Love at the Speed of Email

Lisa
McKay

“
Love
at the Speed of Email
is part grand romance, part travel memoir and part
essay on life's most precious gifts. Lisa McKay is a phenomenal writer; clever
and comedic, poignant and pitch-perfect. You will love this love story.”

– Susan
Meissner
, award-winning
author of
The Shape of Mercy
and
A Sound
Among
the
Trees

“
Love
at the Speed of Email
, Lisa McKay's engrossing memoir about life and love
and home, is a wild ride that spans the globe. At turns funny, contemplative,
and romantic, Lisa's story resonated on many different levels and kept me
eagerly turning pages, hoping for a happily-ever-after ending to this modern
day fairy tale. I can't recommend this extraordinary book highly enough!”

– Nicole
Baart
, bestselling author
of
Far From Here

“A travel memoir with a deep soul,
Love at the Speed of Email
takes us
around the world but always brings us back to the heart of the matter:
humanity's longing for place, purpose, faith. Lisa McKay's seamless
storytelling helps us find ourselves in every corner of her globetrotting and
even learn a little about love along the way.
A true pleasure
for the journeyer in all of us!”
  

–
Leeana
Tankersley
,
author of
Found Art: Discovering Beauty
in Foreign Places

“
Love
at the Speed of Email
is a riveting memoir by a talented author and
globe-trotter. I loved journeying with Lisa McKay as she sought the love of her
life and a place to call home. I can't recommend this beautiful and triumphant
story enough!”

– Gina Holmes, award-winning author of
Crossing Oceans
and
Dry as
Rain

Love
At
The Speed Of Email

Lisa McKay

Copyright 2012 Lisa McKay

Kindle Edition

All rights reserved under
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No part of this text may be used
or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Visit
www.lisamckaywriting.com
for more
information.

Love
At The
Speed Of
Email is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying
details have been changed.

Cover design: Kimberly
Glyder

Author photograph: Kevin McIntyre

Photograph of Michael Wolfe and Lisa McKay: Tristan Clements

For
Mike, who wrote a letter and changed my life

Spinsters
Abroad

Alternate Lives

In The Beginning
Were the Words

Airports and
Bookstores

Icicles in
Heathrow

Chasing
Silver Dollars

The
Internal and Unwinnable War

The Valley
of the Shadow of the Golden Dome

Hope Chases Us

Pouring Sunshine
and Rain

The Chicken
Dance

Love Long
Distance

Shock
and Awe in Love

Upon
Hearing the News

The Day Before

Acknowledgements

From
the Author

Reading Group Guide

Los
Angeles, USA

Almost two weeks after my thirty-first birthday, the alarm
on my mobile phone went off several hours earlier than normal. It was still
dark when I opened my eyes, and as I groped for the phone I was seized by the
sudden and horrible conviction that I had entirely forgotten I was supposed to
be getting up and going to the airport.

This, I realized, could be worse than the time I booked my
ticket to New York for the week
before
I needed to leave. It could be worse than the time I traveled to Colorado
before discovering that I’d left my wallet in my gym bag at home. Surely,
though, it couldn’t be worse than the time I was stranded in Germany for a week
because I’d neglected to get a visa for the Czech Republic. Could it?

 
When I finally
managed to illuminate the screen on my phone, a
Task
list was displayed. There was only one item on it.

That item was
Lisa’s
wedding (Australia)
.
 

This did not immediately clarify things for me.

If the phone alarm was going off that early, I reasoned,
still sleep-fuzzed, I was supposed to be going somewhere. According to my
To Do
list, however, that somewhere was
Australia.
For my own wedding.

Except … I was having a hard time recollecting ever planning
a wedding in Australia.

Or remembering who I might conceivably be
marrying.

Then, slowly, it came back to me.

Two years earlier, I had been sitting in a California
theater waiting for the movie to start. One of my good friends, Robin, had just
gotten engaged. She was talking weddings and bemoaning the twin hassles of
setting a date and finding a venue. I had constructively suggested that a lot
of time and angst could perhaps be saved if you settled those details before
you were even in a relationship. In response to her answering challenge to do
just that for myself I had named a place (Australia, the closest thing to a
home country I have) and a safely distant date.

Laughing like a loon, Robin had commandeered my phone and
programmed in my wedding date for me, complete with an alarm reminder to get
engaged three months before the actual day.

“No worries,” I had said loftily when she explained what she
was doing. “Three months will be plenty of time to plan a wedding.”

