“I need to tell you a story, and I need for you to tell me how it’s going to end.”
When I was 15 years old I met a girl. Trite as that sounds, that’s where this story, and mostly my story, begins. I was in high school. I was a theatre kid. I spent a vast majority of my time, in and around the theatre department, and that, of course is how I met her. Her name was Erin. She was a techie, and she specialized in being a stage manager. She was actually great at it because the key tenants of being a quality stage manager are organization and patience. She could put together a rehearsal script, organize a cast, and be an ear and shoulder for all the emotional baggage that comes with a group of high school kids. I liked her right away.
Erin was almost a full year older than me. When I first got to know her she already had a boyfriend. That wasn’t surprising to me really given what I thought of her. Clearly others could see what I saw. What was surprising was that she talked to me in the first place. I wasn’t really good looking, or athletic, or graceful, or anything that a high school girl looks for. There was no reason for her to like me really, but she did. We became friends, and when it became apparent that her current relationship was on it’s way out, I was a sympathetic, if not completely neutral, ear. However, it wasn’t as easy as “she left him and fell into my arms.” That would have been strange, and wrong, and wouldn’t make for nearly as good a story.
After she’d been single for a while (read: matter of days) I asked her out. It should be made clear that no high school kid has any idea what that really means. In fact when you ask someone “out” in high school you’re really saying “I like you. Do you like me enough to spend a little extra curricular time with me doing something that could be painfully awkward? Maybe? Please?” Not surprisingly, she said no. What was surprising was that she had a good reason. See, at the time, I had never attended church. I would have said that I self identified as Christian, but my belief in God, or Jesus, and my “Faith” was pretty much enough to get by at weddings and funerals so that I didn’t feel like I was going to hell by setting foot in a church when necessary. Erin was a bit more practiced at it. In fact, she wasn’t interested in dating me because she thought I was pretty much a heathen. Which I pretty much was I guess. The thing was I really liked her. And I wasn’t about to let a little thing like God get in the way of that, especially not when I could do something about it.
I’m part Irish. And that’s the part I identify with a great deal. I’m also Welsh, and Apache, but since I don’t look Apache and there’s nothing really interesting about being Welsh, I just stick with the Irish. In high school I started to come into the Irish loving part of my life. And this was evident in the jewelry I wore (mostly rings and necklaces), as well as the attitude I had when people talked about their families. I was quick to point out I was Irish at any turn. I had had these conversations with Erin, who was a bit more Irish than I was. Her last name started with an O’. I was jealous of that. It made me like her even more. Erin’s birthday was also close to St. Patrick’s Day. So for her 17th birthday, a few months after she had said no to me, I orchestrated the single greatest gambit of my life. I gave her the gift of a sterling silver necklace with an Irish cross pendant. For the unknowing, an Irish cross has a circle in the center of it, so the beams of the cross meet at a circle. This particular pendant went a step further and the circle was a claddagh, which is a traditional Irish symbol for romance evoking the ideas of love, friendship, and loyalty. In effect, what I was saying with this one gesture was that I was still interested, and not nearly as much of a heathen as you thought. Later that day she invited me to church with her on Sunday. I said yes.
To this day I don’t believe she was really sure about wanting to date me until we were in church together. I think maybe she thought there was the possibility I might burst into flame while praying, or that my head might spin around when Jesus was mentioned. She saw something in me that day that lit her up like a beacon. She was so excited after that first church service. So was I. I had simultaneously gained something I wanted, and something I didn’t know I’d been missing. My gambit to win this girl had worked in ways I hadn’t expected. I found myself in a community of people who loved God, and I grew to love Him as well. Not only that, but I had a partner who stood by me, and nurtured my spiritual growth.
In many ways, Erin and my relationship is directly linked to our Faith. It started in that church, and grew from there. We did most of the things that high school kids do, with a few exceptions. We didn’t have sex because we promised to save ourselves for marriage. This was a tough task, made more difficult by our tendency to skirt the edge of what was allowable pretty often. Made difficult also by the fact that after being together for about a month, we got engaged. I asked, she said yes. So saving yourself for a marriage you know is coming, and you know to whom it’s coming, is pretty hard on the hormones.
