The One

The Final Chapter

The One

    There’s a text I teach every year, Letters to a Young Poet, written by Austrian-born writer Rainer Maria Rilke, who in my eyes is one of the most brilliant thinkers, and beautiful writers to ever live. One of the many remarkable assertions Rilke makes in his letters to the young poet is that most of life’s experiences exist in a space that is beyond the ability of words to describe. When I teach it, I like to tell my students that Rilke is saying life is little more than a succession of “had to be there” moments to make it relatable to them.

    I agree with Rilke, and since the first time I read the letter, and every one of the countless times after, I’ve wondered if it’s that truth that drives me to be a writer. I’m fueled by this desire to find a way to use words to articulate the darkest, most terrifying, harrowing, happiest, funniest, most violent, and harshest aspects of the human experience. Words are mystical, powerful beings, capable of bringing light and life to situations like nothing else can. 

I’ve taught the text so many times that I can recite the entirety of the three pages with remarkable accuracy by this point, but until I set eyes on Ellie, I didn’t truly grasp the truth in Rilke’s notion. It was Wednesday when I first saw Ellie, looking stunning in every sense of the word, and from that moment everything changed. I entered a different realm; a surreality where words were no longer sufficient in expressing any of what was taking place around me… or inside of me… 

She had dirty blonde hair, a dimpled smile that was warm, inviting, natural, and genuine. I was drawn to everything about her. I scrolled through her pictures, with each passing one becoming more enraptured by the single most beautiful human I’d ever seen. Right then, I felt something...  something that I’ll never be able to put into words… 

My heart melted at the sight of her dog, a big fluffy cotton ball with his face covered in snow. There was something about the last picture… She was in a black dress, wearing aviators at what looked like an outdoor fountain, and I don’t know what it was about this particular picture - the beautiful scenery, or the gorgeous girl with a face and smile that oozed and radiated sheer delight, absolute perfection… but I couldn’t take my eyes from it. 

    Words cannot describe what I felt reading through Ellie’s profile, or this strange feeling that coursed through me as I moved from one sentence to the next, a feeling that I wasn’t reading about just another person I’d matched with, but this was inexplicably the person that I was meant to be with. 

    I can’t articulate the feeling of pacing around my classroom in the minutes that passed after I swiped right, begging the universe to just once let things go my way - or that feeling when, at 10:18 on December, 18, 2019, I matched with Ellie. 

At 10:37 AM, I sent the first message, with this sense that I was sending the most important “Hi! How are you?” that I’d ever sent in my life. 

At 10:38, she messaged me back, and from that point on, suddenly everything in the beautiful life I already had was… better. I didn’t look at anyone or anything the same way I did before. Everything else that took place at school for the rest of the day that didn’t occur within the Match.com app between Ellie and I is a blur… I didn’t care about Kate or her horrendous novel anymore... maybe the kids tried to make my life a living hell… but there was nothing they could have done to drag me off the cloud I was on… 

I remember sitting there at the end of the day, not wanting to leave the building because it meant I couldn’t talk to Ellie for the forty-five minute drive… I don’t know how late I stayed that day before I finally left the building - pit stopping at two gas stations and a park and ride along the way, just so I could keep the conversation going. 

I’d never experienced anything like that before, this unparalleled urge to learn everything about someone, and to let someone know everything there was to know about me. 

Thursday... I went to school… and it’s like I was there, but I wasn’t there at all… 

Friday… nothing but snapshots and fog… until the end of the day when Rosa Cortez gave me a handmade Christmas card and cookies she baked herself. If that had happened a year ago I would have inspected the envelope for arsenic and suspected the cookies were filled with hemlock - but they were just a little under-baked and were still delicious. The card said, “thomas, hope you have a merry christmas. sorry for all the s**t I gave you over the last few years. good luck on your date with Ellie on sunday!” and aside from her lack of capitalization, I couldn’t have been happier.

The time between Wednesday morning and Sunday night, when I was supposed to meet Ellie in person for the first time, passed at both the blink of an eye and an endless eternity. Some minutes passed like hours, days blended, hours passed in seconds. They were the most blissful and magical days of my life, and equally the most heart-rending and frightening. 

