What a Beautiful Thing It Is to Be Wrong

I stood on the Gulf shore in Panama City, barefoot, wind-whipped, the sky painted like the last page of a story that had no plot, just mood. The water hissed at the sand like it knew secrets and wasn’t quite ready to share them. My shirt was soaked, not from waves, but from humidity and hope.

And I knew, knew, that somewhere on that beach, that exact beach, was her.
The one.
The great match, fated and divine and maybe eating nachos at a pier bar right that second.

It was foolish.
So very foolish.
And I was wrong.

But gloriously so.
Magnificently so.
Because sometimes being wrong is the only way to make the story worth telling.
And that day, I wasn’t looking for sense.

I was looking for a miracle in cutoff shorts.

---

Once, I heard a man say, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

And I thought: how unbearably dull of you.

I have failed to plan more times than I can count, and somehow I keep waking up anyway. Coffee keeps being coffee. The sun keeps getting up before me. Love keeps happening at the most inconvenient moments. Failure, sure. But failure in the same way a dandelion fails to be a rose, maybe not what the world ordered, but still defiantly blooming.

The best moments of my life happened without a blueprint. Without a checklist.
Without a vision board, PowerPoint deck, or goal pyramid.

The best moments of my life were feral. Were messy. Were wildly unsupervised.

And I can’t help but wonder, am I actually disobedient to the universe? Or am I just finally in rhythm with it? Maybe we only start to really dance when we stop trying to lead.

Once, when I was a young man with too much feeling and not enough perspective, I fell in love. Or thought I did. It wasn’t love the way poets write it, or the way therapists diagnose it. It was more like throwing myself into a bonfire because I mistook the smoke for a lighthouse.

She left.

And I, being young and gloriously idiotic, did the only thing that made sense at the time. I grabbed whatever cash I could claw out of cushions and coat pockets and drove to Florida with no map, no plan, and one cassette stuck in the dash that refused to eject, so I listened to the same damn song the entire way down I-85. It became an anthem. A curse. A hymn to heartbreak and gasoline.

I never found her.
But I did find a part of myself.
And it was enough.

I slept in my car with the windows cracked. Ate gas station sandwiches wrapped in wax paper that tasted like betrayal and hope. And somewhere on the gulf coast, while watching pelicans divebomb the surf like they had nothing left to prove, I realized: Maybe the point isn’t to find what you’re looking for. Maybe the point is to look so hard you accidentally find yourself.

The best thing about this is it made no sense.

None.

But I didn't, I don't, want love to make sense. I want it to be wild, reckless. I don't want reasonable affection, I don't want clinical, measurable and quantifiable. I want that feeling again. Tearing across Lower Alabama at 2 a.m., radio loud, heart louder, wondering if she was thinking of me.

And it didn’t matter. Whether she was or wasn’t, I was alive in it.

These days, I live my life by no plan, and write it the same way. I throw songs to the wind. Words to the whimsical.

I don’t chase down the stats or polish the metrics.
Not because I don’t care, but because I do.
I care so much that I refuse to strangle the life out of it by trying to make it profitable.

I do not wish to stand here in front of you like some influencer evangelist, trying to harvest your soul through your inbox open rates.
You are not data to me.
You are people.
Wondrous. Ethereal. Unknowable people.

And I will not kill the parts of myself that still believe in magic just to make you fit into a funnel.

Some days I imagine you all reading this and muttering,
“Look at this idiot.”

And that’s perfectly fine.

You’re right.
I am an idiot.
A beautiful one.
A maniac with a pen.
A child who never outgrew the idea that maybe, just maybe, words can still do something holy.

Being taken seriously has never once fed my soul.
It has never called me late at night to tell me I am worth loving.
It has never made me weep with laughter at the absurdity of existence, or feel electric in the presence of another human being just trying their damnedest not to disappear.

You see, we’ve all gotten too polished. Too presentable. We’re all desperately trying to make sense, of our timelines, our profiles, our relationships. We are filing down our quirks into content blocks.

But the universe?
She’s not tidy.
She’s not safe.
She’s a goddamn jazz solo in a thunderstorm.
She wants us to be wild.

There is no prize for arriving on time with the right credentials and a resume formatted in Helvetica Neue. The real bonus points?

They go to the ones who ran toward the thing that made their heart gallop, even if it turned out to be a mirage.

Because that is where the good stuff lives.
In the mad dash.
In the stupid decisions.
In the terrible road trip for love you never find.
In the friends you make by accident.
In the stories you didn’t plan to tell.

So if you’re reading this and wondering if your life makes sense yet.
If you're measuring yourself by likes, or conversions, or the soul-crushing pursuit of relevance.

Let me whisper something impolite but absolutely true.

The point was never to make sense.
The point was to make something beautiful in the middle of all this nonsense.

A poem.
A sandwich.
A laugh.
A love that almost kills you but teaches you how to live.

I do not know what I am doing. Read that again, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I AM DOING.

But I know it is mine.

And if you are still reading, I suspect you understand this better than most.

I’ll keep tossing these misshapen songs into the wind. I’ll keep showing up, unscripted. I’ll keep writing as if the universe were reading.

Because I earnestly, honestly, believe that she is.

And maybe…just maybe…she likes the ones who never made a plan.

---

I never found that girl.

But I found this.

This wild, wrecked, wonder-torn life.
This heartbreak that taught me how to stay human.
This madness that tastes a little like magic when I say it out loud.

Maybe she was never the point.
Maybe she was just a clue.

And the fire that followed?
Was mine to carry.

So no, I don’t know what I’m doing.
But I know what it feels like.

It feels like movement.
It feels like defiance.

It feels like everything I didn’t plan.

And maybe that’s the only thing worth trusting.

Because if the universe is watching,
if she’s out there with her crooked grin and thunderous heart,
I want her to see me like this.

Unpolished.
Unreasonable.
Unapologetically alive.

Still looking.
Still singing.
Still moving.

And still stupid enough to believe that somewhere out there,
the miracle is me.