Gratitude in Motion Read online

  I had good days and bad, good months and bad. Getting on my bike helped on the days I could do that, and being with the kids helped. Going to peace conferences and being inspired by the PeaceJam Nobel laureates helped. Ruminating about how I was probably going to be alone forever and marriage was a sham and maybe I was fundamentally unlovable did not help.

  Then along came a reminder that was both sweet and wistful.

  I had just signed on to my computer when I saw the notification in July 2008:

  Sean Alexander wants to be friends on Facebook.

  How many times had I thought about contacting him? In fact, I had tried looking him up in the phone book a few times over the years, but he had moved and Sean Alexander is a common name. Now here he was in my inbox, and my heart skipped a beat before I even checked out his profile.

  Then there he was. And he was still hot.

  What stunned me was that I was his only friend…the very first person he’d friend-requested when he signed up. That felt so good. After all these years, he hadn’t forgotten about me, either. How many years had it been, anyway? I did some quick math and came up with seventeen. Nearly two decades. So much had gone on since then that I had no idea whether either of us was even the same person anymore. According to his profile, he lived in Colorado. I stared and stared, trying to figure out whether he was married (it didn’t say in his sparse profile), and spotted a ring in one of his pictures.

  That was probably for the best—I wasn’t looking for a relationship, and this basically took that off the table. Still, I had long felt like he was “the one who got away.” It would be so nice to reconnect and just hear his voice again, maybe get the chance to apologize for breaking up with him with no explanation all those years earlier.

  “Blast from the past!” he wrote. “What are you doing in Vermont?”

  I took a deep breath and sent him a message:

  I have always wanted to apologize to you. As a teen, I was heavily brainwashed by religion. I was fearful of being in any relationship with anyone who did not share my same values with salvation. Thank you for being a respectful friend/boyfriend. I appreciated it. Now as an adult, I work with many youths with paths heavily saturated by drug use, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and even a brainwashed-by-religion teen who are transitioning into adolescence and trying to understand their boundaries and the world around them under such a small microscope. I love people and advocating for people.

  I have been working for a youth center and running a program called PeaceJam based out of Denver here in Vermont. This September I’ll be heading to LA to an international peace conference with the kids. I have no children but instead work with them. I have become an independent female.

  Basically, I wanted to say thank you, as you were a pivotal part in the development of my psyche as an adolescent and many of our conversations pertaining to your love of the ocean and the outdoors and how that brought you closer to God more so than attending church stuck with me and percolated into my early adulthood.

  I’m so happy to see you online and to see your big smile, and to know you are well and enjoying life.

  We wrote back and forth a couple of times, enough for me to find out that he wasn’t married after all. The ring was just for fun. (It was on his right hand in the photo, which I probably should have noticed.) He was working at a restaurant now, and had traded in his surfboard for a snowboard.

  Even knowing he was single, though, I didn’t want to connect too heavily with him right away. My marriage was just ending and the last thing I needed was to get into another relationship.

  I messaged him with my phone number so we could catch up, but he didn’t call for a few weeks. One day, he was mountain biking and when he hit the summit at 11,000 feet, he decided he was going to call me. I saw the Colorado area code and took a breath before picking up the phone, hoping it was him.

  “Hey, Colleen,” he said with a smile in his voice.

  “Hey, you!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just got home from work. What about you?”

  “I’m on top of a mountain. I was cycling up here and thinking about you and I thought… ‘You know, I’m just gonna call her.’”

  He sounded just the same, only manlier. We spoke for about twenty-five minutes, both keeping our cool about how excited we were to talk to each other. It was just a nice, warm conversation. Just like that first date, he felt so familiar, so much like home.

  I learned more about the years since I’d last seen him. After he graduated from college, he did a short stint as a model for big companies like Calvin Klein and Hugo Boss, so I guess he had finally realized how good-looking he was. He was also dating a model then, but they broke up when he realized she was cheating on him with someone in the business. Pretty quickly, he realized the modeling world really wasn’t his style, and he had hightailed it out of there to become the bachelor of Vail.

  Within weeks, we were talking on the phone all the time, sometimes until the sun came up. I began dreaming about him, but not sexual dreams…which was interesting, because I was very much a sexual creature by then. I fantasized instead about snuggling into his chest and falling asleep. It was as PG-rated as our high school relationship had been. After about the third time, I thought, Something is seriously wrong with me. This beautiful man, and my biggest fantasy involved us being fully clothed?

  It is just a fantasy, though, I reminded myself. He was in Colorado. I was done with relationships. It was nothing more than a fun imagination about what might have been.

  Real life kept intruding on my imaginary one; in real life, I was still going back and forth to doctors and still getting no answers. It wasn’t celiac disease. Not Crohn’s. It wasn’t related to the Chiari malformation.

  “Maybe I’m just burned out,” I sighed to one of my girlfriends on the phone.

  “You need to get away. When was the last time you took a vacation?”

  Hmm. In the nineties?

  Maybe she was right.

