I Danced — April 4, 2025 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Lonely Rain🌧️
The Best🎶
Disability Claims🖊️

THE DAILY UPDATE

Loneliness sounds like falling rain hitting the skylights overhead … insistent, constant. The room is dim, gray, shadowy.

There was a day, a long-ago day, when I danced in the rain. A silly teenager free from the Bad Place and with someone who saw him. We stood in the street and swayed slowly to no song at all, and it felt safe.

Sometimes, you do recognize when something significant is happening, and this was one of those times. It was almost as if young me knew that this older, worn version would look back and remember the emotions, remember that dance, remember those raindrops.

Today’s rain is so much different. My arms are empty. My heart is … sad. The joy of a dance partner so free and crazy and willing seems distant, translucent, unfamiliar. The promises of growing up turned out to be a desert mirage. Freedom from the Bad Place was one thing, but it came with Responsibilities, with Jobs, with Bills, with Phone Calls To Make, with Car Repairs, with Loss, with Loneliness.

I may have known in the moment that dancing in the rain mattered, but I most definitely did not know that the people who surrounded me in That Life, the people who cared then, would leave … or I would chase them away … or neglect them, and I would be nothing more than a profile picture and some witty posts that mask the pain of missing them, each of them, all of them. I did not know that I would spend much of my adult life trying to fix the damage from the Bad Place, only to end up largely healed but drastically alone.

Had I known?

Had I known, I would have held on. To them. To it. To all of it.

I never stopped searching for The Thing that would fix me, but for God’s sake, for nearly three decades I didn’t even know what really was broken. When I figured it out, when I found The Thing, I stayed serious and determined and focused on doing the fixing so things could be different … so I could be different, and goddammit I did it.

I did it.

And it’s been like having a party that no one attends, not because they weren’t invited or forgot but because they would rather do anything else but.

What does it matter if the people who see the differences, who notice the differences, who care about the differences can be counted on one hand? What does it matter if there is a joyful health and so few people who have the time or inclination to share it with? What was the purpose of the fight if the after-party is a party mostly of one?

I am a better husband and a better father and a better employee and a better coach and a better human, and I am proud of all of that and all the other hats I wear fitting more snug on my head these days. Like I said, I did it. I fought. I won.

And in the end, did it really matter?

Did it really matter that I kept getting up off the canvas and coming back out of the corner swinging, only to get knocked back down again? Did it really matter that I found The Thing or that I’m a better anything? What does it matter if you are better at life if that life doesn’t seem to matter to anyone else outside of the walls of your home, outside of the people who don’t have much of a choice for it to matter to?

Which isn’t to say I’m ungrateful to them. For fuck’s sake, without them, the answer to all these questions is exceedingly easy. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Because of them, there’s at least some complication declaratively stating anything that comes from a place of loneliness and hurt.

I drink whiskey out of a glass of memories. I listen to rain that falls like the hardest tears and reminds me of times when it felt good to sit in the gray, the dim, the shadows and just breathe … the scent of contentment, of connection. When there was always time to take to slow down and just be. When there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that there was at least one someone who would go to great lengths to find time simply because I existed and that existence mattered.

I danced in the rain once. It was a long, long time ago. I close my eyes and see that boy, a mop of unkempt blond hair, standing there, tall and skinny, in the middle of a barely traveled road, dancing to no song in particular, aware … aware that what was happening was important.

It was.

It is.

Something I’m grateful for today: Microwave ovens

Something I’ve (ghost)written: Hot Topics in Disability Claims: Segmentation and ethical AI

Song In My Head When I Woke Up: Wish You The Best, by Lewis Capaldi

Meaningful Lyric From SIMHWIWU:

I wanna say, “Without you, everythin’s wrong”
And you were everythin’ I need all along

Song of the Day: I Stay Away, by Alice in Chains

Meaningful lyric from the S.O.T.D.:

Why you act crazy?
Not an act maybe

Something good from today/yesterday: Sitting on the deck watching the rain fall.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: The surprise Boy The Elder is delivering to Boy The Younger on Saturday … Stay tuned!

Fat-Ass Update:

Starting weight: 230.6 on 2/12/25
Goal weight (for now): 199.9
Today’s weight 221.7 (-8.9)
Fat-ass burn-off remaining: 21.8 fat-ass pounds

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I Danced — April 4, 2025

THE DAILY UPDATE

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