Two Days – A Look Back Part III

TWENTY FOUR: I dated a man named Anthony for most of my 24^th year.  Although I am glad I did not marry this man, I am equally glad that we had our 14 month relationship.  Ant was the first person I told about my Ben ordeal, and he rolled up his sleeves and set to work on turning my self esteem around.  He taught me a wonderful and important lesson – that boyfriends can be nice, that relationships can be fun and safe.  We worked together at the Ohio outdoor center until the fall I turned 24.  I had decided already that I wanted to get my Masters degree and study in England, and so he procured himself a work visa for that country (he is Australian, so it wasn’t too hard.)  I flew there a few weeks ahead of him and got settled into my little house on Chepstow Close in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon – Ant followed close behind and moved in with a friend who lived in the Fulham area of London.  I studied and tended bar, and he tended bar in London, and we took the 2 hour train ride to see each other whenever we could.

 

We rented a paddleboat and ate homemade egg salad sandwiches on the river beneath Warwick Castle for our 1 year anniversary.  He asked me to marry him and I said yes.  And then three weeks later, he flew to America and stepped off the plane and into the arms of my friend, Kate.  For a couple of weeks he was quiet and subdued on the phone, and then one night at 3 am my time, he called me and said it was over.  I was anguished.  For days thereafter, I kept finding notes that he’d written and left for me all over the house before flying home – little I Love You’s in my sock drawer, I Miss You’s taped to cans of soup, How Are You The Future Mrs. Clark’s tucked into the fridge.  I found an old pair of his shoes on the back porch and sobbed into them for an hour before forlornly dumping them in the trash.  It was like he’d died.

 

The whiplash-inducing turnabout also taught me a lesson – that sometimes the ones you love and trust the most can let you down.  And that’s ok, and everything will be ok, as long as you tended to yourself and your outside friend relationships while you were dating the guy.  Dozens of wonderful people wrote me emails, called, took me dancing, made me suppers, and were just all around champs for the several months that it took to feel better.  A caring professor from home wrote me and offered me an acting job and a place to stay.  I cried more tears, of gratitude this time, and accepted the job.

 

TWENTY FIVE: So a few days before my 25^th birthday I found myself I walking through the lovely brick buildings of my gorgeous alma mater, heading to the space where the rest of the cast and crew were assembled.  The stage manager and her actor husband were getting ready to watch their college football team get creamed and then blow out the candles on her birthday cake, which (once they found out about my impending birthday) became a joint cake for both of us.  It came up that I was turning 25.  And that they had a son my age, who was single.  And oh, was I single, too?  Hmmm.  That’s, uh . . . interesting.

 

The show was a success, and so was the one after it, and I found minimum wage work in a bakery through the same supportive professor and his family, and settled to the work of selecting my long term home and long term career.  I was having a good time in Indiana, but it wasn’t where I wanted to live.  I was having a good time being an actor/baker, but I could barely get by on those wages even without paying rent; in fact, this is about when my credit card balance leapt from zero to 4 figures.

 

Part of that debt included plane tickets to Denver, CO.  As it turns out, my coworkers on the play DID have a single son my age, and we were introduced at an October weekend at their South Carolina home, when he caught my cautious attention before immediately moving out to Denver.  A few months of emails and phone calls later, a very nervous me boarded a plane and headed off to a potentially Hugely Awkward Week With a Stranger in Denver.  My fears were for naught, though – at the end of the week, we were officially dating.  The ice-skating, hiking, expensive Italian dinner, snowshoeing trip, botanical gardens visit, and all the rest of the whirlwind romantic stuff he’d planned wasn’t the reason per se, although it certainly didn’t hurt.

 

Attempting to summarize this year into a blog-sized blurb it is proving almost impossible.  The year you meet your husband – this is a big year.  This is a year deserving of reams of paper.  But I only have two days left until I turn 30, so I have got to wrap this up.  So, the rest of year 25 in summary: Back to Indiana.  Pack up car, drive to North Carolina to live with two fantastic people while looking for my own new home.  Pack up the car and drive to Hilton Head Island to act in third professional play.  Boyfriend visits.  Lots of friends.  Good weekend together.  Pack up car, drive back to North Carolina to stay with same two people.  Drop off the car with the parents and fly to California for a summer job as a naturalist in Yosemite National Park (among other places.)  Fly back to Virginia and meet boyfriend, together attend father’s retirement ceremony, drive north and see friends in Philly, friends in Boston, a wedding in New York, and friends in Maine, before starting a vacation to Canada with new boyfriend and his parents (the stage manager and actor from a million paragraphs ago.)  Drive south again and move into apartments across the street from one another in North Carolina.  And settle.  And breathe.

 

After a year like that, fun as it was, I can honestly say that eating Chinese food on the floor of my empty new apartment with Patrick by my side, knowing that I was stuck there for at least a year, was the absolute best feeling EVER.

 

TWENTY SIX: Luckily for the length of this post, 26 was relatively boring, as years of my twenties go.  Generally, domestic happiness and uneventful-ness make for uninteresting reading.  The long and short of it is, I devoted the latter half of my twenties to responsibility.  This is when I started this blog, and why the name – I knew I needed to get a job to pay off my debts, both on cards, student loans, and for the new(er) car that I knew I was going to need.  But it sure dialed down the excitement.

 

What I didn’t appreciate was how hard was going to be to find gainful employment.  Although I temped full time during my search, the crap wage I got didn’t pay the bills, and nothing permanent was coming through – at this point, my credit cards climbed up to their peak at five figures.  I had to charge my rent some months, all my food, my gas.  I charged a new professional suit to my creaking cards, and then put it on and hiked all over a dozen professional parks, faking smiles for the receptionists and dropping off my beautifully written, wonderfully formatted, completely useless resumes.  I was beginning to despair, until finally, finally, a long term temp job landed me into something permanent, something in manufacturing, something in the HR field.  Thus was my fate for the next several years sealed.

 

I bought a gently used car.  I paid down my cards, a little.  And later that year, I hired a real estate agent and (with Patrick’s input) bought myself a house.