  Chapter 6

  Costa Rica

  O​N THE RECOMMENDATION OF a couple of girlfriends, I decided to book a trip to a yoga retreat in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Friends of mine who were yoga enthusiasts had recommended the instructor, and I looked forward to getting away and clearing my mind. I liked the idea of taking my first real solo trip. I called the number listed on her website and asked to come in November.

  “I’m familiar with your work and I’m glad to have you here,” she told me. “But we’re normally not open in November—it’s the rainy season.”

  “Oh,” I said. I told her about what was going on in my life—about the brain surgery and the end of my long relationship and how unsettled I felt.

  “If you just want to do a personal retreat, you’re welcome to come,” she said. “You’d basically be alone, except for my son and the gardener and the man who takes care of the horses. And the person who makes the cheese!”

  “That sounds great. I would love to be alone for a while. I just need a place to relax, do lots of yoga, and have some good organic food.”

  “We can certainly provide that. You’ll have a queen-sized bed and an open-air kitchen.”

  She offered me a room for forty-nine dollars a night, which—I mean, honestly, how could I resist? I booked it for seven nights.

  When I told Sean about my trip, he threw me a curveball.

  “I might be in Costa Rica then, too,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “I always go to either Costa Rica or Nicaragua in November to surf during the slow season at the resorts.”

  I knew what he was not-so-subtly hinting, and it was exciting and terrifying. He wanted to meet me in Costa Rica.

  I can’t let him be my Eat, Pray, Love. He can’t be my pool boy, I thought. It was too soon. If we met, I wouldn’t be able to resist him, and it would be a rebound thing. He deserved better than that.

  Then I thought about it again and decided that I was a strong wom
an who could handle keeping her desires in check. The opportunity to see him again was so unexpected and exciting, even if it was tempered by a lot of anxious overthinking.

  Sean arrived in Costa Rica first. He came to pick me up at the airport, and as soon as he spotted me, he came running over for a hug. I was wearing a big backpack. He must have bear-hugged my backpack for ten minutes before I finally broke free and put it down so we could hug unencumbered.

  It was pretty late when Sean picked me up, and it seemed like too much to make the two- to three-hour drive through the rain forest to get to where I was staying, so we made the decision to stay locally and put off the drive until the morning. We arrived at a nearby hotel and I asked for two rooms.

  “Why do you want two rooms?” the receptionist asked.

  “Yeah!” Sean said with a big smile. “Why do you want two rooms?”

  “No, we definitely need two rooms,” I told her.

  I turned to Sean and quietly said, “That’s not what this trip is about. The purpose of this trip is for me to just be. I can’t jump into something. And plus, you live in Colorado…”

  “Well, I have three rooms left. Two in smoking, one in nonsmoking,” the woman told us.

  You have to be kidding me, I thought. It was like a movie scene with an all-too-convenient obstacle to advance the plot. Neither of us wanted to be in the smoking wing.

  Sean looked at me with that big, silly grin again.

  I threw my hands in the air. One room. Fine.

  It was about the Costa Rican equivalent of a Super 8. After settling into our perfectly adequate room, we went out for food and stared at each other. The last version of Sean I’d seen was eighteen. Pieces of him were the same—his shiny hair, his freckles, his eyes—but there were wonderful new lines around his eyes, and a new brow line.

  He’s an adult, I thought. A full-grown man. And that made me take a moment to assess myself and realize…I, too, am an adult now.

  We went for a night swim afterward, and Sean reminded me that we used to sneak into hotel pools back in high school. My eyes drifted to a scar on his abdomen. He looked down as he started to explain.

  “I got into an accident on my snowboard three years ago. I was by myself on a new board in the back country and the front of my board hit a tree branch covered in deep snow. I went end over end and got impaled by another tree branch.”

  “Holy crap.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty bad. I had to pull the branch out of my body and crawl back to the path to find help. I was bleeding all over the place.”

  “You could have died!”

  “I could have. I needed a lot of blood transfusions—and a colostomy. That was no fun.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The thought that he could have been gone before we ever got the chance to reconnect hit me so hard. I didn’t want to let him go. We stood there hugging in the shallow end until a worker came and told us in Spanish that it was after hours and time for us to get out. Then we stayed up in our room and talked all night long.

  The following morning he drove me to the yoga retreat center, where I spent a couple of days before we were to meet up again in the village where Sean was surfing. On my retreat, I went horseback riding and spent many, many hours reading and lying in a hammock in addition to doing yoga.

  The retreat owner’s son drove me in his old Toyota 4Runner to meet Sean. We arrived first, and I got out of the passenger side. The driver thought I had cleared the car—but I hadn’t. My foot was still in the truck’s path when he began driving, music blasting through the speakers.

  CRUNCH!

  He ran over my foot, and I let out a howl—which caused him to panic and throw the truck into reverse and run over it a second time. Everyone around us began screaming.

  “Grab my back!” I yelled to a bystander in the limited Spanish I knew, because I was afraid I was about to pass out. Lots of people crowded around, wanting to help, but no one knew what to do. Luckily, I’d been an EMT. I barked out orders, roughly translated. “Lower me down to the ground. Elevate my foot.”

