Jeremy
After living all of my wildest dreams, I realized that the one thing I was missing was someone to share my life with. I had spent over a decade living, working, and studying in the Middle East and there was this feeling that I was ready for a new type of adventure—one that let me put me first.
One of my favorite parts of the book to write was about Jeremy. The process of writing about my life brought out so many unremembered moments and buried emotions, but the section about Jeremy was fresh in my mind. I had just moved to Kansas City and the emotions—the passion—was still a vibrant part of my everyday life.
It was an unexpected development when I returned from Bahrain, but Jeremy and I met online and fell in love quickly thereafter. Once I found him, I knew it was time for me to embark on a new kind of life. The last chapter of my book details some of the most important moments in my most important adventure, and I’d like to share what is the best part of any love story.
It only took a week before we said it and it happened like it always happened. We were having our 5th conversation of the day and Jeremy could barely look me in the eye,
“I know we don’t know each other at all…but…I don’t know, man…”
I immediately knew what he wanted to say—and I knew I felt it too. I let him stumble his way around his words,
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing to me…I feel…”
“Me? I’m a world traveling fireman and all I can do is think about you all the time.”
It took us 30 minutes of pretending before we said it,
“I love you.”
This time it was different than when Bret or Dan told me they loved me. I didn’t know, back then, that people were uncomfortable saying those three words. It was never difficult for me because it didn’t mean the same thing. “I love you” was an expression of an idealized reality—it meant that I would do everything in my power to push you to become the hero you were destined to become. Love was an expression of faith and commitment, not lust.
With Jeremy, things were different. I was in a relationship. We talked nonstop every day on Skype, through text, and on the phone. We woke up in the middle of the night and wrote each other love notes about how lucky we were to find each other. I waited for him to text me “good morning” before I started my commute and as soon as I left work, I dialed his number and prayed he wasn’t stuck in a meeting. If I missed him before I got on the train, it was an insufferable 20 minutes before I got a signal again. I was a 40-year old man with a high school-style crush and it felt amazing and uncomfortable. Nothing in my life prepared me for an experience with my own emotional happiness.
Jeremy wasn’t an experiment with how to solve a riddle or complete a mission, he was a new kind of opportunity to be my true self. I had spent so much of my life’s energy experimenting with the most dangerous, adrenaline-fueled adventures that I was successful at ignoring the truth of my own everyday reality. I experimented with gender roles in Egypt, relationships in Yemen, social networks in Fallujah, economic assistance in Nawa, and burning buildings in Virginia—but I had never experimented with my own happiness divorced from some existential mission.
Something clicked when I started sharing my life with Jeremy. It was deeply uncomfortable, but the more I poured my heart into him, the more I found the courage to say the things I didn’t know had been stuck in my heart forever.