this is a story.

This is a story of the closest thing I’ve had to love-at-first-sight paired with the biggest heartbreak I’ve yet to know. The feelings are years old now; I wrote most of this in late 2016, when the breakup was raw but my memory was clear. I added a few things in early 2017, after time had passed and I saw Hamilton and my feelings morphed from anguish to acceptance. This story is years old, though I’ve returned to it a few times each year, wondering if this was the time to finally hit “Publish.”

And now is the time. Not because of any anniversary or revelation or resurfacing feelings, but because these words do no good sitting with the other 21 drafts I have in my “Writing” folder. Though these feelings and this story are old, they were mine. Are mine, still. And putting them into the world is a reminder — to me and to you — that there is no shame in loving hard, hurting deeply, and the work it takes to pick yourself up from that. I reread this story and see — I can feel — who I was that summer, that season of love and heartbreak, that October night when I wrote most of this.

Maybe you will find a piece of yourself in these words, too.

//

I walked into my apartment after work and it felt void of him. The lights were off and it was already dark outside; I worked well past five-’o-clock to avoid this exact moment. The floor was clean; I power cleaned last night, when I’m stressed or sad or need something I can control. It was as if, through last night’s fervid vacuuming and dusting, I could will any trace of him from this place.

He was the first guest in my home. He came to visit two weeks after I moved in, ten days after I started a new job.

“Is that going to be okay?” he asked, cautious and careful of providing space, allowing time to settle and be alone. 

“Of course,” I replied. “I want you here. I want you to be a part of this.”

He was the first to see my color-coordinated books on their shelves. He crouched over to read all of their spines before taking off his jacket, turning back to me to ask when I had gotten this one, how I had liked that one. He raised an eyebrow when he saw I owned “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, found the spine of “Becoming Wise,” the book we had both been reading when we met. His one carry-on bag for the weekend, which I’d learn was typical of his minimalism-except-books lifestyle, was the first thing to sit in my mustard chair, spilling open with the four books he brought for the plane.

He was the first to sleep in my bed; it had been delivered just hours before he arrived, which was not the plan. It should have arrived a week or so before, but a mix-up with the IKEA order and the IKEA delivery company brought it to my apartment during my lunch hour on the day of his arrival. I scrambled to put on sheets and a comforter, pretending like I had not been sleeping on a makeshift bed on the floor for two weeks. He crawled into this new bed even before I did, while I was washing my face at the sink and feeling self-conscious about my choice of sleeping attire, and my whole life he was witnessing.

We hadn’t seen each other since the beginning of June, and even then we hadn’t spent more than 80-some hours together. We had been far from our homes, across the country for a conference unrelated to our day jobs. We were pulled together in a sterile, fluorescent-lit classroom by an icebreaker, a meet-and-greet game where everyone in the room stands up, the facilitator asks a question, and you travel to either side of the room based on your answer. This side for Coca Cola, the other side for Pepsi. This side for waking up early, the other for staying up late.

The third or fourth question was, “Are you planning to go to seminary?”; this side for yes, that side for no.

Our answers led us to the middle of the room. We found ourselves in a circle with two other faces I will never remember because I only saw him. 

“I’m not sure,” I said. 

“Me neither,” he said. “Maybe.” 

I talked about why, he talked about why, and I tried to remember the last time I made such prolonged eye contact with someone. The next question was asked. I don’t remember it, but I know we moved to opposite sides of the room. 

But we were pulled together again and again. We were signed up for the same breakout sessions. We ended up in the same small group for discussion. We sat near each other during presentations and meals and – finally, on the last night of the conference – at a bar with the rest of our newly-made friends.

We walked there together, slightly behind everyone else, talking and asking questions and digging deeper into who the other was. He wrote; I did, too, but not with as much discipline as him. I went to school in the Midwest; so had he. We cared about books and coffee and our families, had a complicated relationship with the church and God, and searched for (and usually found) meaning everywhere and in everything.

We arrived at the bar. A drag queen was singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” and we took shots of whiskey. We danced to Whitney Houston and drank gins. We danced to every song in a circle with our larger group until, finally, we found each other face-to-face. The music was still blaring, the drag queens singing another song, but it went silent for me as we left the bar so we could talk without the strobe lights. We found a bench and talked for almost four hours. We kissed a bit, too, but mostly talked and talked and talked until it was five-’o-clock in the morning and breakfast was at 7:30. I snuck back to my hotel room, my conference roommate peacefully asleep, and willed myself to obey the drag queen’s lyrics as I tried to fall asleep: Hold on to that feeling...

