, it’s not like I’m gay. I didn’t come from a broken family. I don’t have a chronic disease against which I’ve striven against. I’m not a supergenius. I’m not some autistic savant. Still, I figure my life probably falls somewhere outside at least one standard deviation from the mean. So in time, I’ve grown to accept the idea that what may seem to be an ideal lifestyle for most people may not be the best for me.

There are pangs of jealousy, to be sure. Whenever I hang out with two of my friends from college—a fairy tale couple if there ever was one—I get this sense of longing. It’s odd to watch their children grow up. I’ve literally followed their daughter from being in the womb, to being a helpless little baby, to being an articulate and intelligent four year old. And though I’ve seen possibly quite literally hundreds of children grow up before my very eyes, I still shake my head in amazement when I consider that three years ago I had no idea that they would even have a son, two years ago he was a small (but robust) little infant crying, and a couple of weeks ago, I saw him running around, hurling baseballs inside of the house(!) and smiling at me both shyly and yet mischievously at the same time.

Some days I tell myself, “It’s not too late.”

But most of the time, I tell myself, “I don’t see how.”

The long road, for the most part, seems to go in only one direction, down towards the horizon, and while I might take a few detours here and there, I get this feeling that the side roads are all probably dead-ends, and that there are simply no forks or off-ramps coming up. No services for the next 350 miles. You can’t get from here to there, as they say.

But even a readjustment of my expectations from life can’t seem to save me. Even in things that I value the most—friendship, family—I feel like I’m failing. And the thing that can give me so much satisfaction at times, sometimes leaves me feeling like I’m just playing dress-up. Like I’m four years old again, wearing my dad’s white coat from when he was a resident, and playing with his stethoscope, handing out candy and pretending that it’s medicine.

Days like this, I feel like asking “what good is any of it?” I’ve learned to quietly bury these days in shallow, unmarked graves. When I’m feeling this way, probably the best thing to do is take a couple of Tylenol, and just to go to sleep and pretend that it was a bad dream, or that it didn’t happen, and to keep telling myself that tomorrow is another day.

You can only hang out in the Pit of Despair for so long before you get a very serious urge for committing self-harm. Or, to reiterate something I wrote a some time ago, continuously believing that you suck as a human being is pretty much incompatible with life.

Seriously, though, in these long, lonely years, I’ve made an art of hairsplitting. Sophistry. Semantics. Word play. I’ve learned quite well that there is difference between no hope, and having a small glimmer, a fading ember of hope. The former, while usually pretty sucky, is at least clear-cut. You cannot pass. Go directly to jail and do not collect $200. When you know you have absolutely no hope in all the universe, zero probability in all the multiverse, it’s easy to just shrug your shoulders, give up, and move on.

But it’s the latter that flickers on and off from time to time that absolutely tortures me. The idea that there is an exceedingly small and yet finite possibility that if I go all-in, I might actually take the pot drives me to insanity. Because with even a tiny smidgen of hope, it feels like the universe is sitting on my shoulder. Because if there’s hope, then if it doesn’t come to fruition, I’ll know that it’s entirely my fault that I screwed it up.

Thank God for the Arrow of Time. Time turns possibility into inevitability, and so I can look at ten years ago and tell myself, there was nothing I could do. It was just going to turn out this way. And yet I remember the self-recriminations going on inside my head. The self-doubt, the lost chances. If I wallow in it too much, it’s too damn much to bear.

Yeah, that damn glimmer. Like fairy dust, or a will-o’-wisp.

The older I get, the more I’ve tried to ignore it. You can’t be disappointed if you don’t try. (To quote Homer Simpson, “Trying is the first step towards failure.”) While it seems to be a reasonable strategy from preventing heartbreak (although I still fall for it from time to time), I can’t shake the feeling that I’m probably just killing myself slowly, in a rather excruciating fashion.

One of these days, there may be just a pile of dust and ashes where my heart used to be.

Such as life. Like I said, sometimes it’s better to have no hope.