Love at the Speed of Email (10 page)

“I think it comes from having seen a lot. Knowing that the
world is my oyster at this stage and that choices (well, more than one, or two,
or ten) are mine for the making about what I want to do and where I want to be.
And an internal and unwinnable war between my need for
intensity/novelty/challenge and my deep longing for routine/comfort/a normal.

“As for chiefs’ daughters, this is something that I can
speak with authority on. You will still receive multiple offers to marry
chiefs’ daughters when you visit villages after leaving the field – probably
even more of them since your stock will have risen, as you are no longer crazy
enough to actually be living in their country but are living in the land of
plenty, where everyone else wants to live.

“And why do I write essays and put them online? The real
reason why I wrote my very first essay? Sad to say it wasn't uncontrollable
artistic urges or existential angst desperate for outlet or anything similarly
noble-sounding. Really, when it came right down to it, my primary motivation
for writing my first essay was to catch someone's attention. Yes, translate
that to: to impress a guy.”

I stopped typing.

Mike’s questions were pointing me toward my past. Toward
murky territory I hadn’t revisited for more than a year. Toward one story I
hadn’t
written about and posted on the
www for
all the
digitally connected world to
peruse.
 

“You know Ryan Schmidt?” I had carefully asked Mike in one
of our earliest emails after we discovered all our mutual acquaintances. “I
tracked Ryan down very similarly to the way you just tracked me down – through
an essay of his that a friend of a friend forwarded to me.”
 

Just how much more of this tale was I willing to share with
a distant, familiar stranger?

Los
Angeles, USA

A complete answer to Mike’s question about why I write
essays would have started the story more than three years earlier. Shortly
after I moved to L.A., a friend forwarded me an essay she had stumbled across
and enjoyed, an essay written by a Canadian named Ryan who was living in
Afghanistan.

“I turned thirty in Afghanistan,” Ryan’s essay began. “It
was my second birthday here. Last year I was hit with a weird flu three days
before and the fever finally broke as I entered the last year of my twenties.
My friend,
Halim
, came into my room to my weak groans
and cheerily offered me a bowl of rice and beans. He told me again that no
doubt I had malaria. ‘Today check blood?’ he asked hopefully, just like every
other day. Here everything is malaria. If you have a toothache they suspect
malaria.”

It was a short essay, barely a thousand words, but it
inspired the first truly electric flicker of interest I’d felt since the
heartbreak of Notre Dame. After I finished reading the piece, I forwarded it on
to my parents with a brief and blithe “Read this. It’s amazing. I’m going to
track him down and make him fall in love with me.”

But Ryan turned out to be harder to track down than I’d
expected. I didn’t have a last name or an email address. I had to trace the
trail back through my friend to her brother, who also lived in Afghanistan, to
a friend of Ryan’s in Canada who sent out Ryan’s essays and compiled any
replies into one document for him, a system prompted by internet constraints in
the remote province where Ryan was based.

Ryan’s friend cheerfully agreed to add me to the
distribution list, so I settled in to wait for the next installment. When it
came, the essay, titled
A Portable Life
,
cut to my core.

“I crave Adventure,” Ryan wrote. “Sometimes I flip through
my passport just to feel the 48 pages of possibilities. But I’m also completely
obsessed with the idea of Home.”

It’s really something
to travel the world, to bump over roads in Russian jeeps, to see the villages,
the citadels, the minarets, the mosques, but it’s not the same without the
memory of Vancouver back home. It’s beautiful to fly in over Vancouver on a
summer evening and see the Lion’s Gate lit up like a drawbridge on a fairy
castle, but it’s only if I’ve been away on the dusty roads that I get that
feeling of my heart collapsing in relief like a knight at the end of a long
battle. As exciting as adventures are, there’s too little of home in any of
them. And even though there’s no place like home, there’s not much adventure
there.

The fact is
,
I feel a bit restless no matter where I am. The more world
I see the more it delights me, terrifies me, astounds me, and the more I become
convinced that it will never be the right world for me. Maybe somewhere in me
is a distant memory of a world from my childhood or even before that, from the
time I was a twinkle in Abraham’s sky, from the moment the voice spoke into the
darkness and light rose like a daisy.