We sat next to each other at the final session the next morning. I remember nothing of what was said, but I remember when our knees moved from three inches to one inch away from each others’. He bought me a coffee before we left for the airport and asked if he could write to me, if we could stay in touch through letters. We did. He sent me letters and poems and his favorite book. I wrote back.

He came to visit.

He quickly became a home for me, for my heart and soul after weary days. I loved him so quickly, so deeply, so fully. That’s how love happens sometimes. It sneaks up on you and hits you over the head with the best kind of frying pan — but one that spits out cartoon hearts and unicorns and, instead of giving you a bump on the head, fills it with the reality of your love for this other being and their love for you. His was the conversation I looked forward to each night. Our trips to see each other were the highlight of each month. It was the kind of love that felt like home, that made me want to stay in each present moment because it was so, so good, but that also made me want to fast forward to see where it would lead us.

But sometimes, a different kind of frying pan sneaks up on you -- heartbreak. We did not last past fall, after secrets surfaced and I learned new truths and had to come to terms with a different reality of our time together. We broke up over the phone; he offered to fly to me, to work on this in person, but I went dancing with friends instead. I had a plane ticket to visit him booked for later that month, purchased the day before but already past the 24-hour refund deadline. I went anyway, saw Hamilton, visited friends, and didn’t reach out to see him.

I will see him in my kitchen, standing at my counter and making a pour over for me; standing at my bookshelf, quietly brushing over each title; reading in my bed, lying on “his” side. He was here, had been here, and will always be a part of this time of my life, this home. But, slowly by slowly, I’ve been removing the traces of him: the photo of us taken at the bar pulled off the wall; the postcard he sent from a trip removed from the nightstand; the last of the coffee he brought for me gone. Those memories and traces have been pulled into a folder and tucked away in a corner of a closet.

And tonight, with the lights off and the quiet and few traces left of him, I could catch a glimpse of how this could be okay. How I will be okay, how my home will be my home, even without him. After I turned the lights on, and the reality reemerged – he is not here – I whispered:

But I still am.

i do.

“My friends and I don’t belong to each other by blood, by marriage, by law, by ceremony.
We owe each other nothing. Yet we DO take care of each other in sickness and in health.
Till death do we part, apparently. Because we just love each other. We just DO.”
-Elizabeth Gilbert

These words, from Elizabeth Gilbert, have been sitting with me for a full week. They’ve been rattling around in my bones, showing up behind my eyelids as I drift off to sleep. She posted an update on her Facebook page, which I didn’t even know I followed until it popped up on a recent scroll, though I’m guessing I liked it during the “Eat Pray Love” times, or when my own interpretations of that novel led me to make some major life changes (well, as many “major” life changes as a 21-year-old college student at a liberal arts college in Minnesota can make). She had surgery recently and posted an ode to her friends as they helped her come back to health. It is an ode to the voluntary love they share, the unspoken vows they have with another, to care for and be present with and to love, always. If you want to read the full passage, it’s here.

I’ve got a pretty weird and random faith in the divine; I don’t believe that God makes things happen or not happen for us, and don’t you dare console me about a breakup or a diagnosis or any shitty thing (or any good thing, for that matter) with the phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.” And yet! I still believe that words -- books or poems or posts by Elizabeth Gilbert, for example -- come to us when we most need to hear them. That words show up in the display section of the library, or as a gift in the mail, or on our Facebook scrolls for a divine reason. This post and these words struck a particular chord with me (see: bone-rattling and eyelid-movie-screening mentioned above). I needed these words this week, and there they were.

If you’ve been around my Instagram this past year, you may have seen that in the course of a few months in 2019, I became an ordained minister and officiated not one but two! weddings of some of my dearest friends. It was the greatest honor of my life to stand with them, to speak to them, as they made hopeful, deliberate promises to one another and the life they share together. I rehearsed the ceremony in front of my mom for each wedding, getting all of my ugly tears and snot out in her living room instead of in front of Owen and Marilee and Ben and Natalie and their closest friends and family. I believe in their love -- and their love has given me further belief in marriage, partnership, and love in general.

