Chapter II:
Two Stories & A Myth

Continued from
CHAPTER I: Welcome To Leawood, Kansas

No matter what anybody tells me, I am convinced that it doesn’t take very long in a relationship to determine whether or not marriage is a possibility.  Maybe a few weeks.  Maybe.

I already mentioned that Emily and I had been together for six years.  And that’s not untrue.  But that’s not the whole story.

I say that it’s not the whole story because there are at least two versions of every story.  There’s the story that’s easy to share.  That’s the story that is convenient and effortless to believe.  And then, of course, there is the story of what actually happened.

In fact, I’ve noticed that it is possible to to categorize my personal relationships by these two stories.  There are those, generally ancillary friends, who get the first kind of story.  This is a story that is concise and has a clear and redemptive moral conclusion.

The other group of people, an invariably smaller and much more select group, includes those with whom I might share the whole story.  This is a story that isn’t quite as tidy.  This is a story that might not be quite as concise, and almost never has a clear and redemptive moral conclusion.

For the sake of hindsight, and considering that I no longer have any real reason to hide anything, I might as well share the story as it happened, not just as I find it convenient to remember.

I said that Emily and I began dating during our junior year of high school, and that’s true.  I said that Emily and I dated for six years, but that’s not completely true.  It would be more accurate to say that the our dating occurred over the period of six years.

We spent the summer before our senior year doing nothing and everything at the same time.  By the end of the summer we had established a pattern of our days.  Because neither of us had to maintain a summer job we had almost complete control over how we spent our summer.

We would usually wake up around nine or ten in the morning.  She would give me a call and ask how I had slept and if I had any memorable dreams.  She was always interested in what dreams meant.  We’d agree that meeting up sounded like a good idea and I would walk to her house in time for us to have lunch together.  The afternoons were spent pretty evenly between reading at the lake and exploring new and unfamiliar neighborhoods of Seattle.  We would often be out exploring until nightfall.  Some nights we returned home to watch a movie.  Other nights we would meet up with friends.  Some nights we would try to stay awake to greet the morninglight.

I have already called our relationship unbelievable.  The summer before our senior year was no exception.

But we were barely seniors in high school.  What did we know?

Eventually Emily’s mother would be vindicated in her constant reminder that we not take ourselves too seriously.  What we thought with some certainty was love, she would always remind us, would probably turn out to be short-term infatuation.  By the end of that summer, eight months after the TWIRP dance, she would seem to have been proven correct when Emily and I agreed that maybe what we had was perhaps not as long-term as we had hoped.

In fact, one of our earliest conversations had something to do with accidents.  We had promised each-other that there was no such thing as an accident.  We had promised each-other that it was no mere coincidence that we met when we did–that our relationship began as it began.  Just ask your local traffic cop about this point, I would tell her.  The officer will tell you that there is such a thing as a collision, but there is no such thing as an accident.

I have noticed since that lovers often promise each other things that are clearly and verifiably untrue.  It’s a sort of lovers’ myth; a part of the fancy and whimsey of love that, while perhaps deluded, helps to advance the plot, so to speak, of love.

After eight months, I was ready to admit that maybe there was such a thing as an accident.

Maybe there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to our relationship outside of a simple semester and summer of companionship.  Maybe that’s all that it was supposed to be and maybe I had to begin satisfying myself with the idea that our relationship, whatever it had been, was all it was ever going to be.

Over the next several years, Emily and I stayed in varying levels of contact.  We tried the distance thing and found, much to our surprise, that even with the connective power of the internet and discount airfare, 3,046 miles was a distance too great to overcome.  She had elected to go to a small performing arts school in downtown Boston.  Theatrical design had always been a passion of hers and her moving to Boston was the first and only logical step toward realizing that dream.

I remember encouraging Emily’s move to Boston.  The irony was not lost on me that only four years earlier my family had moved to Seattle from Boston.  I remember how when we first got to Seattle people were always curious what would prompt such a drastic transcontinental move.  I remember joking at the time about how my parents had a Manifest Destiny complex.  “From sea to shining sea,” I would say, making no effort to mask what was then a very deep resentment.

“If nothing else,” I would eventually come to tell Emily, “my own move was a growthful experience.”  Of course, if was going to be honest, I would have to admit to her that moving so far from home was terrible.  But, while I was being honest, I would have to admit to her that some good came out of it, not the least of which was our meeting.

She was apprehensive about moving to Boston from the very beginning.  I remember encouraging her to consider it as an adventure.  She told me that she considered an adventure taken alone to be no adventure at all.  An adventure is only an adventure if you have somebody to share it with, she would repeatedly tell me.

Last week as I was cleaning out my desk, I found a copy of a letter I had written to her just eleven days before she embarked on the biggest move of her life.  Regarding the prospect of Boston, the last few lines read:

Your heart might soon be split two ways and you will have a choice.  Either you’ll find that you have a little less heart to give to those two places, or you will find an opportunity to love more deeply than you have ever done before, bridging the distance and those two places with a depth of heart that you had no previous understanding of.  You can love the same and be further fragmented by this move, or you can explore what it means to love more deeply and more fiercely in the hope that distance does not have the last word

Because distance does not have the last word.

I remember her thanking me for this letter, her eyes welling up with tears.  I remember vividly this particular letter because this letter would be the last one that we shared for almost a year.

As soon as she arrived Boston, for whatever reason, we almost immediately fell out of contact.  I remember encouraging her to put her self in such a position that she be able to commit one-hundred-percent to her new surroundings.  Of course I prayed to God that she never take me seriously on this point.  There is no really good explanation of why this surprised me that she was actually taking me up on my advice.  But it came as a surprise.

She would later confess to me that my words about distance not having the last word, while not untrue, were maybe too simple and trite.

Emily told me that in a dating relationship the woman always knows first if it is love.

How was it possible that, almost over night, what we thought was love proved to be nothing more than an arrangement of proximity?

Could it be possible that I had spare time and she was bored and that was all our relationship was? A matter of convenience or opportunity?  What does it mean to discover that maybe a relationship was based merely on proximity and opportunity?

Maybe these types of relationships have something significant to do with the lovers’ myth.