David McElroy

I have trouble starting over. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game, a business venture, a relationship or a job. If I find things going poorly, I want to walk away. I feel humiliated. I want to quit.

Starting over would be an admission of failure, that I hadn’t been good enough. It’s easier to just move on to something new, because I’m uncomfortable with the messiness of fixing something that’s gone wrong.

When I was a student at the University of Alabama, I had been dating a bright and beautiful nursing student for a few months. Then we had a disagreement about something. It was minor — and I don’t recall the details — but we stopped talking. I wanted to continue the relationship, but I wasn’t willing to go to her and say, “How can we work this out?”

I didn’t see this woman for several years. I had moved on and married someone else. Then I was in Tuscaloosa one day and ran into her. We talked about what had happened.

“I knew I was wrong,” she told me, “but I didn’t know how to admit that and reconcile things with you. I kept hoping you would call me again and we could start over, but since you didn’t, I figured you didn’t care and I gave up on us.”

I learned the truth too late. We had both wanted to reconcile, but neither one of us knew how to open the door and then start over.

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When I was a little boy, the wait for Christmas each year seemed to take forever. Even in the summer — or even after school had started back in the fall — the weeks until Christmas went by at a snail’s pace.

If you can remember being a child — and dreaming about what you might get for Christmas or whatever holiday your family celebrated — you probably remember feeling the same way.

When you’re 5 years old, the time until another Christmas represents 20 percent of the time you’ve been alive. That might as well have been forever back then.

When I thought about what I would be in the future — when I got old enough to start having oversized ambitions for myself — my life seemed to stretch to eternity. My parents had lived half their lives. My grandparents have lived most of theirs. But I had forever to become what I was meant to be.

For the first time in my life, I feel a clock ticking. I no longer have forever. I have decades left in which I can live and love, but the years are flying by. The time from one Christmas to the next is now a blur.

I still have plenty of time, but it’s no longer forever. And for the first time in my life, I’m feeling a fear I’ve never known. What if I don’t find the love and the life I’ve always needed?

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As sheriff’s deputies directed the removal of furniture from her apartment, Alison sat on the front steps looking at her phone. Her bright pink t-shirt had glowing orange letters that said, “This is my lucky t-shirt.”

But after nine months of not paying rent and violating other terms of her lease, Alison’s luck had run out.

When I met her last year — when she applied to rent from me — I felt sorry for Alison. She told me about her difficult past. A failed marriage to a dysfunctional man. Drug issues and recovery. Financial problems. But she said she had turned everything around. Her supervisor at work gave her a glowing endorsement.

In the five years that I’ve been managing rentals for my company, she’s the only person I’ve regretted renting to. She left owing us thousands and thousands of dollars. Cleaning up and repairing the apartment will cost even more.

But as she sat there in her lucky t-shirt — two days after having her third child — I still felt sorry for her. And it hurt my heart to think about what could have brought this attractive blue-eyed blonde to such despair.

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