Love Is A Leap Of Faith

This is what I’ve learned about love

Russell took a long drag on his cigarette and motioned for me to sit next to him on his squeaky cot with no sheets. He draped his arm around me in silence.

The opening lines to Kiki Walter’s story, “Rats, Roaches, and The Russell, Oh My,” got me thinking about my past relationships. Again. I was hoping she would continue her story, “The Time I Ran Away to Join the Circus.” about her driving from New York to Chicago with the Lizard King to join Second City.

That happened the day before Christmas in 1993, and if you missed it, her story made me recall my decision when I was twenty-two (Kiki was 23), and I wrote about flying from Los Angles to Arizona after getting a phone call from a girl in my story, “I Made the Same Relationship Mistake As KiKi Walter.”

“Come to Arizona,” she slurred after midnight. “I waaannnttttt to see you.”

This time it was the cigarette that brought memories back. About a girl I met one night in the most bizarre of circumstances. I was driving home to the house in the suburbs I shared with six friends (I slept on the floor for $150 a month) after a journalism night class during my senior year in college.

There was a terrible car accident by the side of the road, and several people had stopped and got out of their cars to look at the carnage.

It reminded me of one of my favorite films, Nightcrawler, a noir psychological thriller about a “stringer” who records violent events late at night and sells them to tv stations — that’s in retrospect since the film was made 2014, two decades after the car accident

Normally I am not the kind of guy to pull of the side of the road to gawk at a car accident, but for some reason that night I did and I started talking to a guy who also pulled over and we hit it off. The guy suggested we get some coffee and dinner in a diner across the street.

That’s where I met Carol for the first time. My new friend and I sat down at a booth beside her and started talking, and she listened to us talking and then turned around and began talking with me and it was an instant attraction.

She had a cigarette in her hand as we talked. I found that sexy. She said she liked to hang out at this diner, and so I started stopping in to see if she was there and, unfortunately, she was there one night, but with her boyfriend.

She hadn’t mentioned anything I remember about a boyfriend. I sat in a booth right next to them, and she turned around and talked to me. It was torture to see this girl I was developing a huge crush on to be sitting with another guy.

It wasn’t just another guy. He was a good-looking guy a few years older than her and I could feel my spirit deflate like a bike tire after running over a nail.

Still, I talked to her and put on a good show in a conversation when she talked with me. I saw her again one or two times, just the two of us, at the diner, and we had long conversations where we talked about all kinds of things while we smoke cigarettes, and we saw each other briefly at our graduation ceremony.

But then she vanished out of my life. And we lost touch after we graduated.

I remember she told me she planned to travel to Prague, and one morning while I was in the shower lathering soap on my body and thinking about the direction of my life now that I was a college graduate … and I thought how much I liked Carol and I though I should call her mom and get her address.

So I did, and we started writing letters. I shared some of the stories from driving a taxi in Los Angeles, telling her about the book I was writing about all the weird, strange people I picked up in my cab, and she wrote about Prague.

I found out in one letter that she had broken up with her boyfriend. My spirit lifted, and thirty years have passed, so my memory is sketchy, but I think it was obvious we liked each other when we met at the diner, and writing each other letters was another indication we both felt something for each other.

We meet again

I think it was after a year of writing letters she said she was coming home. We arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Hollywood. She showed me pictures of her trip, including one she gave me of her smoking a cigarette, and I told her stories of my crazy taxi passengers, and it was cleat that we liked each other.

And I don’t know how this is going to intersect with the third part of Kiki’s story where a guy bought her a plane ticket to Los Angeles…maybe we were in the same coffee shop or jazz club at the same time and didn’t even know it.

Kiki said her escape from Russell to fly to Los Angeles had a Fairy Tale feel to it … and that’s how my friendship growing into some more with Carol felt.

We started hanging out more and more, smoking cigarettes at the diner, and we began dating, growing closer to the point she invited my mom to meet her mom … and I had never let my mom meet one of my past/future girlfriends.

Things were going like a Fairy Tale. I was falling in love for first time. We both shared how we felt about each other, and I put all my eggs in this one basket, she had all the qualities I liked in a girl. Artsy. Adventurous. On the Wild Side.

Then one night we were going to see I play I got free tickets to review for a newspaper. It was a one-woman play that I thought she would like, but she backed out of it at the last moment (I think), and we met up after the play.

I always loved how much Carol was excited to see me. We had some great times. But something seemed off this night. We went for a drive and pulled into a park parking lot. I could just sense something wasn’t right from our conversation. She was hinting around at something in a not so good way.

I looked at Carol. Everything was the same for me except something wasn’t quite the same for her. She was acting differently from every other time we met. We’d dated for about six months at this point. Then she told me.

“I’m planning to move to Atlanta with a friend,” she said.

My heart was broken in that instant. She didn’t explain why her feelings had changed overnight from being in love to terminating the relationship. I don’t remember anything other than she wanted to end our relationship, and I was crushed. Shattered. Devastated. I didn’t see how at the time she was a serial dater and cast several past boyfriends aside like cigarette butts in the wind.

It didn’t make sense to me. That night I wrote her a long letter. The feelings poured out of me, and I drove an hour to her home to put it in her mailbox. It was filled with raw emotion. Pain and heartbreak. Confusion and raw pain.

Post-break-up

I fell into an immediate depression. Except I didn’t know any of the symptoms of depressions. Sleeping too much or not all. Change in eating habits. Loss of interest in life. I felt that last one. I remember telling a friend I worked with that there was nothing anybody could say or do to make me feel any better.

I’d been in relationships that ended before, but never felt like this. It felt like I had been hit over the head with a baseball bat. I was stunned and dazed and depressed for the next four or five months after our break up. In retrospect, I think we broke up partly because a friend influenced her to go to Atlanta. I become a sunken battleship, but I think in a way she ended up worse than me. I think she lost a part herself from listening to a friend who was jealous of us.

I talked to her on the phone once and described a girl I was seeing. I still liked Carol, and I’m sure I told her this, and she asked me to describe the new girl.

“She dresses like a punk rocker,” I said. “She has a nose ring and tattoos.”

“She is not your type,” she told me. And, of course, she was correct.

On the outside, I continued to do things like a normal human. Go to work and do my job. Talk to people at work, but it felt like my heart had been removed.

And one night I remembered something my mom told me that felt like the stupidest thing in the world. She told me if I was ever in a crisis, I could pray, randomly open the bible, and God would speak to me.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” my twenty-one-year self said.

But then that night I recalled what she said. What do I have to lose? I thought. I am depressed with suicidal thoughts. I didn’t see a purpose in living. I could meet another girl, fall in love again, and have the same thing happen all over again. My mom had given me a bible with my name stitched on it. I didn’t even want a bible, much less one with my name on it, but I got down on my knees in my $450 apartment above an auto body shop and prayed this:

“God I don’t even know if You even existed, but if You do, I just want to have hope, and if having hope means turning away from my sins as other people had told me, then I was willing.”

I randomly opened up the Bible my mom had given me, and the verse I turned to relate perfectly to what I was going through. I felt the heaviness I’d felt for six months after the breakup replaced by joy.

I went to bed and woke up feeling great. I remembered what happened the night before and started to look for the bible verse I read. I couldn’t find it, but as I read through the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) I saw there was a divine person who loved me and in my mustard seed prayer I was wanting him to come into my life, and I began going to the church my mom attended.

A friend I met at church invited me to serve with him in a homeless ministry. I started coming to the ministry at a park every Saturday morning, and I was asked to share my experience to a singles group to invite others to serve in the ministry and one of those people listening happened to be my future wife.

Thanks for reading my story.

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