  Just as this commotion was happening, Sean rounded the corner. He got out of the car and said, “What the hell happened?”

  The pain was ridiculous. I was sure my foot was broken. Sean rushed me to the nearest hospital—two hours away—and it wasn’t exactly like hospitals back home. Here, the hallways were all open-air, and the X-ray room was across from the morgue. The X-ray technician gabbed on her cell phone in Spanish and finished smoking her cigarette before putting me through.

  We were supposed to be at the beach, I thought.

  We had to tell them that Sean was my brother (“¡Mi hermano!”) so they’d let him stay with me. The doctor looked at my X-rays and said that no bones were broken; I should just stay off the foot and take antibiotics. That was it; no one cleaned my foot or even picked the gravel out of it.

  I was lucky that we hadn’t been on a paved road and that it had been rainy season, because while the tire had pretty well mangled the top of my foot, my foot had sunk into the sand gravel, which protected it from being a lot worse. Later, when I got back home to my own doctors, I would find out that I did have a hairline fracture—but I didn’t know that yet, and so I just figured I’d do the best I could to get through the pain.

  But how on Earth was I supposed to do a yoga retreat? Forget it—there was no point in my going back. Sean suggested taking me out for margaritas to dull the pain, and luckily the retreat owner was understanding of my plight…particularly because it was her son who ran over my foot.

  The closest lodging was a four-leaf eco-rated luxury hotel in the thick of the rain forest in Arenal for $400 a night, which neither of us had—but we did have credit cards. We stayed there for three lovely nights, and during the day, I mostly lay down with my foot elevated or we did whatever limited activities we could that didn’t involve much walking. We visited geothermal hot springs from the runoff water of a volcano, which felt so healing. When the clouds cleared, you could see steam from the still-active Arenal volcano. Then there were the toucans and howler monkeys. It was a magical atmosphere.

  Throughout it all I tried to understand what was happening with Sean and me. I had such strong feelings for him, but I had already decided that it wasn’t a healthy choice to be in a relationship at that time—and neither did I want it to be a random, hot “hookup” with a blast from the past. Yet being with him was so genuine and loving, effortlessly fun and free. I had to keep telling myself to stop getting caught up in the moment, though, because it was all going to go away soon.

  Come on. He lives in Colorado, and you have way too much going on in your life.

  But a second thought would compete with that one, and before long I was having inner conversations with God about what I was supposed to do.

  You must have put me here for a reason, and if you meant for me to be here reconnecting with Sean, then I don’t want to screw it up.

  Finally we were back at the airport; I was flying home to Vermont and he to Colorado. It was an emotionally devastating moment for both of us, dealing with the sudden reality that we were going to be two thousand miles apart tomorrow and that even though we just wanted to skip out on our lives and get on a plane together, that wasn’t a rational choice.

  The whole ride home, though, all I could think was How long do I have to wait?

  When would I feel right about being in a new relationship? This wasn’t a rebound. He was like the other part of me, and not the annoying part. How often does that come around? Never, that’s when.

  About seventy-two hours after I got home, I booked a flight on Priceline to visit him for New Year’s Eve. Then I called him.

  “Hey, what are you doing for New Year’s Eve?”

  “I think I’m working. Why?”

  “Is it all right if I come out?”

  “Uh…yeah, that would be great.”

  “Good, because I already bought a ticket.”

  That Christmas I spent time with
old friends from high school who asked what I was so smiley about. I told them I had seen Sean again.

  “That’s so cool! You two were always meant to be together!” one of my friends said—which just fueled the fire. She is wise. She must be right.

  I flew into Denver a week later. I had never been to Colorado before, and it had the same fairy-tale effect on me that Costa Rica did. On our drive to Sean’s house in Vail, the high peaks across the skyline were so beautiful that I felt like I was in a storybook. He held my hand from the driver’s seat and I nearly had to pinch myself.

  I’m in Sean Alexander’s car, and this time, there aren’t even holes in the floorboard.

  There was one hitch, though.

  It’s not a very environmentally friendly car.

  Well, you can’t win ’em all.

  The powder snow glistened in the sun, and I soaked in everything about both the atmosphere and my companion. We went to his company party, where his coworkers asked what kind of magic I had worked on this perpetual bachelor.

  It was only a three-day trip, but we packed in a lot of quality time hiking and going out to eat and playing in the snow. This time I didn’t hesitate to share his room. Soon after my trip ended, Sean called me to tell me that he had booked a flight to come visit me in March. It went on like that for about ten months, with our back-and-forth visits. By then there was a staff at the youth center and most of my work was writing grants, which I could do remotely as long as I had someone to manage the place.

  We were walking through the woods near his house once when he said, “Did you know that the aspen tree roots are one of the oldest living root systems in the world? They sprawl miles and miles and they’re all interconnected. It’s like the way we’re so deeply connected all the way across the miles, too.”

  All of the shouldn’ts in my mind melted off. This was real. It wasn’t going away. I was supposed to be with Sean.