I’m not ungrateful; I
love it here, maybe even more for all the longing. But there is neither home
nor adventure enough for me in this world. What there is
is
enough of each to set me off questing for a place where home is really Home and
adventure is really Adventure – enough to satisfy the paradoxical longings of
my soul.

It might not even be a
place or a thing that I want. There’s a part in one of Frederick
Buechner’s
novels that I love. A man has a dream that he
finds a silver dollar with a name on it. He says,

“It wasn’t any of the
other names I’ve been called by various people at various times in my life, and
yet it was my name. It was a name so secret that I wouldn’t tell it even if I
remembered it, and I don’t remember it. But if anybody were ever to show up and
call me by it I’d recognize it in a second, and the chances are that if the
person who called me by it gave me the signal, I’d follow him to the ends of
the earth.”

I wonder if that’s
just it. Suppose what I keep calling home and adventure could do with a bigger
name, say, “God.” Suppose when God says, “Come on, let’s go home,” or, “Follow
me on this adventure” – suppose it’s all the same thing, simply because God is
there.

What if with God there
is enough adventure at home and enough home in the adventure?

I don’t just need a
better world, I need a better self; I need a real name. The backpacks and the
down jacket and the computer I’ve selected so carefully as the building blocks
of my portable life are a poor substitute at best. But one day I believe that
Someone
will come and flip me my silver dollar and call my
name. Then I’ll drop these three bags in the twinkling of an eye and discover
the real world at last.

I sat there breathless and stunned for a long time after
finishing Ryan’s essay. Then I had only one real question.

How
was
I going to
connect with this mysterious man who wrestled with questions of home and
adventure the way I did, who had named my struggles and who seemed a lot more
hopeful than I was at that point that there may somewhere, somehow, someday be
reconciliation of those contradictory longings for adventure and for home?

This was the question I pondered during the next two weeks
while I packed up my own portable life and hopped on a plane for the first of
what would be many trips to Kenya for work.

It was a tough assignment, and to top it all off I came down
with a terrible case of what I finally figured out was food poisoning. By the
time I arrived back in L.A., I’d lost eight pounds, hadn’t eaten much more than
yogurt and apple juice in a week, and I had my answer. Ryan’s raw, lyrical
honesty had shivered through me on some deep level – as if he’d struck a large
bronze bell in my soul. Perhaps my own honesty would evoke a similar resonance.

So that is when I sat down and wrote my first essay, all
about that first trip to Kenya, and sent it out into the universe and to Ryan.

* * *

To be honest, I was rather unreasonably confident when I
sent out this essay that it would evoke
some
response from Ryan. So I was more than a little surprised and disappointed when
the days, then weeks, passed with no reply.

But then I got distracted.

The same week I sent out the essay about Kenya, I received
an email from Colorado. From someone who was
not
on my mailing list.
From someone whom I had
been matched with five months earlier when (bored and lonely right after my
move to L.A.)
I’d been dabbling in online dating.
 

 
Jason lived in
Colorado and worked for a publishing company. When we were first matched up
online I had thought he sounded promising, but before we ever got beyond a
couple of emails he forthrightly let me know that he’d decided to pursue
another match who also lived in Denver.

Then, after months of silence, I heard from him again.

The woman in Denver hadn’t worked out, he said. He’d been
thinking about me and wondering how I was. Would I like to chat sometime?

“Sure,” I thought.
“Why not?
What
did I have to lose?”

Soon Jason and I were talking on the phone every day.

My initial instincts had been right: there was promise here.
He was warm, sweet, and transparent. He asked a lot of great questions. He paid
close attention to the answers. And four weeks after we started talking long
distance we were practically dating.

We made plans for him to come and visit me in California in
the beginning of September.

And then Ryan wrote to me.

He’d just finished a month-long assignment and was headed
back to Canada. He’d been catching up on email at Heathrow Airport. He’d read
my essay.

“I don’t know you,” he said, “but you’re up my alley. If you
ever find yourself in Vancouver, sing Australian drinking songs on a corner
until someone flips you two bits from pity,
then
call
me.”

Then he gave me his phone number.

It is at this point that I started to get very, very
confused.

