Deer and Hawk

It was a long summer. I had started going to church and was experiencing a new found faith. I kept meeting people on the same journey and everyone was so excited to be there. My church had great music and every Sunday they said “we welcome you wherever you are on your journey, especially if you are filled with questions.” It was what I needed to hear.

But it wasn’t all roses. My ex-fiancé had called me out of the blue after several months of no contact and asked me to take her to the hospital. She had been on the floor of her apartment for two days and couldn’t get up. After some testing they found the answer. Her liver was failing. She needed a transplant immediately.

I stayed at the hospital a lot, and hung out with her friends. Her family flew in from New York. It was a little bit awkward as the “ex”. But I even took some of them to church with me as I was sharing a lot about my faith journey.

Miraculously, she got her liver and had the surgery. It was going to be a long road to recovery and she kept asking me to stay with her. She told me she loved me and she was sorry about everything. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted things to be better with us but some things had been said that could never be right. She kept apologizing and writing me long messages and emails about our life together.

I was anxious a lot. One night, I was lying in the bathtub and praying. I asked God to send me my “WITH” person. My “AND” person. I asked if it was meant to be my ex, then, please make her understand that she couldn’t be an OR person anymore. It’s me OR your business. It’s me OR the bipolar. No more OR, it has to be AND.

Finally, I prayed “please send me M if it is meant to be.”

Some backstory to this. My now-ex fiancé had the same name as my ex wife. It was a bit strange but it was a fairly common name for our generation. I didn’t realize the synchronicity would be important later.

I pulled away from M as her family had really stepped in and I was in the way with her Dad, aunt, cousins and friends all at her apartment. I was feeling confused and it was going to be weeks of recovery. So I just faded into the background and I didn’t hear from her for a while.

To try a different tack, I decided to do some online dating.

The first person I went out with was nice, but her name was also M. It made me anxious and I ghosted her and felt bad about it.

I went on several dates with a few more people. Nothing clicked. I got some nice excuses for why not to continue dating me. I had already contacted (and been ignored by) most of the people in my list. I decided to change my search criteria. I had been putting “spiritual but not religious” as a filter in the dating sites. I was not ready to claim I was a Christian but I decided to search for Christian women. I got a very different group of people in San Francisco.

One person struck me as attractive and she had an interesting profile. She said she liked snowboarding and hiking and wanted to play the drums but felt she had missed the boat. I wrote her: “It’s never too late to be a rock star.” Two weeks went by. But then she wrote back that she liked my picture of my dog and that I had nice eyes.

We started chatting online. I liked her. We went back and forth several times a week. I told her all of my favorite places to go. She wrote back that she also loved all of those places and that they were quite close to her. I said we might live pretty close to each other. I told her my cross streets. She said she lived at that intersection. I told her my apartment building.

She said she lived in my apartment building.

I asked if she wanted to go on a date. But would it be a deal-breaker if we lived in the same building? She said it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker.

And she finally signed her real name to a message. She had the same name as my ex-wife and my ex-fiancé. M.

Oh, fuck you God.

But I decided I will see what this one is all about. If I had to meet someone in my own apartment building out of everyone on the Internet, it would be interesting at least.

We met in the lobby on a rainy Sunday afternoon and walked to one of those “favorite places”. We hit it off big time and spent hours talking about our childhoods, books and movies. Especially horror movies. We had watched all the same ones growing up, including some pretty rare campy ones. We stayed at the bar so long they gave us free drinks, because we weren’t really drinking that much. I think it was pretty clear to them we were on a first date and it was going well.

We spent our next few dates exploring new parts of the city and going on long walks. I felt amazingly comfortable with this person. We talked about spirituality and religion. I shared my deer and hawk story, and she was very supportive of my journey. She decided to try going to church with me, as she had lapsed.

Gradually, we fell in love. I cut off contact with my ex-fiancé. My new M and I had a ton of wonderful adventures. She worked with me through some very challenging times and has been the most loyal, grounded partner. We moved in together, got married, and adopted a son. It has been sixteen years since that first date. We still make each other laugh and have big plans.

So I had met my AND person. I had asked for M and I finally got the right one.

PS She learned to play the drums.