Life in Ohio is a lot different.

Sometimes, at the end of the night, the darkness and silence kind of gets at you and starts sending strange thoughts bouncing around in your head. Last night those thoughts centered on how my life would be different had I stayed in Toledo and finished out my lease there for the first six months of my job here in Detroit. I had the option, and I paid the extra couple hundred dollars to get out of my lease early, opting to move up here and start anew.

The thing about moving up here was that it afforded me a couple of different opportunities I had been looking forward to. First, it allowed me to be close to my family. While I don’t spend all that much time with them, the time spent now is significantly more than when I lived outstate. Second, it afforded me the opportunity to spend more time with EB while she was home. This was significant, as the time we spent together last Christmas and while she was home last May was, at the time, priceless. Finally, it gave me the opportunity to increase the time I spend with my friends. It seems that every night I’m out doing something with Loc, Beaker, et al.

The time I’ve spent with my friends has increased exponentially, and I’m a better, happier person for it. There’s no way I make it through the last several months, for example, if I live in Toledo. Without my friends readily available, who knows how things would have turned out.

Living in Toledo would have also not afforded me the opportunity to play roller hockey, especially with the frequency that I do now. I mean, I’m on two teams and about to join a third for goodness sakes. Roller hockey pretty much consumes my life (and yet I still suck at it). Were I in Toledo, I would have missed the genesis of my friends playing this sport. Hell, my friends may not have even gotten into it, as I was integral in linking them with my brother’s crew to form the Vagabonds back in February 2004.

So yes, my life would be completely different. I start thinking about things like, would I have proposed to EB earlier (maybe when she was home in May) and things like that too. There’s no way to tell, but having her in my life still would be the biggest difference between me now and then. I’ll be honest with you, thinking about her being happy with someone else makes me sad sometimes (other times it makes me angry), but I know that it’s for the best and I’m going to be far happier in the long run. It’s just a matter of gutting out the marathon and keeping my eyes on the finish line. It’s a hard road to make it down, and sometimes I think about what would have happened had I gone a different route. In the end, though, I know that the route I chose is the right one for me.