"Don't smile because it's over, cry because it happened" - Ecuadorian proverb
A dear friend told me recently of an interesting conversation they had with a partner. The two of them were lying in bed, my friend explained, having just woken up. Sunlight pushing through the edges of the curtains, brain a little foggy after a night of drinking, looking up at the ceiling side-by-side, delighting in the pleasures of a slow morning.
And this partner started telling my friend about the multiverse.
Imagine it's you, there in that bed, looking up. Into the side of your field of vision creeps a pointer finger. In and out, almost touching your cheek.
"There's a new universe for every possibility," this person says to you. "Every time I either poke you or I don't poke you, a new one opens up."
You push the finger away gently. "Maybe we could talk about something else," you suggest, trying to salvage the feeling.
"Oh believe me, in another universe we already are."
More on the multiverse coming.
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My friend told me this anecdote when they came to visit the Upper Valley, which is described by the Upper Valley Facebook group (totaling a cool 24,000 members) as "a micro-cosmo-rural-metro area centered around Hanover / Lebanon NH and Hartford/ Norwich VT...teeming with social activity and diverse in its environs."
Understandably, since the city folk down in Boston learned I'd be in this diverse social and environmental utopia, they've been practically busting the door down to come visit. And what better way to tell the tale of the past three weeks -- a story of physical rehabilitation, of friendships deepened, of anxiety attacks, and of blossoming relationships chopped to bits -- than through the lens of the wonderful cast of visitors? Through it all, I've found the formula for the perfect tour of the Upper Valley. We'll start at the beginning.
A - A came for three days mid-August. He had just arrived from a West coast road trip. Spent 64 of the 72 hours total asleep on the couch. I mostly read and did my physical therapy for the ankle. One evening I dragged him -- sleepy-eyed and bed-headed -- to Quechee Gorge, and that night a few friends came over to play Dartmouth pong, and we drank, I think, 7 million beers. To A's credit, he said he wanted to hike and I couldn't because the ankle was still busted, and we did try to watch one movie -- Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, which I didn't like because of the weird animation thing. I went to my room to text the wonderful, smart, intimidating person mentioned in the last blog post. When I emerged, A was asleep again on the couch.
J - The following week I scooped J from his new apartment in Union Square in Beantown and we blasted out of the city. J doesn't care much for nature and was fighting off a chest cold and it was raining most of the time anyway, so we went to the gym at the community center in Lebanon both days and then watched movies on the couch, first a war movie and then a strange sci-fi thriller about making clones to escape the death penalty, and the second movie ended with the original person getting attacked by his naked clone who chased him like a dog on all fours and he (the original) had to kill it. Something about masculinity, I dunno. Before one gym day I hobbled along the Lebanon Rail Trail outside the community center, and managed 20 minutes of one-minute-run, one-minute-walk with only slightly excruciating pain. J and I ate maple creemees and an all-you-can eat Chinese buffet (the limit of which was determined mostly by illness rather than fulness), and we talked about the value of simplicity in life, of getting away from the rat race, and we made enchiladas, and I drove J to the bus stop at Dartmouth and got a text a few days later that his chest cold was COVID.
O & A - A brief two days after J's departure, O & A, the old roommates from Boston, came on up. I've been using abbreviations to protect the identity of these people, and while it may be confusing with mounting references, I'll continue the practice here. Except this time. A is Allen Shiu. He's from Newton and lives in Cambridge. This is payback for how he left my shower.
Anyway, O & Allen Shiu arrived with grand expectations of nature, of seeing quintessential, quaint New England but also the thrills and adrenaline of outdoor adventure. The first day we went to Mink Brook, a great swim spot in the Connecticut River, and I brought a book and read in the sun as they splashed and giggled below me. "This place rocks!" I remember hearing, their voices full of childlike glee. "D is the best host ever!" After swimming they joined a Dartmouth pick-up soccer match (and I ran/limped a little route along the golf course near campus), and we met back at the house for dinner. We cracked beers and cracked jokes and a few other friends came to join, and the kitchen was a whirlwind of many hands making light work, of bottlecaps flying, dogs underfoot, no space anywhere in a loud, brightly lit kitchen in the middle of a quiet, dark street surrounded by woods and streams and a sky full of stars overhead. Allen Shiu -- caught up in the speed and joy and levity of the moment -- infamously dumped a feta cheese salad directly into O's duffle bag, and for the whole weekend O smelled like cheese (moreso than usual). For no reason at all, other than the joy of good company and good stories around the table, we drank, I believe, 7 million beers, and we awoke the next morning sore and achy and ready to continue the outdoor adventure.
The following day we headed to another swim spot -- True's Ledges, a wonderful brook off the Connecticut with fast, cold water and places to lounge about. I -- again fulfilling my paternal role -- sat down to read and mumble in my sleep as O & Allen Shiu, happy as crabs in a mud flat, skipped and sang their way up and down the river. Following came a brief interlude of rain, a trip to Hartland for a greasy burger, and a night of drinking games and music and sing-alongs. Jokes aside, one of my favorite qualities about O & Allen Shiu is that they share a positive, encouraging nature. They uplift the people around them through kind words, deep smiles, and validation. They are happy and complimentary people, the kind of people that make other people feel good about themselves. We drank, I believe, 7 million beers that second night, and when they left the following morning in the deeply-hungover-but-happy-and-good haze, I was grateful that they had made the trip up -- even if Allen Shiu left a wad of his long hair on the side of the shower (payback!!).
