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March 30, 2002 ~ Shooting Stars, Part I
Last night, sitting with Morgan on the porch during the thunderstorm, I was reminded of a magical night on a mountaintop almost four years ago, one of the most intense and vivid nights of my entire life. And it's funny, because that night there was no thunder; in fact, there was no rain at all, only the embers of a slowly dying campfire and mist falling into the moonlit valleys.
But I can't tell you about that night yet. I ought to tell you first about how that night came to be.
This love story starts at the end of a different love story. I was living in my hometown, Portland, Oregon, finishing up high school. On January 4, 1998, at age eighteen, I became engaged to my boyfriend of a year, Kris. But, as the days passed, we both began to sense that things weren't quite right between us, that he wasn't ready for responsibility, and that I was more in love with the idea of being in love and of being married than I was in love with him. In late May, during finals week of my senior year of high school, I gave the ring back, and I was surprised to realize that I didn't feel as if my world was ending. Kris and I were still friends (and even now are still friends), but I knew that I would never again be wearing his ring.
Our mutual friend, Morgan, from North Carolina, whom we had met in a chatroom online about a year before, was coming to visit. He would arrive later that summer, and we were eagerly making plans for the visit. I spent hours chatting with him from the public library computers, and we wrote long emails back and forth.
Oh, was I a fervent and evangelical born-again Christian back then! I shudder, looking back at the things that I thought and said. I was earnest, and I had the best of intentions, but, my God. I was righteous and a wee bit close-minded. I had been raised very conservative, and I was boarding with a conservative family, but I had, just that February, "Seen The Light," so to speak, for the first time, and I wanted to share it with everyone. I was attending a Conservative Baptist Church. I thought that Rush Limbaugh had some pretty good points. Morgan, on the other hand, had been raised in a very liberal family, as a Unitarian Universalist. He was considering Wicca.
We had wonderful (in every sense of the word) debates. Quite frankly, I don't know how he put up with me. But our communication was so clear. A deeply spiritual and philosophical friendship was formed, based only on the words that we wrote to one another. Together, despite the many miles between us, we had questioned, strived, and built an identity for ourselves. Online, there was no chance for a relationship that was built upon anything but the most vital element of ourselves. Online, you are reduced to twenty-six letters and a handful of symbols, and you are forced to boil down that most essential part of yourself.
Slowly, as the time for Morgan's visit approached, something inside of me began to change, and something inside of him began to change, and we both started seeing things a different way. He taught me to see outside of strict boundaries. And he began to see why I believed in God. And he began to believe as well.
An excerpt from an email that I wrote to him: "I don't know if I will send this to you, I don't even know what I am trying to say... so often I feel like I am walking on the broken glass of my shattered dreams and ambitions... but now... well, finding God has helped... He's gluing all he pieces back together... But when I talk to you... It's as if I see a whole new un-marred window... a whole new possibility or dream. You give me hope."
An excerpt from an email that he wrote to me: "I don't want guilt, or really forgiveness, I just want to know what it is like to really and truly believe in something. I don't really care whether it is called Wicca or Christianity, or whether there exists a Buddha or a Jesus. I could do without books, and forgiveness. I can live a hard life and bear responsibility, but I need to know faith.... I don't have to have Christianity, but I do have to have a vision, a goal, a God. If I am to forge my own path straight up through the forest of this world to emerge on that far off peak, then I need some help. I need to know. Simply to know. And to love."
I knew that my feelings for Morgan were becoming more than friendship, but I hadn't written anything to him yet. But our chat conversations and emails--they all had an undertone creeping into them that soon became impossible to ignore.
But there were so many tensions. There was the tensions between our still very opposite views on religion. There was the tension of three thousand miles and futures that seemed to be headed in opposite directions. And, of course, the very obvious tension that we hadn't even met yet.
But then, a miracle happened, than neither of us could ever have planned.
continued in Part II...
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