Erin and I knew that no one would take us seriously if we told them we were engaged right away. So, we decided to wait one year and one month from our engagement to tell our families and friends. There’s a lot that fills that time, but that’s not what this story is about. I will say that we were passionate about each other and the life we planned to build together. I look back on that time now with nothing but fondness, and appreciation for the romantic and spiritual partner she was to me then. Eventually the time came to tell our parents about our engagement. They responded in the best way I think they could have: measured skepticism. They were supportive, but they all knew we were young, and that the odds were pretty well stacked against us, no matter what we thought or felt. I distinctly remember the car ride home from the announcement dinner when my Mother asked me if Erin was pregnant, just to be sure there wasn’t some alternate reason for this. I later found out that Erin’s parents asked her the same thing.
That Spring and Summer were definitely some of the happiest times of my life. So what happened? Well, they don’t call it Fall for nothing. Erin was going away to college that year, and I still had another year of high school to get through. It’s things like this that you can plan for all you want, but you won’t know what’s happening until it does. And then it’s too late. At my best I can say that Erin and I grew apart without each other around all the time. For my part I tried to make her feel bad about being away from me by subtly suggesting she was unhappy at college. I also started spending more time hanging out with other friends of mine, who didn’t understand that I had been happy before, and instead made me feel like I had missed out on all the fun of high school by being tied to someone else. My real problem is that I’m a socially adapting creature. I tend to fit the mold of the group, or the individual that I spend the most time with. I’ve gotten better about this, and I loose myself less these days. But then I simply went with what seemed a good idea at the time. So, Erin and I moved inexorably toward our end.
The strangest part is that I can’t for the life of me recall how it actually ended. I don’t remember a break up conversation, or phone call, or note. I don’t remember tears, or apologies, or yelling. I have a vague memory of Erin telling me that I could pursue another girl I had mentioned once as someone I would be interested in if Erin didn’t exist. I don’t remember where that conversation took place, or why she thought that was something she should say. I do remember that over the Christmas holiday, not too long after we had ended, my Father and Step-Mom wanted to take Erin and I out to dinner. They didn’t know we were over yet. Erin agreed to go. It wasn’t bad, I remember that. I’m not sure I’ve ever broken up with someone since who I would have been okay going to dinner with my family so soon after the fact.
After we broke up I didn’t stop going to Church. Erin had introduced me to my Faith, and even shaped it in many ways, but the end of us, wasn’t the end of it. It wasn’t until years later that I would loose myself, and my relationship with God. And for the second time in my life, Erin would bring me to something I didn’t know I’d been missing.
“How do you say ‘I’m looking at what I want?’”
Four weeks ago now I found Erin again. But you don’t know what that really means, so we’ll get to that later. After Erin and I broke up things get a little fuzzy for me, like I said, but they get even fuzzier over the years. I know that last year of high school involved a lot of acting out on my part, and a lot of displacement of emotions. I never really grieved over the end of our relationship. I didn’t know how. I threw myself into other things, at other things, at other people. With little to no success I might add. In fact once everyone you know is aware of your engagement, and subsequent loss of it, it’s hard to get them to see much else. No disrespect to the friends of mine who continued to look at me as a person and not a mistake, because I probably wouldn’t have lasted long without them. Luckily I stopped getting rejected from all the colleges I wanted to go to, and found one that would take me, as well as be the best place for me. It’s not lost on me that all the places I wanted to go had to deny me before I found a place I’d never heard of that I would come to love the most. And with college came the opportunity to reinvent myself.