We shared everything within the hundreds, maybe even thousands of messages we exchanged throughout those days. We shared pictures of our dogs, and agreed that people who don’t melt at the sight of one cannot be trusted. Her dog is Levi, a Wheaten Terrier. We chatted about books, literary analysis, poetry, music, movies, TV shows, everything - and I was astounded by the similarity in our taste. 

We talked about our families, our hopes and dreams. Ellie told me about her dream of being a singer/songwriter, and shared copies of her songs with me. I remember sitting there and feeling like something magical was surging through my body as I read them and got lost in the beauty of her words… and was transported into the world of her lyrics and was “Walkin around a big empty town, I’m just crossing streets, head in the clouds. Searching all over, sleep drunk but sober, it feels like winter keeps getting colder…” It was the most transcendent experience of my life. 

I opened the door and let her in, too… I shared my writing with her… and from there, we just kept going deeper, breaking down walls and barriers, ignoring the voices within us that told us we were moving too fast, and allowing ourselves to be truly vulnerable.

It was scary, realizing that I was sharing things with her that I’d never shared with anyone before… and knowing she was doing the same. We’d never met… we’d never acted like this before… we both knew it was crazy… But, there was something indescribable at work, some inexplicable and deep-seeded connection between us that defied logic or reason, but we both knew was real. 

The night before we were going to meet, I heard Ellie’s beautiful voice for the first time on the phone. During that almost four hour call, as it crossed well beyond midnight, and we were both completely exhausted and clutching onto our awakeness by a shred… even as it passed one… I didn’t want to hang up. I’d never wanted to listen to anyone’s words like I wanted to hear Ellie’s… and I’ve never wanted to topple every wall, every barrier that stood between myself and someone as I wanted to with Ellie… 

That night we faded away on the phone, our bodies drifting, but our voices, minds and hearts furthering what I can only describe as a series of crashing waves; slow rollers, gentle whooshers, and surging crashers… And the only reason we hung up is that we knew a night’s sleep would bring us closer to the moment we could meet in person. 

We met at Rosalina in Providence the next night. I sat at the bar, ordered a drink… and awaited the arrival of the person that despite all logic and rationale telling me I was insane, I knew was The One. I’ve never been more nervous than I was in the minutes before she walked in. The same questions that had haunted me for days spiraled through my mind. What if she didn’t show up? What if she wasn’t real? What if none of this was real? What if she didn’t feel the same way I did? 

In the midst of my turmoil, the door opened, My stomach fluttered, did a triple backflip, my heart was zapped, my soul warmed, and more indescribable emotions rose from the depths of my being as I sat five feet away from, and for the first time in person, I laid eyes upon everything I’d ever wanted and needed in my life… 

 And from that point onward… I didn’t just fall in love with Ellie. I crashed into love with her. I crashed, and crashed, and crashed and it felt like every second that passed during that euphoric time I was just spiraling further into this realm where I was going through the motions of everything else in life, a world where time itself ceased to be relevant… but there was only one thing that mattered. 

I didn’t know that I’d kiss her for the first time that night… that I’d close my online dating accounts from that day forward… or that the following night I’d be sitting on the couch at her house and find myself in an uncontrollable fit of tear-filled laughter that was so intense I could hardly breathe…  or that I’d spend two hours on Christmas Eve sitting in my minivan in the parking lot at Barnes and Noble writing in her Christmas gift - a journal I was going to give her the following night, on Christmas Day which we decided to spend together, with waves on the cover that represented us, and inside, my words that attempted to convey the true nature of how I felt… or that over the next twenty four hours I’d be engaged in a debate with myself over whether to give it to her… 

I can’t say it enough… I love words… but they can’t encompass the array of feelings that radiated through me as I sat on her couch on Christmas night when she reached over, picked up her guitar, told me she was nervous playing in front of anyone… dimmed the lights…practiced for a few minutes, built up her courage, then let the walls crash down. I couldn’t take my eyes off her - was mesmerized, as she strummed Sublime’s “Santeria” and sang in the most angelic, soulful voice I’ve ever heard. 