T - Last but not least, my dear childhood friend T came up for a short one-night stint, which we jam-packed with all the good things the Upper Valley has to offer. Swimming (this time, a rope swing on the Ottaquechee River), a three-mile dirt-road run (this time with less limping and no stopping), maple creemees, good food, sing-alongs, and, I believe, 7 million beers. A wonderful man, a Bradley Cooper look-alike, and an adventurer at heart.
So, through it all, I found four essentials for a successful Upper Valley tour:
Ice cream. Should be maple creemees, and they hit better when you're vaguely hungover.
Beer. Roughly 7 million of them. The mountain air makes it so they don't affect you as much, and your company, enraptured by the thrill of days spent in the sun, connecting with some sort of primal instinct from being in the woods, will want to get weird. Enable it. Just draw the line at cloning.
Swimming. Many good places to choose from.
Food: There is a great joy to spreading out in a big open kitchen, of coming home as the sun is setting, shorts wet from swimming, starving from subsisting only on maple creemees. You turn on all the lights and turn on some music, and the adventure continues as people contribute what they can to a collective dinner, cracking beers, taking turns for the shower, mixing salad, setting the table. You get the first beer down quick on a near-empty stomach and you get the start of a buzz, and everyone is smiling for no real reason. That, to me, is VT summer.
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I get the phone call on a Friday.
I'd been anxious all week because I hadn't heard from the smart, wonderful, intimidating person who was away on a business trip (why does it always happen on a business trip!), and my anxiety had been made worse from drinking all those stupid beers the weeks before with the visitors. My Spidey senses were going nutso, telling me something was up. I'd been waking up at two, three in the morning after struggling to fall asleep, and I'd rush to the now-dark, empty kitchen to eat a peanut butter sandwich in my underwear over the sink, illuminated by the light of the open fridge. I'd struggle back to sleep and check my phone again first thing on waking up. And then, finally, the call.
Funnily enough, it felt like a business call. There was an exchange of pleasantries, a sharp transition. ("Thank you for taking the time for the call. The reason...") I paced in the backyard, heard the clean, no-nonsense description of the situation. ("I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with someone else.") An explanation of the significance. ("I can no longer see you romantically.")
No time for questions. The bill is in the mail.
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So I'm looking back at the life of this two-month thing that could only be defined as a situationship, and I'm thinking of all the strange, poetic ways I can try to make heads or tails of it. The only way, I think, is to try to get a full picture, start to finish.
On July 22 I was at my cousin's wedding just outside of New York. I wrote SWI (smart, wonderful, intimidating) a message on Hinge. "Listen," it said. "Ive been at a wedding all night, I'm feeling all the feelings. I'll be in Boston tomorrow and Monday because I have a few grad school classes to wrap up. What do you say we get coffee and go for a walk along the river and see if our zodiac signs align?" It's a great message (and it's now in the public domain for reuse).
I drove down that Sunday and texted her the whole drive down and joked about how she was cute enough to make me crash the car. We went on a first date and got coffee and walked along the river and I walked her home and we made out a little in an alley and I wrote in my journal that Monday, back in White River Junction, that it may have been the best first date I had ever been on.
My grad school classes ended and I made excuses to keep going to Boston. Doctor's appointments, visiting friends. I'd wait for her to get off work and we would get food and ice cream, and sometimes she'd let me sleep over. We went to the Brookline Booksmith and picked books for each other. We spent multiple dates at Walden Pond, lounging in the sun, eating bread and cheese, fooling around in the water. She told me she wanted to run the Cambridge half-marathon in November and I drafted a running plan. My first run back from the ankle injury we ran together on the Esplanade. I made it 3/4 of a mile before having to stop, and she kept going like a rocket. Later her friend texted her that she saw us running together, that we looked at each other the whole time, smiling. We talked about her coming to visit the Upper Valley. The final, never-meant-to-be, Upper Valley tour. Say it ain't so!
But there was a timer on the whole thing -- me leaving to go backpacking for a year, end of September. In my head, it would all be this carefree, light, what-if scenario, a soppy summer fling movie. Maybe she'd come visit me along the way, a whirlwind weekend in Buenos Aires, things unspoken. We danced around the topic, looking up at the ceiling. Sometimes it stopped feeling light and carefree. Looking back, I think she tried to talk about it. I didn't really hear what she was saying. I responded in platitudes.