By the time I had landed in Chicago and really settled myself, I had gone through two long distance relationships back to back. A last ditch effort on my part to hold on to high school, and to do some things I hadn’t had the stones to do while I was there. I spent college doing what college kids do. Only, I had a bit more of a moral center than most of the actors I spent my time with. Or at least I did at the beginning. I stayed clear of drugs, and promiscuousness, though I can’t say my relationships improved much in that time. I call it the three month period of my life, because that’s how long any relationship I was in tended to last. The cycle went something like this: Month 1 – get together and be crazy about each other. Month 2 – settle down a bit, and conduct what by most standards is a “normal” relationship. Month 3 – find out and labor over all the things that drive me crazy until I manage to push them away (ideally I make them want to break up with me so I don’t have to do it). Month 3 can also involve the finding of a new person if there’s someone available and/or interested. It’s not that I was a bad person. It’s not that I didn’t want to find someone to be in a long term relationship with even. I just didn’t like being alone and there was always a solution to that, even if it didn’t last.
For a lot of reasons, all of them not good reasons, I never found a church in Chicago to attend on a regular basis. After you spend enough time not doing something you convince yourself that you’re okay not doing it. It becomes less and less of a priority because there are always excuses as to why it’s inconvenient or difficult. It’s the procrastinator’s way. When I met people who did attend church, I would feel guilty that I didn’t anymore. And then I would tell myself that I didn’t need that guilt anyway. I could rationalize that all the lessons and prayers and ceremony was just a way to make me feel like I wasn’t good enough in the first place. Why should I go hear about what a sinner I am and how I can never be good enough for God, let alone anyone else? I have enough self esteem issues without an omniscient being telling me I’m not trying hard enough. And that’s what it became for me, a chore to be avoided. I lost the joy.
Time passes, and after a while of not doing something, you also stop thinking about doing it. Until you stop thinking about it all together. Again, what this story is about is not contained in the years in between, so we’ll skip ahead a bit. I’ve been in Chicago for nine years now. In the past year I’ve been on a quest to recapture a bit of myself, and retain it for good. This was spurred on by the ending of another relationship of mine, this one my longest – three and a half years. To say that I was a different person a year ago from who I am now is true in many ways, and in the ways that it’s not, I am working on. Ultimately it’s been back to basics for me. I’ve been working on remembering who I am, and who I always wanted to be. A little regression is good from time to time I think. But naturally the toughest parts are avoided until they can’t be avoided anymore.
I won’t say it was fate, because that’s not giving credit where credit is due. God has a plan. To suggest otherwise or to infer that there’s a different force out there with a vested interest in what you’re doing is a bit egotistical, and blasphemous if you want to get technical about it. Also, you can’t talk to fate, and that’s not very comforting when you don’t understand why certain things are happening to you. Like when you wake up on a rather normal Saturday morning with only one thought burning in your head from the moment your eyes open: find Erin. Yeah, that’s how it started. Someone I hadn’t spoken to in at least seven years, and had no hint of an idea of where she was or what she was doing was suddenly the only thing I could focus on. Having had some experience with friends who are twins, I think the sensation I had was akin to one of a pair of twins getting hurt miles away from the other, and the other knowing about it without being told. Not that I thought Erin was hurt or anything urgent like that. I mean that would have been pretty poor planning on someone’s part if I was to be her emergency contact.
So I did the only thing I could think to do. I sat down at the computer, and attempted to search for someone on the internet with what little things I could remember from a decade old life. I don’t fancy myself a stalker, but this next part is a bit stalker-ish I guess. The thing is, she could be married with a different name, she could be in another country, she could be in witness protection, or she could be dead. I just didn’t know, and for about 45 minutes, the internet offered very few clues to help me out. I found some outdated websites that looked like she’d been mentioned there back in 2005, but that was no good to me. I searched high and low for anything, but the digital universe was set on keeping it’s secrets until the very end. Eventually I went back and searched the two places I had looked first – Myspace, and Facebook. I never held out much hope for either of these being a place she would be found, because they didn’t seem her style. What was I saying? Like I could intelligently comment on the preferences of someone I haven’t known for seven years? I tried looking again, this time a bit harder, and sure enough she was there. So, what now?