 I gave her the journal that night, and read everything I’d written because I wanted to say it aloud. I confessed my love for her that night… a week after we matched… three days after we met in person… Then before Christmas night was over, she melted me as she plucked her guitar and my heartstrings with a beautiful rendition of The Bee Gees “To Love Somebody”, confessing her feelings through song. Words cannot explain what that moment felt like, or what it meant to me… or anything that happened going forward. 

I finished the first draft of my book, by the way. I won’t say Ellie’s been my muse, but she’s inspired me, and has kept me focused and grounded every step of the way. Still, I’m not sure it’s my natural voice - and she has this pretty funny idea that we should both write the stories of how we found each other after failing so many times. Maybe I’ll do it one day, but I have to say… Her story is far better than my own. 

It was a hell of a journey, but in hindsight, I’ve come to believe that everything unfolded exactly as the universe intended. Ellie is everything I ever wanted in someone, and all the things I didn’t know I wanted but now mean everything to me. 

She’s the best of all the people I know. She loves me unconditionally like my mother does, but doesn’t steer away from calling me out when a situation calls for it, and sometimes I need that. She sees the gray area in situations like my father does, and thinks that I probably should have gone to the show with Madison the horse-laugher, because Ellie was there and said The Lumineers crushed it… and she introduced me to Mt Joy, the band that opened that night… and there may be a tie for my new favorite band… 

She carries the wisdom of Rosa Cortez, who will be graduating in a few months… all of my kids will be graduating, and I’ll get a new crop of young, immature ninth graders who will spend the next four years of their lives trying to further the spread of the white hair in my beard. Well, unless the book is a best-seller, then I’ll never know… Ah, who are we kidding? I love teaching. 

She’s a best friend like Steven and Nelson - someone I can sit down and have a few drinks with and vent to, or just have a strange conversation with, that to anyone else would seem nonsensical. We’ve even had a few double dates that have led to the disappearance of multiple boxes of wine and some pretty epic, beautiful conversations about nothing. 

She doesn’t scream at restaurants and make scenes like Lecretia, or whatever her name was. She loves dogs, and I’m pretty sure Leia thinks of her as her own mother now… and sometimes I get jealous that they’re so close… but I suspect Ellie is also jealous of Levi’s attachment to me… 

She even does “Do Nows” with me, willingly. Her three-sentence short stories are exceedingly better than my own. She isn’t a dirty-rotten liar like Samantha, and I actually love playing ANYTHING with her. She’s my favorite game partner from Monopoly to poker to scrabble, and everything in between… but our favorite game to play together is BASEBALL.

So... I hit her in the face on the third time we played… but in my defense, she did look really hot out there that day. She didn’t get that mad, though - and we’ve since bought a helmet! (Sorry!).We’ve decreed that we are without a doubt in the top 99% of baseball playing couples out there,  ready to take on any challengers. And we are the best ball-hunters in town. 42 and counting, including the insane find of 24 on my birthday! 

She isn’t a vampire wanna-be, she isn’t mean to her mother (whose name is Linda by the way, one of the many universal “coincidences” we’ve found that have brought us together), she’s always on time, and she’ll get lost in fun, bizarre places with me… One day we had about sixty conversations between us that took place only in our pets accents… Levi, the addition to the alliterative pet trio, has quite the distinguished southern drawl. 

It’s been the happiest, most enjoyable time of my life. Every day with Ellie is like a day of summer, but words fail in their ability to describe any of the beautiful “had to be there” moments we’ll share forever. 

More than five and a half surreal, serene months later, that have been filled with incredible experiences, we’re still together and going strong, and I love Ellie with every part of my being - more with each passing second. Those waves just keep on rolling in, crashing through me. 

But I’ll never be able to explain it because I understand what Rilke means. The events that take place while falling in love are filled with transcendent experiences, monumental moments, realizations about the little things, and serene euphoria. It’s a sequence of events that defy description, fractions in time that exist only between the two people living them, and they occur within a world where no words can venture, because love itself is immune to definition. It’s abstract - and we know it’s real, and we try to make sense of it, but we don’t understand what it is and we can’t find the right words to describe or capture these moments in time because those words don’t exist. 

Love simply is.