Rustling through the undergrowth on the abandoned, frozen shores of small lake in rural southwestern Minnesota a few weeks ago, I realized how life can take you to the most peculiar places. As I am struggling through prickly ash in search of news photos of a Ford pickup sticking out of the ice like a discarded toy - and hoping the person who allegedly stole it and left it there doesn’t come back and kidnap me - I wonder to what places your life takes you.
I think about you a lot. I know I’m terrible at phoning and emailing and going to parties – and have been even since before we moved well beyond the suburban bubble. But that’s a personality quirk, not a reflection of fading sentiment.
I wonder how cold it is where you are in North Dakota, what your school kids are doing today in St. Paul, whether you're wearing real maternity clothes now, if you’re eating lunch out someplace in Minneapolis or practicing soccer indoors, how you like your new church and if your classes are going well in Thailand. And since there’s no way I can know what you're up to in that exact moment, I substitute by remembering things we did together. Trying to pull Laura’s sweatshirt over your head after you’d had too much to drink. That time you lit the stove on fire making cream cheese wontons with Nick. Listening to Harry Potter while falling asleep in France. Taking a late-night dip in Lake Sag with what might as well have been a stranger. Drinking Radlers together. Walking into the computer lab at 3 a.m. after getting done with The Record to find you jumping from chair to chair in a hyperactivity brought on by over-exhaustion and poly-sci papers. Sharing a few bottles of wine with you only to wake up to the worst and only hangover of my life. Getting dripped on watching the Twins play outdoors.
The more I remember, the more I want to go back. Life is good, but I wish you were here, next door, so the threads of our existence could knit themselves together in a way that only seems to work with physical proximity. To be honest, I haven’t found anyone who quite fills the space you used to hold. Nice, wonderful people. But not people who tell me shocking dirty jokes and hug me with that sparkle in their eyes. Not people who have expansive dreams and recite poetry on roofs. Not people who are exactly at the same peculiar point in their lives where things go from hypothesis to heart-stopping reality while the future still holds a sheen of what’s possible – who do I chatter across my cube to about that? There’s Nate, of course. Wonderful, handsome, brainy Nate. But no one can be all things, and he sort of lacks in discussing the merits of Ryan Gosling, the south of France and dark chocolate. No offense.
I could pick up the phone and call you, but somehow it just isn’t the same.
Looking backward has a way of putting one off balance, and I don’t want to lose my equilibrium. So, I’ll keep moving forward: keep joining groups, working, and hoping. In the meantime, I wanted you to know there’s a girl at the side of a frozen lake clutching a low-hanging branch and hoping you’re doing well, wherever you are.
