Itch

So, I’ve got these itches on my ankles and wrists. Raging itches. Killer bug bites from hiking Acadia and poison ivy from yardwork at my grandparents’ house. Calamine lotion for days. My arms and legs may have permanently turned pink in the last week.

I’ve never itched this much.

Of course, this being a blog from me, my current itch is metaphorical, too. Because everything’s a metaphor.

I’m itching for home. God, I’m itching for regularity again. I’m itching for therapy and CrossFit and training for a marathon and the same coffee shops and writing my third book and building local friendships and taking Your Other Brothers to bold, new frontiers.

I’m itching for this road trip to end.

Two months ago, I didn’t expect to wander up to Maine. I didn’t expect to acquire this itchiness of literal and metaphorical magnitude. I didn’t expect my grandfather to die and cause me to second-guess every relationship in my life.

His passing last month has been a wake-up call. That our time really is limited. Our bodies are limited, and yeah, our relationships are limited.

Relational clocks are winding down all over the place, and you never know which one is about to expire.

I just listened to a podcast that talked about how marriages often fail because people fall in love with one version of a person, only for that person to change into another version 7-10 years later. I used to not “get” how divorces happen after 20+ years with the same person. I’d get angry when I heard those stories, be they of celebrities or parents of friends.

But it’s so clear to me now. They’re not the same person anymore.

Biologically, we shed and regenerate and replace all of our cells every 7-10 years. We gain literal new bodies every decade, but we also become other people far beneath this weathering skin.

People in our lives die.

We change jobs and locations.

We learn a new thing that shifts or implodes our ideology and theology.

We follow new dreams.

We let go of old dreams.

The person you marry is guaranteed not to be same person in 20 years, just as you will also change twice over. And if we change persons 7-10 times throughout our lives, going through seasons of life and death and crisis, new perspectives and wounds and scars, is it any wonder we don’t see more divorce?

We change persons in marriage, and we change persons in friendship too. We’re always changing, all of us, staving off death as long as we can — death of the body or death of the connection.

Am I even going to enjoy that fifth version of you down the road? Are you even going to care for this fifth version removed from today’s me?

32 years and now multiple versions of me into this life, I’m starting to gain some mileage in relationships: how good they can be, how far they can drift.

It’s less and less of a surprise now. People change. I change. It happens.

Heaven forbid I ever hold onto another human to be there for me until the end of time.

With marriage, there is covenant; with friendship (generally), there is not. Thank goodness, because I can’t imagine being locked into a five versions of you friendship contract. Can’t imagine it with a single person in my life.

Am I awful?

Do I have commitment issues? More than most?

That’s not to say I won’t still enjoy friendship with another human five versions of us down the road. But to sign on that dotted line for it today, not knowing the kind of person you’re gonna be in 42 years? No chance.

But getting back to this itch. Am I really that eager to “settle down” and see how people continue to evolve and diverge from who I am, who we once were?

It sounds pretty awful. Like pulling plugs from relational life-support, again and again, for the next 50 years.

Stability and relationships feel like playing the lottery, hoping that if I just commit enough and make enough friends, surely one of them — just one — will survive this evolving five versions of one another.

Both parties. Them. Me.

I’m itching for relational stability, yet I’m scratching this itch of doom. I want it, yet I succumb to this fire.

In years past, I’ve countered my relational cynicisms with visions of grandeur — namely, a life on the road.

Wouldn’t it be nice just to be on the move perpetually, like a shark, always swimming, always devouring new experiences and new relationships and never bogged down by the same old?

Because if I’m guaranteed to watch the people I love grow old and change into different people, maybe people I no longer want to associate with, and vice versa, why not stay ahead of the curve? Why not do all the changing myself, ahead of the change that’s coming, the change that’s already here?

God, I still want to scratch this wander-itch. I really do. Living on the road these last three months (along with multi-week and multi-month trips of years past) has given me a glimpse of how good it can be. The adventures. The inspiration. The constant change of scenery, geographic and relational.

But this trip has given me more of a recipe for disaster than one of fulfillment. In just the last month since my grandfather’s death, I’ve spent more time alone than perhaps any other time in my adult life.

Sure, I’ve seen some epic stuff. The blues and greens of Acadia will stay with me the rest of my life.

But I’ve also gotten some crazy bug bites and scratched some gnarly itches. I’ve cried, falling asleep in my car.

This trip has left me depleted in the most gorgeous places in America.

And so I return south this week to scratch the stability-itch. I have no idea how soon I’ll be disappointed. How soon I’ll stare out windows pining to scratch the wandering itch again.

But even if I bounce between itches the rest of my life — the settling down and the let’s-just-leave-it-all-behind — I’m standing high on who I am. This second or third iteration of my adulthood.

I’m a different man than I was at 18. I have less acne and more facial hair and bigger muscles and increased capacities to love humans and ache because of them, too.

I’ll be a different person in another 7-10 years, and so will everyone else in my life, if still they remain.

And this is just how it damn works.

For now.

Amid all the hurt of the last couple months and years, I cling to this future hope in Christ. That I’ll sit on Ahh’s lap again. That this nonsense of change will end. A new body that will need no further replacing. Relationships that need no more maintenance or repair. A singular purpose of praise, a place of perpetual belonging.

A place to itch no longer.