And, if you’ve been around my Instagram this past year, you may have also noticed that there are lots of pictures of me. Just me! I am single, without a partner, though I’ve gone on dates (one day I’ll write a post about the hilarious blind date I went on where a man tried to convince me that the Earth is, in fact, a snowglobe) and actually dated (like boyfriend-girlfriend-level dated) someone this year. But, I’m not near the kind of romantic love that leads to a decision to enter into a lifelong partnership involving the government and a marriage license, or a party involving dancing and free wine. 2019 has been a year full of marriage for me -- writing sermons about love, choosing poems to read that represent that love, crafting vows to carry that love beyond a ceremony and into life -- but it hasn’t led me closer to my own kind of partnership. My family has not-so-jokingly mentioned that they’re going to create a Bachelor audition video for me titled “Always The Officiant, Never the Bride.” (At this point, who knows! Hey, Chris Harrison...?!)

I write about that -- the gentle irony of a human who’s been single for most of her 20s ushering people into marriage -- not to gain sympathy or to have you set me up with your boyfriend’s cousin’s older brother (though online dating is a bit of a drag so maybe I will take that blind date), or even for the unsolicited “You Do You, Girl!” encouragement so often bestowed upon 28-year-old single gals. I write about that because one does not need to be married, or even close to it, to understand the concept and philosophy of marriage, of love, to have the capacity to hold two souls in your heart as they make promises to each other and to those in their circle, to wholeheartedly rejoice with them as they say, “I do.” And I write about this because this year has caused me, like Elizabeth Gilbert’s surgery caused her, to think about all of the other marriage-like relationships I have in my life, particularly those with dear friends.

My friends and I haven’t stood up in front of our loved ones and make vows to one another, though a strong argument could be made that vows are embedded throughout our friendship -- in every action we do, in every word we say to one another. They’re in the Instagram posts I write, the karaoke duets I sing, the weekly phone calls, the cards sent just because, the Venmos sent for coffee on Friday mornings, the gifts outside of birthdays. They’re in the promise to show up when shit gets hard and messy and sometimes a little weird, and the follow-through of that promise.

The vows are in the listening to understand even when the idea or thought being shared is a little bonkers, in the holding space for one another as we get to that realization on our own, in the calling each other out on our unhealthy enneagram-type bullshit when necessary. They’re in sharing a bed when we stay at each other’s homes, even though there’s a guest room or a couch and we are in our late 20s, so we can fall asleep debriefing the night’s wild adventures or giggling over the song we sang in our 8th-grade choir. The promises are in the crying and laughing and praying and dancing and hugging, in the FaceTimes and cross-country flights and the postal service’s delivery of word after word of gratitude, strength, inside jokes, love. 

The vows are this Elizabeth Gilbert post, sent and shared with a little heart emoji. The vows are lived, every day. And these friendship vows are just as valid as romantic love vows, even without rings or a priest or a DJ to mark them.  

At both weddings I officiated, I tried to say something like this. How these couples were gathered on one particular day to make these vows, but that this ceremony -- these words they were about to speak -- were just the start of this love-filled life together, of promises to show up and love and be there for each other, through the best and worst of it. That the not-so-glamorous, everyday living that came after this Big Exciting Day, was what mattered. “I do” is a verb. 

And that’s true for any kind of relationship. Vows be damned, words written in cards or typed out on Instagram or spoken over coffee or wine be damned, too, if they’re not put into action. Words matter, but what matters more is how we make those words come alive, take on meaning with our partners and friends and chosen loves of all sorts. 

Just like I believe something divine planted these words in front of me, I also believe in some kind of magical divine that has connected me to my dearest loves. I hope that, one day, I’ll have a ceremony with a partner where I can write my own vows and ugly cry in front of a bunch of people and dance my ass off and -- above all else -- promise to love and try, and to keep trying even when those vows are broken and get a little beat up over the years.

And though I probably won’t throw a ceremony for me and each of my friends to celebrate our chosen unions (though that sounds like an amazing use of my time and expendable income), let this little blog post be a reminder to all of us -- single, married, coupled, humans in love and searching for love, humans who have given up on love -- that other kinds of love abound, if we choose to see it. That our lives and every relationship we have can be our own ceremonies, our own vows. 

That each day can be a reminder to everyone in our circles: “I do.”

the answer was yes.

