Love at the Speed of Email (21 page)

Until then I have the
opportunity to serve these people. Right now that means working to prevent the
cholera from spreading, in the hope that fewer of these people die and can
someday leave the camps and return to their villages in the green rolling
hills. And every now and then I have a moment where my heart is filled with
love and compassion.
   

In humanitarian aid
work, feel-good moments are rarer than you might think.
 
Most days are painful struggle.
Cross-cultural misunderstandings.
Being
viewed as a wealthy vending machine.
Feeling perpetually compromised in
your own beliefs, ideals, and desires. Staring into the terrible face of
intense suffering knowing full well that you are completely unable to end the
suffering, that
you barely even know where to begin.

But, today, I had a
humanitarian moment.

“I don’t do it just for the humanitarian moments,” Mike
said. “I don’t think you
can
do this
just for the humanitarian moments. They’re beautiful when they come, but
they’re not enough, and there are not enough of them. I do my work now as best
I can because I still feel more passionate about this than anything else, and I
still believe it does more good than harm. What about you? Why do you keep
working to support humanitarian workers? Why do you keep choosing this? The
last essay I read before I emailed you that first time was the one you wrote
about alternate lives. I loved that essay.”

Then he quoted my own writing to me: “Few of us who live in
the Western world must do exactly what we do to feed and clothe ourselves. Many
times our career choices are really more influenced by a cocktail of duty,
fear, apathy, talent, priorities, and passion. Alternate lives, at least one or
two of them, often lie within reach.”

I stared out to sea again, through the haze hanging over the
cane fields below us and into all that luxurious, promising space beyond.

“I don’t have one good answer to this,” I said. “I still
often sit on planes wondering what I can possibly say in the workshops that I
am going to give that would make it worth the time, the money, the energy and
the risk to get there – for me and for them.” Then I told him a story. “When we
had to postpone the last set of Kenya workshops last year until October because
of the violence, we ran some online discussion groups for counselors and
humanitarian workers in Nairobi. One person, a child advocate, talked about how
overwhelmed and powerless she felt. Stray bullets from the police had killed
two of their students that week.

“We ended up talking a lot that session about that issue of
feeling overwhelmed and powerless, and about what can anchor us in the midst of
situations that provoke those feelings. What do we really have to offer as
helpers, as counselors or humanitarian workers, when people are being killed on
your neighborhood streets? What weapons do we really have to fight against
feeling powerless?

“Someone in that session said that being there was critical,
even if you didn’t know what to say, that your mere presence was hope. They
said that the fact that we were alive, and walking and talking and present, all
sent a message that there was life and hope somewhere and that a different kind
of future was possible. They said that we tend to focus only on the miracles
that Jesus performed but that he must have spent most of his time simply
walking among the people and that that, in
itself
,
must have brought hope.
 

“This theme of the power of presence stuck with me. Presence
can seem like such a small offering. I want to believe that sometimes when I
show up I
sow
some seeds of hope in fields of
violence and despair, but I’m not sure. When I stop to think about it, I am
rarely completely sure of anything anymore.”

I looked again at the dozen horizons glued to Mike’s wine
glass.

“I quoted
Tolle
in that
alternate-lives essay,” I said. “‘Live every moment as if you had chosen it.’
But perhaps I should also have quoted Rilke: ‘Be patient toward all that is
unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked
rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek
the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live
them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you
will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the
answer.’”

I cannot now remember what Mike said next, because as he
said it he also reached up and slid his hand over mine, pulling my arm down
around his shoulders and anchoring it against the living warmth of his chest.

I closed my eyes, blocking out the expanse of
there
for just a second, and felt his
heartbeat against my palm.

* * *

On day ten Mike sent out a mass email to his Melbourne friends
inviting them to come and meet his Aussie girlfriend during a drinks gathering
down there in a couple of days. By this time I’d already figured out that Mike
and I were on. That didn’t stop me from teasing him about his presumption when
the email landed in my inbox.

