There are some things an older guy just shouldn’t do—unless he’s prepared to pay the price. Don't play ball with younger men—you'll break things. Don't chase younger women—they will break things.
But most importantly, don’t look backward—you might break everything.
But you do look back. We all do. Some part of you can’t help it—turning over old memories like loose change, hoping one might still buy you something. We’re all just stumbling through spacetime, each of us carrying our little bags of laughter and regret, hoping that someone might find the grace to care. And we get so disappointed when they don’t. Because we all want to be seen. We want to be met where we are.
But the problem is, we’re rarely in the same emotional place at the same time.
That’s why we hurt each other. Not because we’re cruel. Not because we’re bad people. But because we’re selfish in a way we don’t even notice. We live inside our own stories, dragging everyone else into them, barely noticing the flag they are waving, the muted pain of their call for attention. Then, when they don’t meet our expectations—when they don’t give us the emotional return we think we deserve—we pull away. And they do the same.
It’s not that love disappears. It’s that the emotional payout disappears. And when it does, we stop showing up. Not all at once—no, it happens in slow motion, so gradually that by the time we realize what’s happening, the gap is already too wide to cross. Love doesn’t die. It just goes bankrupt—too many withdrawals, not enough deposits.
The silence has set in. Silence is the open wound.
It’s not the fights that kill. Not the slammed doors, not the sharp words. It’s the absence. It’s the mold that grows in the spaces we stop filling. It’s the slow decay, the hurt we don’t talk about, the little disappointments we swallow, the quiet decisions to stop trying because we can’t bear another moment of not being met halfway. We pretend everything’s fine, waiting for some wave to roll in and reshape the coastline, but deep down, we know that things won’t reset.
So we drift. You feel the shift—the hesitation before the words, the gaze that lands just past you. The flicker of resentment, disgust. And you feel your heart react, even if your head remains “level.” That’s the time to grab a rope and a canoe—to fight like hell to pull them back. But most of us don’t. We tell ourselves it’s just a phase, just a mood. We wait too long. We blame them. It’s easier than asking if it’s us. By the time we reach for that rope, they’re already moving in another current.
And you can’t fix it. You would have to tear it all down first. And who has the stomach for that? Who has the courage to say we have to break this completely if we want any chance of saving it? Very few. I didn’t. So we don’t. The room just spins; the floor falls away. You hear the commotion, but through a haze. You don’t see them anymore, just their shadow as they drift by.
And then one day, you wake up, and it’s gone.
I’ve pulled the plug. More than once. Each time, I saw the moment coming—the moment when the distance became irreversible. Not because I didn’t care, but because I knew I couldn’t outrun the inevitable. The space between us was growing, and neither of us was willing to tightrope to the other side.
And yeah, it hurts. It still hurts.
But here’s the thing no one wants to admit: the hurt doesn’t go away. You don’t wake up one day and find it magically gone. You don’t “move on” the way people like to pretend you do. It stays with you, like a scar, like an echo. It’s what happens when people stop giving each other what they need—not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know how. Because they’re too caught up in their own shit to see what’s slipping through their hands.
I live alone now. The kids are grown. The relationships have cooled to awkward ashes. Friends have disappeared in their own ways. I don’t have any great wisdom about it. I don’t have some neat conclusion wrapped in a life lesson.
I just offer this: when you see someone you love beginning to drift, grab that rope and canoe and pull them back. Because once they’re gone, they’re gone. And the silence they leave behind? It now lives inside you, wakes you up at 2 am to remind you, “You could have been better—you could have tried harder”. But an old man’s regret won’t reshape the coastline. It just rolls in like driftwood from a shipwreck—waterlogged, splintered, too broken to piece back together.