When I flew to Fargo-Moorhead to interview for my job that wasn’t mine at the time, I snuck away to young blood. I had extended my trip past the typical 36-hours-across-the-country-and-back schedule that’s typical in Residence Life to make a long weekend out of it — the “it” not being the interview, but the being home. I was in the *tHicK* of it then: my last term of grad school, my last months in my job, balancing being present for my education and my students’ education, their lives and my own life, while white-knuckling the looming figure-out-a-job-and-geographical-location decision.

So I was home, but I had articles to read and reports to respond to and, beyond that, a deeper question: Could I live here? Could I make this town home again, all on my own? So I went to Young Blood on a Saturday afternoon, just me. Not I-grew-up-in-Fargo me or I-went-to-college-here me, but I-might-move-here-as-a-27-year-old me. I bought a cup of coffee and a refill and perched myself at the window seat. Between sending GIFs of reassurance to my RAs after a hard duty night and underlining a source for my COMPS, I let the question wander around my brain and my heart: Could I live here? Could I find a church and a coffee shop and a community here? Could I make this place home again? I imagined coming to this coffee shop on a different Saturday in a different month, with a different job and responsibilities, maybe to read. or to write or blog, or to make friends with the baristas or smile at a handsome man from across the room (hey, a gal can dream). I imagined having coffee dates with old and new friends, what it might feel like to be a regular somewhere, to belong here.

There’s much more to say but this caption is already long so the answer was yes. Yes, I could. A complicated yes at times, and not to all the questions I asked back then, but still yes. This is home. Where I read and write and have coffee dates, where I order my first cup for here, my refill to go. This photo was taken this morning, looking out that same window.

heart-filling times.

A handful of weeks ago, in the midst of some heart turmoil times, I thought of an essay in “Tiny Beautiful Things.” I specifically thought of one particular line that I needed to read to have the courage to carry on through said heart turmoil times; the words I believed would grant me permission to do the thing I had to do.

When I went to pluck my copy off the shelf to locate these words, it was gone! Not totally surprising, since I think I have owned at least six copies of this book and have gleefully given each one of them away. So I did the thing anyway and survived without the line and ordered a new copy for myself.

And now I’ve been rereading. I haven’t read this book cover to cover since I was 22 and unemployed and sleeping in the trundle bed I lugged across the country to Portland. I am going slow, underlining words and folding in corners of pages and sitting for awhile with the ‘Yours, Sugar’ at the end of every piece.

The last few weeks, I’ve been sitting in some heart-filling times — a snap-of-the-fingers shift from the turmoil, just like that. Karaoke singing and nature walks and bookstore adventuring, big belly laughs and big questions and big conversations that get right to the good stuff. In one essay, Sugar writes, “The whole deal about loving truly and for real and with all you’ve got has everything to do with letting those we love see what made us.”

These heart-filling times have only been so because they’ve been filled with some of my heart-people, in Fargo and Minnesota and across the country: the ones who see me, all of me, when I’m at my fullest and when I’m at my turmoiliest. And who let me sit with them, too.

This wasn’t the line I was looking for when I started, but it was the reminder I needed all along.

arrows.

When I was 24, I got two tattoos: a list of latitude and longitude coordinates on my right shoulder blade and an arrow on my right arm. It’s always easy to explain the first one; they are tangible numbers that translate into a spot on a map, tied to time periods in my life when I called that place home. I like answering questions about that one — it’s concrete, specific, and makes sense even to people who don’t like or understand tattoos. There’s not much wondering or meaning-making you have to do to get its purpose on my body.

The arrow though? That one’s always hard to explain, and my answer changes every time someone asks about it. Sometimes I got it because you have to pull an arrow back before letting it go. Sometimes I got it because I heard that Kasey Musgraves song where she told us to follow our arrows, and I thought it was cheesy but in a good, true way.

But if you asked me right now I would say I have this tattoo as a reminder. (Aren’t they all?) I want to remember (and believe) that I can point myself in a direction and go. Not just point myself to new places to travel or to new jobs or new hobbies; those tangible things that show up in our calendars or our camera rolls or, sometimes, on our bodies as tattoos. I want to remind myself that I can bravely move toward the indefinable things that make up the parts of each day — the relationships and vocations and goals and the things I journal about, the hopes I whisper to my closest circle, the swirly truths I know but can’t always say.

I want to remind myself that when I want or need or deeply feel something, I can thrust myself fully toward that hard, wild, brave thing. And that I can trust that I will land where I need to.

Ask me tomorrow, maybe it’ll be different. For now, my tattoo is like me in this picture: looking ahead, courage coming breath by breath.