 
“We’ve talked about
almost everything else under the sun but we couldn’t manage to clarify our
relationship status before addressing it in email?” I asked. “And not just any
email, mind you, a mass email?”

Mike rolled his eyes and grinned.

“Technicality,” he said.

By the time we parted ways five days later at Melbourne
Airport, we were utterly exhausted, emotionally overloaded, and officially
dating.

I sat alone in my departure lounge, waiting to board my
flight back to Los Angeles, and thought about the charged intensity of the last
two weeks – of Mike’s smile, the way he made me laugh, the night we finally
shared our first kiss and the sandy applause I heard when I dropped the pair of
sandals I was holding to the beach so that I could wrap my arms around him.
Then I wondered whether I would ever see Mike again.
 

Los
Angeles, USA

I never did get an answer to the letter I sent to Travis
telling him I’d be moving out a couple of days after I got back to L.A. I
didn’t get an answer to the letter I sent to his sister and mother either – a
long, frank record of what I had seen unfold over the previous eight months.
Without more tangible family support and some antipsychotic medication, I told
them, I wasn’t sure how much longer Travis could continue to cope the way he
was currently coping. His life was unraveling.

When I boarded the plane in Melbourne, I wasn’t sure what
I’d find on the other end of my journey. It probably wasn’t the wisest decision
I’ve ever made to get off the plane in Los Angeles and go straight back to our
apartment alone, but that’s what I did.

I was hugely relieved when I got there to find Travis at
home, alive, and in apparently decent spirits. As it turned out, he had gotten
my letter and wasn’t overjoyed that I was moving out, but he didn’t appear to
be unduly dented by the news either. He didn’t mention anything about my
letters to his family. And he was going to Las Vegas that weekend.

I was moved out by the time he got back.

More than a dozen of my friends showed up on Saturday to
help me relocate. I am not used to being so completely on the receiving end of
kindness, and it was profoundly overwhelming and touching to see this friendly
troupe boxing up my kitchen, disassembling my bed, and carting my couch out the
door. About five hours after we’d started
I
was
standing alone in my new apartment, surrounded by hundreds of books piled in
haphazard stacks, realizing that I hadn’t contacted Edison about the
electricity at the new apartment.

Hence I wouldn’t have any for five days.

I didn’t really mind not having any electricity. It was a
good excuse not to do any unpacking after it got dark or buy groceries or cook
for myself. At night I navigated by the light of my laptop screen while the
computer battery lasted and pretended I was living in Botswana, until I
remembered that I probably would not have a laptop if I really were living in
Botswana. Then I pretended I was camping.

* * *

I had thought that I would mourn my old apartment. That
place was layered with memories of hellos and goodbyes, movie nights and
intimate dinners, long talks, laughter, and tears. I knew how to turn the tap
just so for the right water temperature in the shower. I could walk downstairs at
night in the dark to get a drink without fear of tripping. I knew the sound of
the front door opening and closing, of the fountain that splashed in the
courtyard. That familiarity was precious.

But by the time I finally moved out, none of that mattered
in the slightest anymore. I still did feel sad and angry, but it wasn’t over
losing a place. On that front I felt nothing but relief and exhaustion. At some
point since Travis had fallen through a portal in his mind, that apartment had
ceased to be a home. The uncertainty, helplessness and fear I felt in the face
of his unpredictable volatility had rendered familiarity completely moot and
vanquished any sense of sanctuary. It had become more emotionally taxing to
come home in the evenings than to travel solo to Nairobi.

My new apartment was devoid of electricity, gas, home phone,
internet, and memories, but it was pure joy to leave work and be able to relax
instead of having to take the energy levels up another notch. It was luxury to
walk into space that was empty and silent. I loved that the walls in this new
place were painted
a cheerful
panoply of yellow,
orange and red. I loved seeing the mountains from the kitchen as they traced
out a jagged horizon behind the tops of the palm trees. I loved the two big trees
in the courtyard that formed a thick green shield against my neighbor’s
windows.