* * *

Before long I found myself emailing Ryan many mornings and
talking to Jason for hours on the phone every night. I still hadn’t met either
one of these guys in person – I hadn’t even talked to Ryan or seen a photo of
him – so I couldn’t exactly figure out why I was starting to feel like the
worst sort of cheater.

But I was. And it was catapulting me back in time a dozen
years.
To the tainted era of my first kisses.

Technically, I guess, the kiss I’m thinking of wasn’t my
first. But if you don’t count the quick peck executed in front of ten pairs of
thrilled eyes during a game of truth or dare when I was in fifth grade, then my
first kiss was with my first boyfriend, Dion.

I was sixteen and Dion was a kingly two years older. I was
in Zimbabwe at the time, attending an all-girls school. Dion was the head boy
of our brother school. He attended my church and I’d watched him, interested
and somewhat awed, for months.
Interested because he just
seemed so … nice.
Awed because, in the rigid and
hierarchical British school system, the prefects were a remote and
authoritative sort of royalty.
And so, for the first three months of
that year, whenever I was bored in church, I just watched.

I did a lot of watching.

But I didn’t do anything else until the date of the
fourth-form ball began to loom.

I didn’t want to go to this dance. Spending my teenage years
in Zimbabwe had been good for a great many things. I had, for example, learned
how to sew baby clothes on a hand-crank sewing machine, ride a horse, use a log
table instead of a calculator, make bread from scratch, and locate a cattle dip
tank on a topographical map. What I had not done was learn how to dance.
 

(I had not learned any algebra either, but that wouldn’t
come back to haunt me for another year, until after we’d relocated back to the
U.S.)

So, dancing.

I’d already suffered through a couple of school dances in
preceding years, and they’d been truly painful. At
fourteen I
was fascinated by the boys, these creatures we never saw during school hours who
just appeared, so neatly groomed, at the chaperoned events in the school hall.
I longed to be asked to dance and I was terrified of being asked to dance. More
than once I panicked and made a quick escape to the bathroom when it looked as
if a boy was approaching with intent. Then I would stay there, locked in a
stall, until I figured the coast was clear.

I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go to my own fourth-form
ball – a formal affair to which we were expected to bring
an actual date
– but my girlfriends begged and harassed and teased
until we struck a deal.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask one guy. If he says yes, I’ll
come. If he says no, I am off the hook.”

We all agreed that this was fair. So I went to church the
next week, sucked in a deep breath, and went up and asked Dion.

He said yes.

I had such a glorious time that night. Not even the memory
of the dress I’d had custom-made for the occasion (a bright pink satin frock
overlaid with black organza and sporting a big bow on the back) can erase my
smile when I stop to think about that first taste of the surety of being
partnered and the exhilaration of finally relinquishing self-consciousness on
the dance floor.

Dion did not kiss me that night. In fact, he didn’t kiss me
until we were well into the six months we spent as an official couple after
attending the ball. And even then I never really felt it counted because he
never kissed me
with tongue
.

Dion was every bit as nice as I’d judged him to be, the sort
of considerate and respectful first boyfriend parents dream about for their
daughters. In addition to being the high school equivalent of the president, he
ran track, he played in a local Christian rock band,
he
even wrote me a song. But to his credit and my great disappointment, what he
never did was put his tongue in my mouth or his hands anywhere he would have
been embarrassed for our pastor to see them.
 

When he broke up with me after six chaste months, he told me
it was because he felt as if he were dating his sister.

“Perhaps,” I thought resentfully, “if you’d kissed me with
tongue I might have felt a little less like your sister.”

* * *

When Dion broke up with me I was determined not to turn
seventeen without having experienced
real
kissing. In retrospect, this is perhaps one of the clearest examples of my
ability to resolutely and willfully pursue experience for experience’s sake –
an ability that has not always served me well.

The person who served me up my first “real kiss” was the
friend of a friend. We were out together, part of a larger group on a Friday
night. We’d gone to the one movie theater in town and then back to someone’s
house to watch another movie. We sat at the back of the room together, cuddled
under a blanket. I had heard he had a girlfriend, but I kissed him anyway. If
he wasn’t going to say anything about her, why should I?