10-29-25 05:18 PM
feeling: impatient </3

Sitting up at a cafe right now waiting to catch a train to Chicago! My wife husband¹ is flying in from the UK for my little sister’s wedding on November 9th.

Or he did fly in, I should say. He’s just landed in O’Hare. And I’m still…2+ hours downstate lol.

Usually I take the train ahead of his arrival time. This time he convinced me to take a later train to make things easier for myself. But it’s been delayed two hours. Soooo I’m gonna be waaaay behind him and he’ll have to wait at O’Hare until I get from Union Station to the airport, which takes another hour on the L.

Sigh. Trying not to get too hung up on it. It is what it is. Of course the one time I don’t take an early train is when everything goes to shit. Well, lesson learned—I’m never leaving it to chance again. I don’t care how early I get to Chicago lol. I’d rather wait for my husband than have him wait for me after a seven hour flight!

We always joke that something has to go wrong whenever we visit each other. Our misfortunes have ran the gamut from—

1. a car accident the day before our wedding
2. a nationwide airline IT crash that left us stranded in Atlanta for 3 days
3. my husband contracting a weird heat rash in Gulf Shores
4. running late and missing our train back to chicago, forcing my mom to drive us 2+ hours to O’Hare
5. various other instances of bad luck I honestly can’t remember now because there’s been so many

As a Buddhist, I’ve started looking at it in a new light.

A few years ago I really doubled down in my practice. After that, I had a slew of bad luck. According to the dharma, sometimes after advancing your practice you end up purifying residual bad karma. This is inevitable—but practicing the dharma can speed things up. Which is great on a spiritual level, but shitty on the surface.

It brings me comfort though to think that our time together is so fortuitous that we end up burning off bad karma leading up to, during, and sometimes even after our visits. It makes the “big” wait—closing the distance between us—a little easier to bear. I believe that once I move to the UK and we get settled together, our lives will improve to such an extent neither of us thought was possible.

Until then, I guess it’s waiting in coffee shops, missing flights, and catching late trains. I’ll keep doing it, too, for as long as it takes for us to get together. What awaits on the other side is worth all the bad luck in the world.