If the electricity company had told me that it couldn’t turn
the power on for a year, I would just have bought a flashlight and stayed
anyway.

* * *

I wasn’t the only one who left Australia and returned to a
chaotic move on the home front. In the wake of the last robbery, Mike’s
colleagues had indeed moved him out in his absence. He returned to Papua New
Guinea to find what remained of his belongings piled in boxes in his area
manager’s office.

“I can’t look through it just yet,” he wrote to me. “I can’t
bear to find out what’s not there.”

What Mike had instead of worldly possessions was a new boss,
a new house and a new housemate, Tristan, who was out in the field the night
Mike arrived but who’d thoughtfully left behind a set of keys and a note
letting Mike know he’d killed seventy cockroaches in the new place the night
before. Also, Mike had a new girlfriend on the other side of the world.

We were so used to communicating via letters that we hadn’t
give much thought to whether or how we were actually going to
talk
once we’d decided to date. And with
both of us moving and returning to work, thieves having relieved Mike of his
laptop microphone, and limited access to the internet on both sides of the
Pacific, we also didn’t figure out the talking thing until
some
time
after we had returned to our respective sides of the world.

Two weeks after getting back to L.A. I was sitting on the
couch in my new apartment on a Saturday night, writing, when my mobile phone
rang. The display read “No Caller ID,” which usually meant someone overseas,
and I picked it up expecting my brother.

The line wasn’t working that well and neither was my brain,
apparently. Before I relay the conversation, I have to pause for some
disclaimers. I didn’t know that Mike had my mobile phone number. I wasn’t sure
it was technically possible for him to call me from where he was. I had never
talked to him on the phone before. And I was writing. I was therefore vague.
Very vague.

“Hi,” Mike said. “So, do you like surprises?”

Hmmm, it’s a guy’s
voice. Not Matt.
Probably foreign friend.
Possibly foreign friend flying into L.A. tonight who wants a couch
to crash on.
Crap, I don't want to drive to LAX to pick someone up
tonight!
“Uh ... sometimes.”

Mike said something about sitting on a rock looking out over
the Pacific Ocean.

Hmmm, mystery guy
friend trying to mess with me by pretending to be Mike. Who would be that mean?
Okay, let's face it, a lot of my friends would be that mean.

I had no idea who it was, but for some reason I was firmly
convinced that it
wasn’t
Mike. After
we’d traded several more sentences I finally sighed and asked, “Ah, who is
this?”

“Your secret admirer from PNG.”

Hmmmm
, he didn't say
Mike,
he said
secret admirer.
That's something a mean friend might say.

It took about three awkward minutes for me to accept that it
actually
was
Mike, and about thirty
seconds after that (while I was still trying to pretend that I normally acted
like such a weirdo at the start of phone calls) the line went dead. I was left
with no way to call him back and no way to even debrief by sending an email,
because the new apartment didn’t yet have working internet. I went to bed with
the phone that night in case Mike managed to ring again and stewed for hours
about the fact that I hadn’t recognized my own boyfriend’s voice on the phone
and must have come across as a suspicious freak.

Were we insane to
think we could make this work? I mean, how often do you really hear of
long-distance relationship success stories outside of novels set before or
during World War II?

* * *

After all the time we spent in Australia sitting on my
parents’ porch swing and talking about every topic under the sun (a time Mike
referred to with a straight face and complete seriousness as our “due diligence
period”), we entered the long-distance dating game confident. I even told Mike,
one warm afternoon, that I was good at distance.

Mike, I found out later, had thought that was particularly
amusing.

