Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Obvious, Even

I just came across a picture in my phone from 2015. It's the first picture I ever took with Skylar.


We had met in person for the first time just the day before this. I had flown to Cleveland to go to a wedding with him. I thought I was being crazy. I've told that whole story before.

I felt like a crazy person for trekking halfway across the country to meet up with an internet stranger, but I convinced myself this would make a fun story no matter how it turned out. I felt like when I looked back much later in my life I would probably regret not taking chances like this and being a little more spontaneous while I was young and single. There was very little chance that I would later regret having done this. I mean, if it went bad enough, I would just be murdered and therefore not really able to regret anything at all.

To be honest, I really didn't think this would go anywhere. Skylar lived in Wisconsin. I had put down roots in Salt Lake City. It was frankly a miracle that we even connected on Tinder during his one-hour layover in an airport twenty minutes from my house.

Skylar might claim otherwise, but he wasn't really much more optimistic than I was. He called me as I was sitting in the Salt Lake airport getting ready to board my red eye flight to Cleveland. "Are you sure you really want to come all the way out here?" he asked me.

"Well, this is a fine time to be asking me a question like that!" I told this person I had never met.

Skylar said he just suddenly felt a lot of pressure and "what if you meet me and you're just disappointed."

Looking back it's amazing to me that Skylar thought meeting him could ever amount to anyone's disappointment.

I have since scolded him for this phone call on a semiannual basis. I put a reminder on the calendar and do this every six months. I will continue to do this until he or I or both have been killed in a completely avoidable accident.

I actually met him in a hotel lobby the day after I landed in Cleveland. He had just driven in from Madison. That night we ate tacos on a small bistro-lit patio at a restaurant on the end of town. He made me laugh as he adorably explained to me how he successfully accumulated millions of points of something called neopets.com, a website I still haven't looked up.

"It's too bad this relationship probably can't go anywhere," I thought to myself.

Nearly five years later he sits in the room next to me as I write these words. We're socially distancing from everyone else together, in our pajamas and wedding rings. He's clankity-clank typing on his laptop, hopefully studying for medical school and not checking his Neopets account. I sometimes forget to be amazed that we got here. I guess in hindsight the trajectory that once seemed impossible really looks inevitableobvious, even.

If you get on social media or check the news right now, it's not hard to find hundreds or thousands of people doomsdaying their way through COVID-19 and other apocalyptic predictions. It's easy to get so full of anxiety in this that it actually becomes debilitating.

Sometimes when I get feeling overwhelmed by bad news and the world's reactions to it, I remind myself that I can't fix everything; instead, I think about one thing I can do to make my corner of the world a little better, and I try to do that.

And then I remind myself that although bad things can and do happen, you never know what good trajectories that seem unlikely now will later look inevitableobvious, even.

~It Just Gets Stranger

16 comments:

  1. Just so y’all know, your story is why I am willing to talk to the boys I meet on apps, even when they’re just in town for business, or a layover, or a funeral. Because you never know what could happen!

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    1. For every 1,000 murderers there's a Skylar (who so far doesn't seem to be a murderer). Totally worth playing the odds.

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  2. Thanks for sharing this happy. We need more happy right now!

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  3. I met a guy two months ago who is only in my area until the end of April for a training. He lives thousands of miles away in Hawaii (he’s military). I still don’t understand how we even matched — he’s further away than my settings. But we did, when we both were feeling lonely yet open to new things.

    Fast forward to today, and he’s not allowed to leave base due to COVID-19. He may be here longer than originally planned, but I don’t know if or when I’ll get to see him again.

    I’m torn between frustration that something good but most likely temporary may have been cut even shorter and grateful that he came into my life when I needed him. We’re still talking constantly and plan to video chat this weekend (in lieu of when we usually would get together).

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    1. Not for nothing but I'd follow a guy to Hawaii . . . .

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    2. Haha I have friends in HR where I work who were trying to convince me to transfer to our office there, but that office is a call center and I’m in marketing. Also, would you follow a guy to Hawaii after only two months? I’d happily go visit though!

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    3. Update: I took advantage of low airfare and no change fees and booked a flight to Hawaii later this year.

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  4. No lie, Neopets was an answer in the New York Times crossword puzzle earlier this week. Or maybe the LA Times. Our newspaper does both. Either way, it was there!

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  5. I met the love of my life in my Statistics class at university 33 years ago. Actually, I saw him in my class sitting in the front row next to a smart girl and I sat in the back row hiding out and never spoke to him. Once day I had to leave class early to meet with my advisor and when I got on the city bus afterwards he was there, sitting alone. I plopped down to ask him what I had missed. I fell madly in love on the bus and went home to call my friend and tell her "I met the man I'm going to marry". We have 5 grown up children now and although we never actually married and therefore never had to actually divorce, we are not together anymore. Still we remain friends after all these years and I can't imagine what my life would have been like if I had not sat down beside him that day.

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  6. "We're socially distancing from everyone else together, in our pajamas and wedding rings." I think my face actually turned into the heart eye emoji when I read this.

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    1. This line weirdly made me tear up. I think social distancing has turned me into a romantic softy somehow.

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  7. I met my husband through Yahoo personals when I was trying to cheer myself up by convincing myself there were people more pathetic on earth and Yahoo personals was where they were hanging out.

    This was before meeting people online was an actual thing that sane people did on a regular basis and everyone told me he was a serial killer.

    I think I've shared this before . . . . in any case - sometimes taking chances pays off (and I'm not a chance-taker by far). And if good things like this can happen - there is more good in this world than I realized.

    Thank you for sharing your stories of Sky with us - we all need to feel-goods right now.

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  8. This post could not have hit my heart any harder. Thank you so much for this. It's honestly exactly what I needed today.

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  9. Oh my god of course Skylar was a Neopets kid. Everything makes sense now.

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  10. Off to go google “neopet.” In my head, it is something like the Tamagotchi of my adolescence.

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