Marriage was supposed to be the thing that anchored me. The white picket fence, the Sunday dinners, the carefully curated photos on social media that screamed, Look, I made it. I had the house, the wife, the job, the kids. The illusion of it all was flawless. But illusions don’t hold up when you’re staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, wondering if this is it.
I wasn’t happy.
And I didn’t know what the hell I was searching for.
For years, I thought happiness was in the chase—chasing money, chasing validation, chasing a wife who had stopped looking at me like I mattered long before I stopped trying to matter to her. I went through the motions, kissed the kids goodnight, posted anniversary messages online while something inside me atrophied. My heart had become a calcified thing, a piece of old meat in a freezer I forgot to unplug.
Then I left.
Amalia’s was the playground of the freshly divorced and the terminally broken. It was a land of indulgence, an all-you-can-eat buffet of sex, excess, and the kind of depravity that made you wonder if humanity ever really evolved past its primal instincts. Women who needed attention, men who needed validation, all of us swirling in a toxic soup of temporary affections and whispered promises that meant nothing beyond the hour they were spoken.
I took it all in.
The bodies, the voices, the hands grabbing at me in the dark. It should have been enough. It was supposed to be enough. But I walked out of every encounter feeling emptier than when I walked in. The more I consumed, the hungrier I became. I had been starved of love for so long that when I finally had it thrown at me in abundance, it was too much. It overwhelmed me. Drowned me. I couldn’t tell the difference between love and addiction, and neither could they.
That’s when I learned about fish love—the kind of love that isn’t love at all, just desperate dependency masquerading as something real. The kind that says, I love you but really means I need you to fill this void in me so I don’t have to do it myself. It was the only kind of love I had ever known. The only kind I had been raised to recognize.
I didn’t want to be like my uncle Vic, sitting quietly in his recliner while his wife dictated the rules of his existence. I didn’t want to be another yes-man, another guy who fell in line because he was too tired or too scared to stand alone. I had spent my life doing what was expected, making choices that fit the mold, following the path that had been carved out for me before I even knew I had a choice.
So I left again.
Hawaii wasn’t a destination. It was a cliff, and I was the idiot jumping off without checking if there was water below. A one-way ticket, a full tank of gas, no plan, no safety net, no backup. Just a blind leap into the unknown, because I knew if I didn’t do it then, I never would.
And for the first time in my life, I was alone.
Really, truly, alone.
No wife to appease. No kids to feed. No one asking what was for dinner or if we could watch their show instead of mine. Just me. And the sunset. And a couple of bottles of wine.
At first, the silence was unbearable. I had spent so long surrounded by noise—family, coworkers, lovers, responsibilities—that I didn’t know how to function without it. The first few weeks, I still reached for my phone, still checked for messages that weren’t there. But over time, the silence stopped feeling like a void and started feeling like a gift.
I learned how to be happy without anyone else’s approval.
I ate when I was hungry. Slept when I was tired. Had sex when I wanted, not because I needed to prove something or fill some empty space inside me. I sat with myself in ways I never had before. I learned to listen to my own thoughts without trying to drown them out. I stopped running.
And for five years, I lived on that island, untethered. Women came and went, some leaving their mark, some barely registering. I kept my distance, partly because of my bias against Asian women, partly because when you’re in the zoo, it doesn’t matter what kind of animal you’re hungry for—you just eat what’s in front of you.
But I knew, deep down, I wasn’t built to stay.
I had become too good at saying goodbye.
Every woman who clung to me, who tried to make me hers, who whispered about love and forever—I let them go. Not because I didn’t care. But because I had finally learned the difference between love and possession. Between wanting someone and needing them. Between being whole and just looking for someone to complete you.
I wasn’t perfect.
Hell, I was barely functional most days.
But I had found something close to peace.
Then came November. The deadline. The ticking clock that had been counting down for years.
For over a decade, I had worked jobs I didn’t care about, lived a life that wasn’t mine, all because of one number: $1,100 a month.
Child support.
The system had me by the throat. Take my passport. Take my license. Garnish my wages. Throw me in jail if I didn’t pay. It was the leash I had been tethered to, the one thing that had kept me from walking away entirely.
But in November, that number would drop to zero.
And suddenly, the question that had been lurking in the background of my life became impossible to ignore.
Now what?
The thought of staying put, of working this job for another five, ten years, of saving for retirement so I could be 65 and battling prostate cancer with nothing to show for it except a gold-plated watch and a widow who’d cry over my great benefits—it made me sick.
I had 3,287 days left.
That’s it.
Give or take.
Which meant I had 3,287 sunsets left to watch.
111 full moons to drink wine under.
469 weekends to do something that actually meant something.
I wasn’t going to waste them.
So I started planning.
Step one: Sell everything. Strip down to nothing. Get it all down to one backpack, just like in my Navy days.
Step two: Take every credit card, max them out, pull every loan I could get with my 800 credit score, and walk away with one last pile of cash.
Step three: Move to Argentina.
Why Argentina? Why Mendoza? Because it was cheap. Because it was far. Because it was as good a place as any to disappear.
I’d find a little apartment, close to a park, with a view of the mountains. I’d sit on a terrace with a glass of Malbec, watching the world go by. Maybe I’d meet a butcher. Maybe I’d fall in love with a woman who rolled her own cigars and let me call her Mami in bed.
Maybe I’d just be alone.
And that would be okay, too.
I’d make money from my websites, keep my overhead low, live off $3,000 a month. Stay until I got dual citizenship, buy a place, rent it out when I traveled. Use it as a home base while I explored South America.
I wasn’t running away.
I was just finally, after all these years, running toward something.
So if anyone is worried about me, don’t be.
I’ve got a plan.
And for the first time in my life, I don’t need anyone’s permission to follow it.