But there were some things that weren't great, too. Sometimes it all felt like it was on her schedule, like I had to bend over backwards to spend time with her. I'd drive down to Boston and wait, and sometimes I didn't have a confirmed place to sleep, and she'd text me to come over at whatever time, and then five minutes before that time I'd get a text saying she wasn't home yet, and then fifteen minutes later I'd get the same text, and this whole time I'd be in my car sitting a few blocks from her place, a bag of melting ice cream next to me, and I'd wonder how I could be such a, well, such a dinkus as to keep putting up with stuff like that without ever saying anything, wondering why when I feel strongly about someone I can be so willing to put myself so much to the side that I'm not even in the picture anymore. I still wonder about that. I'd be sitting in the car, yelling at myself in my head. You dinkus! But I did feel strongly about her. Paradoxically, in spite of my feelings, I'd tell myself that it didn't matter, that it was just a few more weeks. I avoided the conversation.
The last time I was down there, while I was waiting for her to get off work, I made a reservation at a restaurant and then drove to a tea shop to wait. As I was driving I thought, "This car friggin' stinks. It smells like dirty running shoes." (My dirty running shoes were in the trunk.) And I thought, "SWI deserves better than a stinky car." So I went to CVS and then Walgreens and then Target, looking for an air freshener, and I ended up with this dumb little clip-in filled with neon purple goo that made my car smell like synthetic flowers and a headache, and at the end of it she didn't want to go out to eat anyway and we just stayed at hers, and then that next week was the infamous business trip week, and then on Friday I got that call.
Friday after the call I had to get in the car. I drove up to North Hero, Vermont for a wedding, and I was on Route 2 which goes up through Lake Champlain on a series of bridges, and I was driving with the big lake spreading out on both sides of me, and I saw that little air freshener. I realized she had never been in the car since I bought it. I rolled down the window and pulled out the clip and tossed it in the lake.
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So there it is, the whole thing. Hot and cold and then real hot and then, finally, real cold. All bookended, somewhat ironically, by two weddings. The first one I was on cloud nine, happy and bouncing around, and then this last one I was just a mess. I started crying before the ceremony even began, I ate too much food, and then I figured I'd get real drunk. But I had eaten so much, and all they had was beer, and so I was funneling beer down into my over-full stomach unable to really get a buzz because of all the food sopping it up, and in the end I slammed into bed at midnight in a cabin with my immediate family, mostly feeling just sick, worse than the Chinese buffet.
At the wedding I watched my childhood neighbor and her husband on the dance floor. They're these classic hippies living on a farm outside of Burlington. He's a barefoot gardener and she, I think, sells vegetables, and they met backpacking the Inca trail or something like that. Anyway, they were dancing to, I believe, a Nelly song, both barefoot in overalls, her six months pregnant, him wearing a bandana and twelve glowsticks. And they danced like they owned the place. They spun each other around, bumped all up on each other, did weird, goofy shit with their limbs -- and the whole time, they looked at each other like there was nobody else in the room. They were on their own planet, in each other's orbit, and we were all just space junk.
I thought of that run on the Esplanade. Once, for ten minutes, 3/4 of a mile, on one good ankle and with a timer hanging overhead, me and someone else looked at each other that way.
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In between the tours and the trips to Boston and the spilled salad and the heartache, I've been biking and running and swimming on my own, exploring the Upper Valley. A good tour guide has to know his turf. Anyway, one day I got a haircut and went to swim in Hartland at a covered bridge, and the twenty-minute drive there was through rolling cornfields along a river with the sun overhead, and then I turned onto a dirt road and drove past the Hartland Elementary/ Middle School set back amongst the trees. The parking lot was full with staff cars and I saw a teacher carrying a box of supplies from the car into the school.
As I ran along the road behind the school and swam at a nearby covered bridge, all I could think about was that scenario. If it was me, moving boxes in, getting ready for the start of classes at Hartland Elementary/Middle. I could spend a year working there, spend a year in the Upper Valley, spend a year living at C's house. And I thought, there's a universe where I do that.
I've been feeling all this anxiety over the decisions I'm making -- I talked to my mom about it the Saturday after the wedding, the two of us jogging side-by-side, me fighting the urge to stop and vomit all over North Hero. All of a sudden, it feels like my choices are calcifying; career paths, relationship decisions, where I go, where I live, it's like all the possibilities are condensing into one path, and the choices I make now are setting me down it.
To me, that's the multiple universes thing (Yes! The throughline!) There's a universe where I do stay and live in White River, enjoying the company of a good friend and a small town. There's one where I stayed in Boston. One back in Spain. A different grad program. There's a universe, I think, where the situationship worked out, where I listened a little better when she told me what she was worried about, where I stood up for myself and was more willing to talk about what it all meant, where I thought of it as a real relationship and not a made-for-TV version.
Here's what my mom said. She said it made sense, feeling anxious about all that stuff. She said going away for a year, sacrificing all the friendships and relationships and in-roads I'd made up to now, is a hard thing to do. And she said I was on my own path, and there was no way for me to know how it would go, but it was full of wonderful plans and opportunities and relationships and surprises, and that the only way to figure it all out was to keep going down it. That all of the things that are meant for me will come.
We had left all the windows open in the cabin on Friday night, and there were just sheets on the bed. At some point after I stumbled in, she woke up. In my half-sleep, shivering and sick, I saw her unfold a blanket and put it over me. She must have been thinking, This poor dinkus.
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