“Hello, Lisa who’s good at distance,” Mike emailed me a
couple of days after our Melbourne farewells, in response to a note of my own
bemoaning our separation. “This is Mike who’s not good at remembering details,
but he remembered that particular detail because he wanted to tell Lisa that
she was on crack but figured that might ruin the moment on the porch swing, and
Lisa might think he was an insensitive ape, and then Lisa would kick his ass
onto the first plane to Melbourne and Mike wasn’t prepared for that. But now
that some time has passed and approximately 7,000 miles of ocean buffer us: You
are so on crack.”

“I would like to point out,” I wrote back, “that however
hard this first week apart has felt, we must both be somewhat good at distance
or we would never have decided to embark on this crazy path. Being good at it,
however, doesn't mean it doesn't still suck. I am quite talented at doing a
number of things I really hate.”

Whether or not Mike and I really
were
good at distance, distance was probably good for us in some
important ways.

Having nothing to build our relationship with but words for
the following three months forced us to cover a lot of ground. Doing this when
we couldn’t exchange text messages and were only able to talk by Skype every
couple of days for an hour or two also removed some of the pressures and
pitfalls that attend 24-hour accessibility and the possibility of instantaneous
response. Distance slowed us down, granted us extra time and space to think,
and encouraged us to be deliberate and thorough in our communication.

But the distance was also often difficult. There was the
temptation to feel as if my “real life” was on hold until Mike arrived in May
for a month of holidays – to live in such a haze of anticipation that it
obscured the beauty of the present. It took effort and energy to rearrange my
schedule so that we could talk, or to prioritize writing letters when I was
exhausted or flat. Mike was sometimes out in the villages and beyond even the
reach of cell phones for a week or
more,
and these
stretches of silence sometimes assaulted my sense of surety in the concept of
us and prompted mood swings that hit without warning. I could be grocery
shopping, looking forward to a quiet night at home with Indian food, red wine
and my laptop, and then glance up to see a couple ahead of me, hand in hand,
and I’d be swamped by a sudden wave of longing or doubt.

In those moments I never had the option of reaching for the
phone just so I could hear Mike’s voice, and even when we
were
talking during our carefully scheduled Skype dates, it wasn’t
guaranteed to be smooth and happy sailing. Occasionally we’d be chattering away
easily one minute only to find ourselves mired in a messy miscommunication the
next. Or we’d be laughing and a moment later one of us would have blundered
unexpectedly into a virtual minefield.

This was the situation we found ourselves in late one night,
about a month before Mike was to arrive in L.A. for his May holiday. We’d been
talking for an hour already, but before we wrapped up I suggested we dip into
the question box.

The question box was a game we used sometimes to help move
us past the
whats
,
whens
,
and
hows
of our days. A solid plastic rectangle, it
held hundreds of small cards each printed with a different question.

What is one special holiday memory from childhood?

If you had to move to a foreign country indefinitely, which
one
would
you choose?

What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?

This night, however, the card that I randomly selected
focused on a topic much weightier than ice cream. I took a glance and wondered
whether I should throw it back and pick another one.

“What’s the question?” Mike asked after I’d been silent for
a couple of seconds.

“Okay,” I said, deciding to stick with it, “what’s the most
important quality in a marriage?”

“Commitment,” Mike said immediately. Then he paused and
talked around this concept for a while, trying on words like
honesty
and
forgiveness
.

“No,” he finally said decisively.
“Commitment.”

Sleepy and relaxed, I opened my mouth and started to think
out loud. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think
it’s
affection or warmth or … kindness.
Yeah, kindness.
I’d
rank that above commitment.”

There was silence on the other end of the Skype line.

“Hello?” I said.

“Is that because commitment would already be there?” Mike
asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “I can’t easily see a relationship
that’s full of affection and kindness not being built on some foundation of
commitment, but I
can
envision it the
other way around – a committed relationship lacking kindness – and that’s just
ugly.”

Again, silence.

“Hello?” I said.

“I’m a bit paralyzed right now,” the distant Mike finally
replied. “I think I’m better at commitment than I am at affection. I don’t
think I can discuss this anymore at the moment. I have to get back to the
office over here anyway.”