Now, three months before that safely distant date, I groaned
and silenced that alarm. Whatever had possessed her to think I’d want to start
planning said wedding at 5 a.m. on a Friday, I wasn’t
sure.

* * *

One of Jane Austen’s most famous novels opens with this
sentence: “It is a truth universally
acknowledged,
that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Now two weeks past the landmark of thirty-one I was starting to wonder whether
it was also a truth even more universally acknowledged that a single woman of a
certain age and in possession of no fortune of which to speak must be in want
of a husband.

Many of my friends and family certainly seemed to think so –
this was not the first time in recent history that I had been ambushed at an
early hour regarding the pressing matter of my nuptials. Even total strangers
in African airports were in agreement on this point.

Accra,
Ghana

The interlude with the stranger in Ghana came first.

I was sitting alone at dawn on a cold metal bench in Accra
airport, reading, when he sat down beside me.

He was tall – that was the first thing I noticed. Easily
six-eight, he towered over everyone else in a room that was already full of
tall men. His skin was so shiny black, like oiled coal, that the fluorescent
light glanced off him at odd angles. His hair was sectioned and bound into a
dozen spiky knobs. He wore spotless red and white Nike exercise gear and
sported an enormous square diamond in his left ear. He pulled out a portable
DVD player and slid in a disc.

He waited longer than most, four minutes, before striking up
a conversation.

“I am Gabriel,” he said. “What is your name?”

I looked up from my book and sighed mentally.

“Lisa.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nairobi.”

“Why?”

“Work.”

“What work?”

“I run workshops on stress, trauma, and resilience for
humanitarian relief and development workers.”

I could see that this last sentence didn’t register, and I
wasn’t surprised. It usually took some time for native English speakers to fit
those pieces together, and Gabriel spoke English with a thick West
African-French accent.

“What do
you
do?”
I said, wondering, as always, what was compelling me to ask this.

It's not that I wasn’t interested in what he did – I was
especially curious as to where the diamond came from. It was just that I didn’t
particularly want to end up chatting at length to yet another strange man in an
airport in Africa. But no matter how many times I tell myself that I'm not
responsible for reciprocating interest in situations like these, it breaks all
the normal rules of polite behavior to give a one-word answer to a question and
return my eyes to my book. Five questions
is
about my
limit. After that I usually buckle and return one.

I learned that Gabriel was a seaman, working cargo ships out
of Djibouti. His family was from Cote
D'Ivoire
but now
lived in Ghana. English was his fourth language, and his worst.

“Are you married?” Gabriel asked me. “Do you have a
boyfriend?”

This
is why I
don't enjoy chatting with men in airports in Africa.

“I have a boyfriend,” I lied shamelessly.

Gabriel did not even pause. This was something I’d noticed
with other men, too. Apparently, if my boyfriend was allowing me to wander
around Africa unsupervised, I was fair game.
 

“Do you like to make friends with the black man?” he asked.
“I know some white woman; they do not like to make friends with the black man.”

Flummoxed, I tried to think. Answering no was out of the
question. Answering yes was tantamount to an open invitation to continue this
line of questioning.

I recalled the face of an ex-boyfriend and mentally grafted
it onto my hypothetical current boyfriend.

“My boyfriend is black,” I said.

Gabriel smiled. “I like to make friends with the white
woman.”

I looked down at my book and turned the page.

I have received more attention from men in Africa than
anywhere else in the world. Most of the time, however, I don't think it’s
because of my sparkling personality. How sparkling can you be when you’re
travel-weary in an airport, especially when you’re engrossed in a book? But I’m
also not deluded enough to think that these propositions come because of any
irresistible physical magnetism I am exuding. Most of the time, I get the sense
that when these men look at me – my hair, my eyes, even my skin – what they
really see is not brown and white but blue.

Blue, the color of my passport.
Or, rather, the color of both my passports – the Australian
and
the Canadian one.

This sometimes bothers me. And the fact that it bothers me
bothers me, too.

My parents spent decades trying to teach me that it’s
qualities other than beauty that really matter. I’d say I believe that. Why,
then, do I catch myself at times like these preferring that someone approach me
because he desires me physically than because he desires my citizenship and all
the other qualities it represents – escape, freedom, and relative wealth? After
all, physical beauty and citizenship are both, to a large extent, assets
bestowed on us as accidents of birth. Objectively, citizenship even has some
major advantages over beauty – it tends not to depreciate in value over time,
and you have to screw up really badly to lose it altogether. Physical assets,
however, are subject to degradation caused by any number of things, like
gravity, sun damage, neglect, and the overconsumption of ice cream and takeout
Chinese food.

