3. The Improbable Man
The Universe In an Eye
How do you tell someone your story is an improbable one with a straight face? How do you confess that the life you’ve lived seems more like fiction than fact, all the while knowing that every line is real?
Ever the optimist, the glass-half-full kind, I came back to Paris after all those years to heal. To rediscover myself. To look through the gilded mirror of a Parisian youth and maybe, just maybe, catch a glimpse of who I once was, or who I could still become.
Life hadn’t taken me where I thought I’d be by forty. And that was just it, it had taken me. I hadn’t taken it. I’d been a passenger, rarely a captain. A man swept by currents I had never learned to swim against.
They say the human body regenerates most of its cells every seven years. Some things never change, like the eyes, or the memories they carry, but most of me was, quite literally, new. A different man stood in my shoes. The boy was long gone. And yet, despite the passing years, I’d never truly grown up. I got away with that for longer than I should have.
Six foot one, above-average looks and intelligence. Green eyes and curly brown hair. A frame that was once taut and lean, now a little looser, softened by time and indulgence. I was trying to get back in shape, trying to reclaim the outline of a man I once was. A double chin caused by twenty-five years of hard drinking doesn’t vanish overnight. But two months in Mexico City, a European diet, and 20,000 steps a day might just carve away at it.
I was Dionysian by design, spark, flare and fire in equal measure. I drank hard, laughed louder, loved freely, and danced like time didn’t exist. Humor was my armor: self-deprecation and absurdity, my faithful companions.
But if I’m honest, I half-assed my way through life. I had a knack for most things, but not the focus, not the fire-in-the-belly grit to follow through. A self-sabotaging mind dressed in a tailored suit. I lived in contradiction. I could take the ball all the way to the goal line and then fumble it, shrug, and wander off to start something new.
A dilettante. A dreamer. One of the saddest truths I ever heard was that “wasted talent is the greatest tragedy.” I understood it intellectually. But to live it, that was another matter. To feel it sink into your bones and hollow out your pride, that’s what teaches you. That’s what breaks you open enough to change.
People called me things, un bon vivant, un raconteur d’histoires, un passionné de la vie. And it was true. Every day was a holiday if you asked me. I lived to share my thoughts, to throw them out into the world and see what came back. I understood myself through others through their eyes, their laughter, their questions.
I was always searching for meaning, but often in the wrong places. The wrong women, too much of everything. A little too often. That’s how I hid in plain sight, by putting on a show, by keeping the lights too bright for anyone to see the cracks. That can only go on for so long.
I made mistakes. I will make more. But hopefully, not the same ones.
I’ve always been gregarious by nature. Friends and acquaintances scattered across every major city, on every continent. I know how to charm. How to belong. But the truth is, I came back to learn how to belong to myself.
To lean into the man I am now. To reread the book of my life with the distance of time and the clarity of age. To retrace the labyrinth of memories I once ran from. To steady the ship. And then to hopefully write a new chapter.
Because when you write something good, when you speak a truth or tell a story that lands it might just last forever. Ideas endure. Stories repeat. Same chords, different keys. Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story themes recycled, reframed, reborn.
The rise, the fall, and the rise again isn’t that the architecture of being human?
“It’s not us, it’s everything around us.”
Somewhere, West Side Story