Chapter 9

Any Less Real

My hand expands and contracts, sending the water pulsing over my bare chest. It occurs to me that I am giving myself CPR as though my heart has stopped. Maybe it has.

“One Hundred and one ways to satisfy your man.”
I awaken to Sarah’s voice.
“What?”
“The cover of Cosmo…101 ways to satisfy your man. Interested? There is also a quiz on how to find your true love, sounds promising.” Sarah ends her last words with a full grin. She knows how ridiculous I find her magazines.
“I do not believe in true love.” I look her squarely in the eye expressing that I am more than just kidding around. Sarah rolls her eyes knowingly; I have said this statement one too many times.
My eyes drift back to the passing countryside. I have always loved riding by train, it gives you the ability to either be engrossed in your surroundings or relax and forget that you are traveling at all.
“I do not believe in true love.” My statement comes back to me but in a different voice. I remember my friend Christine from college. She had been that girl that always had a man in love with her and after each relationship fell apart she would proudly proclaim that there was always another fish in the sea, but that was before she met Timothy. He had been quiet and introspective. Whereas before she had been caught in the violent throes of relationships, she found herself studying and analyzing this gentle man. She had always been the girl that held the power in her various relationships and now she had met someone that she was helpless with. “I do not believe in true love.” She had said the statement plainly but with too much force. Her declaration was like those enlightened friends you find in college that proudly assert they do not believe in God- like their words could make him any less real. She wasn’t telling me her disbelief, she was telling the cosmos; it had been her last protection against the soul shattering that was falling in love.
I missed her and wanted to know if her last stand had been like the Alamo, a failure in front of a force larger than her, but I had lost contact with all of my old friends. The past two years of my life had been a roller coaster of change and most people found it hard to keep up. I eyed Sarah again; she was engrossed in a story about a girl that had fallen in love with the wrong twin brother. Her friendship had come at the right time in my life; it was easy and required minimal effort. It was the kind of relationship that made you realize how imperfect your past ones had been. I couldn’t blame my old friends for their slow desertion. I couldn’t expect them to know me when I did not even know myself. They had known the caricature of me, the simplified version that I presented to the world. No, there was no blame to be doled out to each and according to their measure. We had all known as much about life as one does before it happens: nothing at all.
I will call Christine when I get home. The last thing I need is another casualty in a life I am just beginning to live.
The train suddenly shuddered as if it had been privy to my thoughts. Christine’s memory led me back to that night in the church. I still had not been able to shake the priest’s words. Sometimes I would read my old friend’s blogs and see them having another fight over theology. They would argue various points of eternal damnation and the Eucharist. It seemed all so pointless now. I could not begin to understand the little things about God, how could I approach the finer points of belief? I think we all need something to argue with or maybe argue for. It is part of human nature. I felt like a child pondering the life of a butterfly while they argued over the consequences of chaos theory. Sarah had decided that I was a closet Christian- whatever that meant. It seemed to me to be such an important thing, a decision that should not be taken lightly. Not to be taken wholly as I had when I was a child, when I went on mission trips to Mexico to pass out tracks and save the world. We passed out Jesus like food stamps, the bread of life in a neat package. Maybe I helped save some people. What if I had? What did that say about my life now?
The train shuddered again, and this time I knew it was because of my thoughts. I could be such a heretic at times.
I hear the familiar beeping of Sarah’s phone signaling that she has received a text message. Her phone had been doing that a lot lately and I was starting to wonder where all the messages were coming from. She opened up her phone and read the message; stealing a subdued smile at the text and placing it quickly back in her pocket. Now she had my full attention.
“Sarah”
“Hmm.” Her eyes are glued to her magazine.
“You have been receiving a lot of texts lately, is there something I need to know?” I ask her in a motherly tone, adding a bit of humor to water down my honest earnestness.
“Nope.”
“Nothing? You know you can’t hide things from me.”
“You won’t like it.” She finally looks up from her magazine and I can see in her face that she is about to tell me no matter what her words belie.
“Spill”
“Ok. Well I know that I have a boyfriend and that we are only going to be here for seven more months but…I met someone.”
“What?!?” I had resigned myself to being supportive to whatever she said but this had caught me off guard. She had met someone? How could I have missed this? I look at her injured face and know that she was afraid of my reaction.
“I am sorry. How long has this been going on? What are you going to do about it? Does Anthony know?” My questions firing at her like a machine gun.
“I met him two weeks ago, nothing has happened yet so Anthony does not know and I have no idea where this is going.”
“Nowhere good.” Uh-oh I am in mother mode full on now and there is no stopping me. “Really Sarah, please think about this. You have been with Anthony for a year and he is coming to visit for Spring Break. I thought you were happy with him. Whatever happens here, you still have to go home and live with the consequences. Being on another continent does not give you a free pass.” The truth was that I thought Anthony sounded like a complete dumb-ass but I was never a supporter of cheating. I had learned the hard way that if you want to break away from something you should just do it, but do not give the other person reason to believe it had anything to do with something other than the fact that your relationship was not working out. If you cheat on someone then they only focus on that point instead of all the trouble that lead up to you being able to commit the act.
Sarah’s eyes were back on her magazine but she was not reading. She was angry at me for not indulging her fantasies and being the voice of reason. Maybe I should have listened to her but if there was one thing I needed two years ago, it was someone to lift me up and shake the crazy ideas out of my head. Her phone went off again but this time she reached into her coat pocket and silenced it. I took this as a good sign but I would have to do some damage control tonight. Maybe buy her a beer and tell her I was sorry for coming down so hard on her.
I looked up to see that we had arrived at the airport and people were beginning to collect their luggage. Yes, Sarah would forgive me because I had saved her from having to forgive herself.