Really, let’s think this through shall we? You’ve just been possessed with the unyielding need to find someone you have no real connection to anymore, and you haven’t even had breakfast before you dive into scouring the storehouse of human existence for any traces of them. What do you do when you find them? What do you say and how do you say it? Do you even have anything to say? I mean where did this urge come from in the first place? You see the problem. You can’t just write or call someone you don’t know and shout “I woke up this morning and you were the first thing on my mind. What the hell is going on!?” There are steps one must take in the process so as not to inspire the person you’ve found to look into acquiring a restraining order. I labored over what to do for two days, because I knew that I’d do the wrong thing if I just did it right that minute. I manage to fail pretty grandly after two days anyway. I compose and send a message that’s as stumbling as it is strange, and I feel confident when I send it that I will never hear back unless it’s from the police. I deserve to be locked up at this point anyway I guess.
Three days pass in silence. I have no idea if she’s read what I’ve written, if the police are on their way, or if she saw it was me and decided to ignore it entirely. And then I get my answer. She writes to tell me about where she’s been, and what’s she’s been doing, and to say that it was good to hear from me. Erin has followed her calling from day one, and it would appear she has never waivered from that. She’s majored in religious studies, and become a missionary, spending three years in Malawi, and traveling all over the world with a company that specializes in mission work. At the end of the year she is going to grad school to study bible translation for the next three years, then she’ll redeploy to places without the bible in their native language. She doesn’t ask me any questions about my faith. She doesn’t tell me about what God is doing in her life like she’s witnessing to me. But I can’t help at the end of this note feeling like I’ve been given a glimpse down the fork in the path I didn’t take. And in turning back to look, I see where I’ve been, and where I could be.
That night I pray fervently for the first time in I can’t remember how long. Then I wait two days. I write her back to let her know what’s been going on with me. I tell her about my career and the things I’m proudest of. I tell her also that I feel like she’s someone I should never have lost touch with, and if she’s willing, we should be friends. I start then, and it’s not as hard as you might think, to rediscover my faith. I start reading my bible, which is laden with passages circled and notated by Erin when we were together. I start praying. I even have a reason for praying. I’ve decided to pray for forty days on one thing. Forty is a good biblical number. I have one question that I desperately need answered. I think it’s why I had to find Erin in the first place. I need to know what my calling is. I need to know what God’s plan for me is, or at least what He would have me do next. So every night now I pray for that. I pray for a lot of things, and a lot of people. Just the thought of Erin reminds me now that God has a plan for all of us, and that he’s just waiting for us to step up. I remember feeling this way when Erin and I were in her car leaving the church parking lot after that first Sunday we went together. It’s exhilarating, and terrifying, and wonderful. It’s the joy I’ve been missing without realizing it. Erin’s brought me around to it for the second time in my life. And I’m grateful.
“You always said I’d be happy in Paris. You couldn’t have meant without you.”
It’s been a few weeks now since those first few days of trepidation and excitement. I’ve had some time to calm down and consider things fully. I’ve talked to a few good friends of mine about all this, telling them the story you’ve been reading here. One question I’ve had for each of them is this: “Do you know someone, or have you ever known someone who if they asked you to spend forever with them, but you had to leave everything you had behind to do it, you would?” The more people I ask the thinner the odds get, but most people say “yes” right away. The first friend I asked actually said “Don’t tell my boyfriend, but I know exactly who that is for me. I haven’t seen him in about six months.” The thing I’m contemplating, and have been rather extensively since this hit me, is if Erin is that person for me. We’ve been talking on and off since then. We’ll see each other for the first time at Thanksgiving when we’ll both be home visiting family. I don’t know what she must think of me yet, but I know now what I have always thought of her. She’s someone who can remind you of all the best possibility you have inside you, and she’s willing to stand by you while you try to bring it out. She’s still the best partner I can imagine someone having. Even if that someone isn’t me. Just the thought of her brought me back my faith in a matter of days. Someone like that you should hold on to, in whatever capacity, for the rest of your life. I still have a lot to sort out, and I have an answer to get from God before anything else. But I’m thinking that … if she’ll have me again… would I go?
- I stumble through the wood alone and wonder, how did I get here, and where am I going? And then a path joins mine and I see a clearing ahead. I stop to ask the question whose path is this, and where will we go together when we reach the open air? A voice in leafy tones says, “The time for questions is passed. Now you must walk. But don’t be afraid. I am walking with you.” -
The End
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