All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,75

should take some comfort from that, but right now comfortable just isn’t in my vocabulary. I have never been less comfortable. Never.

In the dog-eat-dog world in which I’ve lived my whole life, I have never allowed myself either of two things that I now regret. The first is weakness. I have not allowed myself any weakness at all. I have always felt that showing any sign of vulnerability would destroy me completely, and as a result I have lived in a rather solitary world. The other is that I’ve never allowed myself to get over the one man who broke my heart. Perhaps the two are related. Perhaps allowing myself to get past him would have opened the door to a new man, a real relationship, and you can’t have one of those without allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and so there we are, back at the beginning again. You can’t have love in your life if you aren’t willing to suffer for it, and so rather than take that risk I have chosen instead to suffer for a man who hasn’t loved me in two decades. It sounds so stupid, which is infuriating, because I am so far from stupid, but this is the way I have lived and that is why in addition to being afraid I am also regretful and angry. There is nothing more debilitating than regret, and no anger worse than that which is directed at yourself. And I have all of that going on now, in addition to cancer.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m a complete mess.

What happened is I turned forty and decided I needed a vacation. That may not sound like much, but I never take a vacation. I have worked practically 365 days a year every year since I got out of business school, because I never want the assholes I work with to feel like they are outworking me.

But this year I turned forty, and I went on a blind date, and I won’t bore you with the details of that except to say it was bad enough that I decided I needed a vacation. I went to the mountains in Colorado and fell in love, first with the mountains and then with a man named Stephen. I met him on a hike and then he took me to dinner. He took me not to a restaurant but to a joint, one where they served burgers rather than filet mignon, and the silverware came wrapped in a paper napkin and you ordered your drinks from a bartender, not a sommelier. Oh, and his dog came with us and waited outside. I loved every second of it. I ate burgers and french fries and coleslaw and pickles, I drank three beers and three Cokes and we played darts and watched baseball on television. When we were done, he said he wanted to show me his favorite place in Aspen and he gave me the leash and we walked, the three of us, down a huge hill toward a park just as the sun was setting over the mountain. We walked through a huge grass field where some kids were kicking a soccer ball and a group of teenagers rode skateboards. We kept going, through the soft grass, talking so easily, without awkwardness or long pauses. It was all so easy, in a way it rarely is when you are with a man you hardly know but are aching to sleep with.

We crossed a small bridge with a stream rushing past and then turned into a park, and our feet began to crunch on a gravel path that split into four directions. He pointed to the path on the left and told me to lead the way, he’d be right behind. He wanted me to see it quietly and by myself. He unleashed the dog and she ran ahead, and Stephen pointed and said, “Just follow her, she knows the way.” But I was much too conscious of how my ass would look if I walked before him, so instead I put my arm through his and said, “Let’s go together,” and we did, right into the John Denver sanctuary.

And that was when I entered the most stunningly peaceful, gorgeous, spiritual place I have ever been. There is gentle, rushing water, a trickle from the mountain stream, with large stones that you can sit on spaced deftly about a grassy field, and much larger stones standing proudly, engraved with the words