Two People Chasing Two Different Things

My first girlfriend out of college was Trisha Leigh Kelly, and she was a dancer.

Not a hobbyist. She was chasing a contract with River North or Hubbard Street — the two serious companies in Chicago — which is roughly the dance equivalent of what I was doing, and roughly as likely.

So for a couple of years there were two of us, in our early twenties, both pointed at something absurd, mostly in different cities.

What that is actually like

I have written a lot on this site about the people who helped me. Coaches, a surgeon, a chiropractor, an aunt, a family who took me in.

This is a different category and I do not have a clean word for it. She was not helping me. She was doing her own version of it at the same time.

There is a specific thing that happens when you are with someone who is also chasing. You do not have to explain the schedule. You do not have to justify moving to a city you did not choose because that is where the opportunity is. You do not have to defend the fact that the thing might not work, because they are also holding that, every day, about their own.

You also cannot be each other's whole support system, because you are both already spending everything you have. Long distance most of the time. Two calendars that do not care about each other.

I did not appreciate any of it while it was happening. I was twenty-two and I thought that was just what a relationship was.

2007 and 2008

She was there for the first two championships.

Windy City ThunderBolts, Frontier League, back to back — 2007 over the Washington Wild Things, 2008 over Kalamazoo. Two years out of a total hip replacement, in the first two seasons of a career I had been told repeatedly I would not have.

I have written about those rings from the inside of the clubhouse. What I have not said is that there was a person on the other end of the phone the whole time, in Chicago, going after her own thing, who knew what all of it meant to me.

You do not get to have those seasons twice, and you do not get to have the person who was there for them twice either.

The clean break

We broke up and it was clean, and I have not really talked to her since. A kind comment on a story every once in a while, a like, years apart.

There is no bitterness in this post because there is none to report. I wish her extremely well and I always have.

I am writing about her anyway, because I have spent a year putting my life into writing and I noticed that the version I had been telling skipped straight from the hip replacement to the championships to Mexico, as though I had been alone the entire time. I was not.

What she is doing in this story

Two things, and neither is the one people expect.

She showed me what it looks like from the outside. Watching somebody else chase something at that intensity — the auditions, the rejections, the training, the years of it — taught me more about what I was doing to the people around me than any amount of introspection would have. You cannot see your own obsession. You can see theirs.

And she was proof that it was normal. At twenty-two, in a world of people getting sensible jobs, I was doing something that looked reckless to almost everyone I knew. She was doing the same thing in a different discipline. That does something for you. It stops being what is wrong with me and starts being this is a category of person, and there are others.

Every close friend I had was another lefty pitcher, which I have written about as a pattern. This is the same pattern from a different angle. You find the other people who are pointed at something improbable, and it does not matter much what the something is.

Trisha

I do not know how her dance career finished. I hope it went the way she wanted and I suspect it went the way most of them go, which is to say it turned into something else that was also good.

You were in the two best years of the first part of my life and I never said so publicly. Saying it now.