I’m 11 days out from that, and in three days is the first anniversary of his death. (Do you really want to go to Arizona before fall again?)

And I had the chance to talk in serious terms with my mom about my upbringing on a mixed trip overall.

But that’s not where my brain has been residing since my return to Texas. Instead, it’s been about where I zigged when I should have zagged. Introspection, if you will, admitting to myself that I have made some incredibly stupid choices.

While the vast majority of these owe mostly to external circumstances (I needn’t rehash the decline of print media since 2001; suffice to say, there, I was a leaf in a stream), it’s the big ones that owe them to my youth, hubris and a feeling that I can do better.

Exhibit A is my first real relationship. I’d had a singular girlfriend in college in 1998 ahead of Rach, but I was 18 and really just wanted to get laid. So she was the type I tolerated for transactional reasons, but I have certain expectations out of conversation, and she didn’t meet them. Of course, she was madly into me, and I couldn’t grasp why.

But by the start of autumn quarter 1998, my freshman-year social circle was dead, between dropouts and friends finding, you know, interests that led to us starting the long tail to “someone I used to hang out with.”

I was out of the dorms, and despite a terrible first experience at The Daily in April that made me swear I’d never set foot in the newsroom again (the other vow was “I’d make a better opinion than this asshole”), I needed a job, and despite having a car, being able to work on campus was my preference.

As it turned out, the entire senior staff had been replaced between spring and fall, so the newsroom I walked into this time was a completely different environment.

So I walked in and filled out an application, and thus began my illustrious reporting career consisting of two stories and fucking hating it. As luck would have it, my second piece was edited by the ed chief because the news ed was out, and as I was walking out of his office, the phone rang. I only heard his end of the conversation, which opened with “actually, we are looking for designers.”

I’d tried design freshman year of high school, with Beginning Yearbook. I did not follow the rules, questioned the advisor constantly, demanding better answers than “that’s just the way we do it,” and that became my only F. She was also the newspaper advisor, so that door was closed. But despite that, layout never fully receded into the back of my mind in the ensuing years.

So, I turned around, waited for the brief call to end and said “Actually, that’s something I might be interested in.”

I’ve told this portion of the story many different times in many different ways, since I’ve now had 28 years to think about it. To retell it here is to talk about success, not failure, so I’ll sum up.

Rach didn’t want to hire me, but the ed chief insisted she needed to train staff as freshly minted management. It was, in retrospect, such a classic tale … just not on the timeline most expect. I thought, in return, that she was a complete bitch, and that design wasn’t going to stick as an interest, either.

That lasted all of three days, when I decided this particular brand of geometry and learning the editorial process holistically was my calling – a mix between system integration and creativity. The only issue being I was complete dogshit at it.

I woke up in her bed four days later after an ambush she orchestrated to get me there.

And after switching between apartments nightly (my cat was nonplussed with missing mealtimes due to me getting laid) until our leases were up, we got a lease together in January to save money.

So, she is the reason newspapers finally took hold after two false starts. After our first weekend together, another designer started, and by the end of the month, we were all inseparable.

This is unabashedly good news: In under a month, I’d found my career, my first true love and a complete social circle!

But I was 19 and wanting “the full college experience.” This was a good run so long as the ed chief was in office, and he turned out to be the glue holding my life together. By spring quarter, he was gone. At the end of said quarter, the other designer had dropped out.

Rach and I took this in stride, but then one night in June, I got a message on ICQ from the woman who’d taken me to my first rave just after I turned 18, saying she was back in the dorms for the summer. And my feelings for her, while unrequited, meant I was going to do everything I could to spend time with her.

And this meant turning full raver. Rach would come with us sometimes, but the music was not her idea of a good time, and I’ve never been good at hiding an interest in someone else.

We broke up ahead of the start of the new academic year but still were in each others’ orbit. I was now the opinion ed, and she was managing ed. After I got a new girlfriend in Victoria, B.C., I returned to the office one Sunday and Rach immediately said “I can smell her on you.”

I didn’t say we were professional about this. But we weren’t ready to disconnect just yet. In fact, skipping a lot to get to June 2000, I went to a rave on my own and met someone in line who I felt would make a fun companion for the evening. She enjoyed her free tab of E, but then basically headed off to dance.

Despite rolling, myself, I was crestfallen and sitting on the floor toward the back of one of the rooms.

“There you are,” someone says. “I knew it had to be you; you’re the only person here who looks as lonely as I feel.”

I turn around to face Rach and insist that my night is going just fine, though I’ve never been good at hiding facial emotions. I say I’m just taking a break as friends are dancing.

The girl who’d disappointed me did her own thing for the rest of the night, and three weeks later, her shenanigans would lead to my first suicide attempt, so if I’d instead been honest with Rach, told her I’d fucked up … who knows?

I was afraid of having a stable, sorted out life so early – that I simply must be missing out by accepting a straightforward trajectory. So I rejected her out of hand as a path forward, not backward.

Turned out she was moving to New Mexico soon, which I didn’t find out until I was an a hotel in Taos that August. She immediately drove up from Albuquerque, and we hung out, but she was still with my former best friend I’d introduced to her in Canada, and apparently things were moving apace.

She sensed that something was very amiss after leaving my hotel and returned an hour later under the guise of having forgotten her sunglasses to find me half-passed out, empty bottle of Tylenol on the nightstand, a few beer cans strewn about the room and a suicide note still sitting in my manual typewriter. She called 911, then my dad, followed the ambulance in her car, and when I came to in the morning, she was still holding my hand in my room, where she remained until my dad made it up from Phoenix.

That’s the last time we saw each other.

But the agonizing part is I still could have stopped the train. We would have had a lot of work to do, but it could have been done … I just decided, well, not to. She got married the following year.

It would take until 2009 to feel that spark again, and that time the beginning was the error.

On the drive back to Phoenix (I had to get my car out of a Taos lot), Pop said to me, “You know, she loves you very much.” And I said I loved her, too, but with the way things were going with my old friend, I felt stuck.

“Well,” Pop said, “that’s your choice.”