Chapter I:
Welcome To Leawood, Kansas

I’ve now been in Leawood for four days.  It’s hot.  It’s humid. It’s unfamiliar. And now it’s home.

There are a lot of reasons somebody might move to the middle of nowhere.  For me, it was simply a matter of changing up the game.  I had gone to high school with some kids who were brilliant but never did anything meaningful with their lives because they never had an opportunity to get out of town.  Maybe Leawood is my proactive attempt at getting out.

And I shouldn’t actually say that Leawood is in the middle of nowhere.  Leawood is really just a southern suburb of Kansas City, but on the Kansas side of the border.  I guess you could think of it as a Kansas suburb of a Missouri city.  If that’s not a helpful way of thinking about it, I’m sorry.  You can forget I said anything about it.

It has been an interesting four days.  Four days is just long enough for things to begin to seem somewhat familiar, but altogether too short to have developed any legitimate understanding of how things actually work.

For example, I spent almost an hour this morning looking for a coffee house.

“Well, do you want good coffee or good ambiance,” Kyle, my new housemate asked me.

It was clear that I had not yet even begun to adjust to the new scenery of middle America.  I had become used to living in Seattle where it wasn’t difficult to find a coffee shop with both. But Kansas was a different story.  In fact, it was already clear that this whole story was going to be different.

This whole story was going to be different because it had started out differently.

If I try to think about all of the factors that played into my leaving Seattle I begin to quickly become overwhelmed.  There were a lot of reasons.  Maybe first of these reasons was Emily.

Emily and I had gone to high school together and ever since the second semester of junior year I was convinced that I was going to marry her.  That was the semester when she asked me to the TWIRP dance.

What was particularly compelling about Emily was that she actually gave me the time of day.  I don’t want to set the bar too low here, but this had been an unprecedented occurrence.

At the risk of falling off the proverbial deep end of tangents, allow me to explain.

During my first year of college I had to argue an original thesis for WP101: EXPOSITORY WRITING.  I took the opportunity to refine what had always been a sneaking suspicion of my childhood; that everyone needs a fat kid.

Consider any of the great coming-of-age tales of our time.  The Sandlot, The Lord of The Flies, The Goonies, Stand By Me, or any of hundreds more.  Each of these stories had a fat kid.  The fat kid in each of these stories filled a unique and necessary role.  The fat kid was generally responsible for providing the comic relief in the organization.  More subtly (but perhaps more important), the fat kid was the barometer of the group against whom all of the others could compare themselves quite favorably.  I might not be the best looking one in the group, one might say, but at least I’m better looking than him.  Or, I might not be the most capable or athletic one in the group, but at least I am more capable and athletic than her.

It was a mutually beneficial relationship.  The fat kid had a group of friends to which he or she was endeared, and the group had a clown and a barometer.

Of course, it’s not at all hard to see why the fat kid was always the clown of the group.  Quite easily,  the fat kid, not being able to rely on aesthetic or athletic traits, was forced to develop a fortitude of personality that is without parallel elsewhere.  The fat kid was the clown because when all else failed, a strong personality would be the only thing that could endear him or her to a group of people.  In all seriousness the fat kids ran with this idea because that was the only kind of running they were capable of.

(Sorry.  That was mean.  But I was the fat kid, so maybe I’m allowed to make fat jokes.)

This is all to explain, of course, why attention from Emily had been so unprecedented.  As the fat kid myself, I had plenty of beautiful friends.  But I was never the beautiful friend.  That’s why  I had no good way to respond when, after a few months of dating, she told me that she loved me.

“Oh…  That’s…  Cool…” I stuttered out, overcome both by surprise and disbelief.

Even to this day I can recall exactly where I was sitting; exactly where she was sitting.  The couch had a sage-green, almost paisley flower pattern, and the floor was covered in orange shag.  We were in her mother’s basement.

Somehow (and to this day I haven’t the foggiest idea why), my failure of articulation did not ruin our relationship.

Of course I loved her.  And even in that moment I knew I loved her… I think.  But, what was love to a high school junior? And why was she so comfortable with the idea, and I so incapable of saying something similar?

It would only be a matter of days before I could tell her, in complete certainty, that I loved her too.

Emily had told me before that the woman would always know first if it was love.

Having never known true love myself and tugging at the bit for any hint of what might even be misconstrued as love, I had always anticipated that I, not she, would be the one to identify it first, even if I was doing so at the risk of being completely wrong.  As soon as a woman gave me the time of day, I imagined, I’d be in love.  And I knew that I would know it.

Nevertheless, she did know first.

Always curious for details, I asked her later about the point at which she knew it was love.

“Do you remember when we visited my aunt in Medford,” she asked.

I said that I remembered.

“You spent almost an hour playing with Andrew and Jonah, and as I watched you play with the boys, I just knew.”

It was during the summer between our junior and senior years.  We had both earned our driver’s licenses a few months prior and decided that a weekend road trip was not only a good idea, but a requisite high school experience.  I told my parents that I was going with some guy friends; she had told her mother that she was going with some girl friends. Her aunt Kathy was just cool enough to not make a big deal of the fact that two seventeen-year-olds had made the 451 mile trip alone, together.

The point of all of this, of course, is only to illustrate that my relationship with Emily was a first and an only.  Even today, as I recall these points, I am tempted toward anachronism–toward altering the timeframe of things to increase the believability of my account.

It’s hard, even for me, to believe that my relationship with Emily had developed as fast or as young as it did.  It’s even more surprising to consider that my relationship with Emily defined almost six years of my life.

If our story is unbelievable, I beg your forgiveness.  That the story is (and was) unbelievable is precisely why it is so significant.

I was flipping through a magazine yesterday and saw an interesting advertisement. There were two seemingly naked bodies lying in bed near one-another.  In big white handwriting the page read “We were never just friends.”  The ad was for some type of fragrance, I think.

I couldn’t help but think of Emily.  We were never just friends.  From the beginning we both knew that it was something significant.

It was something significant.

And we had always planned on getting married after our senior year at University.

We had always planned.

Now more than six years since the TWIRP dance, I am only beginning to be able to use the word “was“ in its true sense, as the past-tense form of the verb “to be.”  As in, was once; isn’t anymore.

It’s an interesting thing to look back at how there are some things that always change and there are other things that never do.

This is the story in which I find myself.