What a Trip | 16 June 2022
I spent days packing and fretting. Would the trip turn out as I had hoped or was I living a pipe dream? Six months texting and now meeting in-person for the first time, in Australia. Is this real?
BNR Response
It had been a long time since I felt excitement about the potential of a relationship. Years since I’d felt any kind of hope. One day my girlfriend told me that, upon returning home to Oz, she’d become reacquainted with an old friend she believed to be the man of my dreams. When she put us in touch, I was so tired of the online dating game that I approached the introduction with fatigue and carelessness.
We started texting, in earnest, at the tail end of the North American winter. Sam. Samson. His candor and accessibility were disarming. We had things in common: divorce, love loss, ambition, a love of the ocean, children. He was kind, and he thought I was funny.
As the weather warmed in Southern California, so too did my feelings for him. His low, raspy voice exciting me during our first phone call, but it was interrupted and ultimately cut short by a teenager/golden retriever emergency, so we reverted to text. The texts grew longer and, when one of us knew the other was asleep or unavailable, we’d send each other emails. The dialogue was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before: even in the earliest of days, no topic was taboo and no confession was too vulnerable. I’d simply never had feelings like this before, even with the man I’d married and had my son with, and he claimed the same. I started imagining myself the lead character in a film - the middle-aged woman giddy with schoolgirl excitement that had long been abandoned. I danced in my bedroom to “Blister in the Sun”, something I hadn’t done since college. I started wearing lip gloss again.
After only a month, Sam and I decided that we should meet in-person to see if this virtual relationship was as life-changing in “real life” as it was in our dreamy distance. It only took a few weeks for both of us to move schedules and teenager time, and to squirrel away enough money for the tickets and planned escapades. I was going to stay with him, my Sam, which made me eager and nervous. I wasn’t used to relying on someone else: to not having a back-up plan. The days passed swiftly as I anticipated our long-awaited rendezvous, and before I knew it I was planning which jewelry would match with my outfits.
Pressing linen paper bag waist pants and baseball caps into my bag, and I felt myself disassociate from the present. Despite all my previous hurt, heartbreak, jadedness, and scars, my mind couldn’t help but race through fantasies for the future. Could Sam really be my person? I’d never believed in soul mates, in the lightning bolt, until now. Was remarriage in the cards for me? Shockingly, I could already see myself accepting his proposal if he were to get down on one knee. I counted on my fingers, we’d only been in each other’s lives for 7 weeks. My mind pivoted quickly to the shadows: was I being catfished? Or fooled? Was this some sort of elaborate love bombing exercise meant to humiliate or manipulate me? It felt too good to be true. In all my 46 years of living, I didn’t have any evidence that happiness could come so easy. All these thoughts raced through my head as I chose sundresses and tee shirts to pack for the trip.
The flight wasn’t bad from California. The film in my imagination continued to flourish – the lovestruck divorcee making the grand pilgrimage West for true love and possibly a new life. A fresh start. A blank slate just when I thought maybe my chances had all been spent. The soundtrack was as vivid as my imagination. “Iko Iko” on the runway, the pitch of my voiceover matching the excited tenor of the music, butterflies emerging from their 11-year hibernation. “Downeaster Alexa” flying over the vast Pacific. Being thrust back into my chair as the 747 came to a forceful and unnatural stop, wheels down, was met with the eager and youthful voice of Paul McCartney singing, “'I’ve just seen a face, I can't forget the time or place, where we just met, she's just the girl for me, and I want all the world to see, we've met, mm-mm-mm-mm-mm…”
I disembarked from the plane, my two weekenders full of everything I needed for a fortnight. Pushing through the Sydney airport, my heels had wings as I grew more and more impatient to meet my Samson in the flesh.
Exiting customs to that bittersweet area where people are either gathered to greet you with hugs and tears or they aren’t – I had a knot in my belly. Would we recognize each other? Would he be the guy to embarrass me with a goofy chauffeur sign, as he would if Hollywood were producing the movie in my mind? I realized I didn’t know how he moved, how he talked to strangers, how he reacted to other people’s dogs or small children. And as these thoughts were flooding my mind, pulling vellum across my eyes, until there was Sam – right in front of me and cutting right through my self-manufactured haze. He was tall and broad shouldered, with large soft hands and a mild manner. I immediately felt like I was in the presence of the Redwoods I grew up amongst: grounded, calm, humbled, aware of my size.
The weeks passed like a blur and yet as if as a slow-motion all at once. I once heard a TED talk about the different kinds of time: Chronos being the passing of time in sequence, and Kairos being a period of indeterminate time in which something of significance happens. Our liminal time was all Kairos, with every day and every conversation revealing another moment of reckoning, the fulfillment of a longing I didn’t know I had, a healing of unidentified pain. We rollicked on the beach, walked for hours, stayed up all hours talking over bottles of Syrah, woke early to trek to see the sunrise from the summit, and cooked dinner together. It was all so effortless.
Then Chronos caught up with me and I was confronted with a reality I had been avoiding since taxiing in on the tarmac: my time in Oz was up. Our last day together had a dark cloud hanging over it, with neither of us able to really enjoy the time for the countdown until my lift-off. Sam felt far away, somewhere else. I realized that, for all he meant to me, I didn’t know him hardly at all. I didn’t know how to interpret his quiet, his brooding, his distraction. My insecurities got the best of me: was it me? Had I overstayed my welcome? Was I too much? Was it all too much? Then I forcefully quieted those destructive thoughts and reminded myself to trust in Samson, in what he had told me, in what I knew of his character and his word.
The goodbye was quick and awful. I cried for the first half of the flight back, full of loneliness and doubt, and then chose to escape by focusing on the future and making plans. When I got home, I was surprised by how glad I was to be there. I missed the smell of half burnt cedar-scented candles, my front porch, my cats, my trees. My soft sheets welcomed me that night while the cold half of the bed haunted me.
I didn’t worry the first day back when I didn’t hear from Sam. Between the time difference and the headiness of it all I figured that it would take us both a few days to settle back into our divided everydays. After two days, I tried but was unable to get ahold of him. I sent love and took deep breaths. After a week, I received a cryptic email that was too short to explain much of anything. It hinted at needing room to reconcile such a shift in his reality, something going on with his kid, stuff on his mind. When I reached out, he failed to engage. I meditated and turned tarot cards.
My movie was taking a predictable turn, one I had hoped I had finally evaded: the woman who walked herself down the primrose path, overeager and misreading the signs; the man who was overwhelmed, misunderstood, and emotionally distant. I played Billie Holiday on a loop, her aching voice ringing in my head as much as my ears, “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather, since my man and I ain’t together, keeps raining all the time.” After a few weeks, I stopped calling and counted the days between texts. After two months, I wrote a letter. I didn’t hold my breath, but I was ready for the day when my phone would ring once again.