“Do you do lots of travel for work?” Gabriel asked me
suddenly, interrupting my concentrated study of page 231.

“Yes, lots of travel!” I said, trying to sound busy, mobile,
unavailable
.

“I travel lots, too, but when I get married I will stay at
home with my wife and our children,” he said, clearly hoping I would take the
hint and apply for a starring role in
that
story line immediately.

My strategy during these conversations is to be reserved but
polite. Rarely will I be confrontational and firmly shut someone down.
Sometimes, however, I will run away.

I dug for the last of my Ghanaian Cedes and headed for the
small stall selling bottled water. Then I wandered into the one store in the
airport, thinking.

It's not that I blame the men for trying, I don’t. I even
admire their moxie sometimes. It’s more that I hate the way it makes me feel
defensive and objectified when I suspect that I'm simply being seen as a
walking one-way ticket to wealth and a better life. But why should I feel any
less objectified, or any more flattered, by a man looking for a pretty smile
and a tight shirt?

“Perhaps,” I thought as I stood alone in the airport on that
sultry morning in October, “I've been coming at this all wrong. Maybe my parents
are right. It is other qualities that matter more than beauty – it’s my
passports. Maybe I should start seeing them as just as tangible (and more
indestructible) assets than my cup size.”
   

Behind me a voice called my name.

I turned and looked up. Gabriel had come to find me, to make
sure I’d heard that they had called pre-boarding. He pressed a piece of paper
containing his phone number and an email address into my hands.

“Where I come from we have a saying” he said, “‘My blood met
your blood.’ When I saw you here today,
my
blood met
your
blood.” He looked at
me meaningfully and paused.

“Then again,” I thought, “maybe I should just invest in a
fake wedding ring. Call me demanding, but I need someone to be drawn to my
passports, my pretty smile, and my personality.”

I smiled, awkward, and tucked the slip of paper into my bag.

“It was nice meeting you, too.”

Washington,
D.C., USA

Two months after transiting through Washington’s Dulles
Airport on my way home from that trip to Ghana, I was back on the East Coast
again to spend Christmas with my family.

Washington D.C. can be a magical place to spend Christmas.

The last time we had all spent Christmas together in D.C.,
we were living there during my last year of high school. That year we walked out
of the candlelit warmth of the Christmas Eve service and into a still, deep
cold. Snow was falling straight and thick from an inky void, the flakes so
incandescent they seemed a stately, silent parade of displaced stars. The
everyday landscape had already disappeared under a transforming layer of white.
I can still remember the paradoxically warm tingle of midnight snow on my
tongue and how the sudden shock of all that unexpected beauty kindled a
reverential hope.
 

O holy night, indeed.
 

This Christmas wasn’t exactly like that.

We
were
all
together. My sister, Michelle, who married her high school love, Jed, was the
only one of us still living in
D.C.,
and it was their
house we were invading. My parents had come from Australia.
So
had my brother, Matt, and his girlfriend, Louise.
I’d flown over from
Los Angeles.

So we were all together, at least. But on Christmas morning
it was dripping a cold, dreary rain that did not even bother to pretend that it
might turn to snow. And despite the fact that I was wrapped up in a blanket,
nursing a cup of coffee and staring at a positive mountain of presents under
the Christmas tree, there were no warm tingles, no reverential hope.

Instead there was the feeling that we were all trying hard
to create a happy Christmas vibe and not quite getting there. It was Louise’s
first Christmas away from Australia and she was homesick. Michelle was three
months pregnant with her first child and not feeling like eating much, or
sitting up. My father was trying too hard to make sure everyone was having a
good time, and his anxious organizing was annoying me. Jed, who was
periodically calling me by a nickname he knew I loathed, was annoying me, too.
And I’m pretty sure we were all annoying Jed, who in that moment was probably
feeling a bit sorry that we regularly took his hospitable invitations of “come
any time” at face value and descended full force upon his house for two whole
weeks instead of just the couple of days that normal American families devote
to celebrating the Christmas season.

Collectively we were a bit like an out-of-tune guitar trying
to play carols.

This feeling all-out-of-tune thing is aggravating when it
happens after you’ve worked hard to coordinate travel schedules across
continents so that you can spend time together. And it’s particularly
frustrating when it happens at Christmas, because everyone wants Christmas to
be special.