I often feel I am discussing the exact same thing in about forty-five different ways.

Ten months ago I wrote about what I would fill the time with since my time with my girlfriend, Magen, was gone. It has been a few weeks, but, I finally buckled up the nerve to admit it is harder to figure out what to do with yourself the second time around. It’s been about four weeks since I’ve come home from New York, where we terrorized Brooklyn together and I’ve done nothing constructive since.

I can boil it down to small and easy things, markers for how I understand time. Barcelona loses a Clasico, a Champion’s League semifinal and also La Liga. Their coach leaves. Napoli fights for third place still. United loses to City. I somehow end up at a Cinco de Mayo party. I leave the theater after watching The Avengers stunned. MCA dies and I try to hold back tears in the bathroom at work.

It is a strange series of events.

I begin to think about this place and what it means for me. Broken Nerves, an awkward mouthful of letters, strung together to mean something important since 2006. A phrase that changes meaning every time I look at it. Something I can’t quite put my finger on.

Nerves haven taken on such a meaning to me lately. My grandmother’s jumbled nervous system, left pained by after-shingles neuralgia. My own inability to do so many things because I am nervous. The fears I’ve gotten over because I have fallen in love. My own fear of forever and the way it has diminished. How old nerves bring on new nerves and new nerves overshadow old nerves.

How I still miss the character who had his own nerves broken and couldn’t feel a thing. How it meant so much when he fumbled with his other hand, the one that could feel but was hard to control, just to understand what something felt like, how his body would react to it.

I think of how putting this all together takes forever, takes stitching, takes perseverance, takes repeating yourself over and over again.

Much like you find yourself saying the same thing ten months later. I am just getting by. How do you get by when you find your heart has gone to stay somewhere else, in a place you can’t get to without a pocketful of exact change and time enough to travel.

You fill the space with things. With things. With things.

Exactly like this.

The entire month has been lost. I am not entirely sure where it went, really. It has gone somewhere in a haze of doctor visits, hard decisions, socializing with people I haven’t seen in months, preparing for my vacation to New York City in April and endless streams of soccer games on ESPN.

I feel like I am coming out of it with my eyes fogged up, scratching at them with nails that have grown longer than I anticipated. Something like that man who slept under the tree for a hundred years or however that story goes.

It is hard to describe Broken Nerves in a mouthful and what I am trying to do here, which is likely why I haven’t given it much of a thought in the past few months. In truth, I am trying to deal with a lot of stuff in my own life, hiking over stumbling blocks. I am working the courage up to learn how to drive, I am trying to figure out what I’d like to do with my life, I am helping take care of my Grandmother who has been sick since November and just has not gotten better.

I am trying hard to not sink into the overwhelming prospect of all of this combined. Trying hard to figure out how to put this all in a way. Here. Open, honest and clean.

I’m hoping to be better about things before April. Maybe we will wake up to April 1st with All New Things.

♥