Colette & Evan

Yesterday I went to a wedding. As an actual guest, not the videographer. Which is something in itself, but this wedding was pretty amazing for another reason. When I moved to NYC in July of 2001, I subletted a place with my friend Sarah Lilley for a few months until I found a place of my own. I knew I was going to live with a friend from summer stock, Anne Mannal, and we were hoping to find a third. I put an ad on the Redeemer Classifieds, thinking that I would be less likely to room with a weirdo/psychopath if I found them from a church bulletin board instead of Craig's List. Not always a guarantee there either, but it just felt safer to me.

A girl named Colette responded to my posting. She was moving to NYC from Iowa in September and was willing to live with me and Anne in an apartment she wouldn't see until the day we moved in. So, everything was agreed upon, Anne and I found a great place and we all moved in on Sept 1, 2001. I remember that as of 9/11 we still didn't have cable, so we hooked our TV up to the previous tenant's cable cord that was dangling from the wall, and put the TV on a stack of boxes and were able to get a few channels that could fill us in on everything that happened in the days after, when I refused to leave Queens for a week.

Anne moved to LA a few years after that and we had a succession of roommates come and go in the years that followed, but Colette and I lived together from Sept of 2001 to December of 2007, when I was engaged and moved into the apartment I now share with Geoff (about 2 blocks from the old apartment). Which is kind of amazing, considering that she and I have almost nothing in common. I'm 5'9" and she's maybe 5'2". She would burn incense in her room and I can't stand the stuff. She is a little more "earthy" and eclectic than I am. I don't know that we have ever even bought the same groceries except for maybe milk, and even then, I would always go for skim and I think hers was always whole. I'm definitely a dog person and she would probably prefer a cat. I take showers, she always takes baths. She can deal with getting rid of the mice we would catch in our apartment and I am a COMPLETE chicken in that department. I definitely saw a dead mouse one morning and despite my guilt, I left it right where it was and went to work, hoping and praying (and knowing) that Colette would be able to handle it.

And despite all these differences and more, we have so much respect for each other as people and truly care about one another. She is a very talented playwright. She's wise and open and incredibly smart. She's a jewelry designer. The times that we would sit down and talk were always interesting and rewarding and I think it was living with Colette that truly gave me a sense of what it's like to care about someone that I probably never would have been friends with if we'd met at work or in college. One of the only things we did have in common, besides our faith, (which I guess is how we found each other in the first place) is the fact that neither of us really had an extensive dating history before moving to New York, and certainly were coming to the city as single girls with a lot of married friends. Throughout our time living together, I know we both often felt like we'd probably never meet anyone at all. And then we both did. I was SO excited for Colette when she and Evan met. I'd been dating Geoff for maybe about a year at that point, and it was awesome to see, even just a little bit, the beginnings of their relationship and how she was excited, but cautious. And then yesterday, I went to their wedding.


I just think it's amazing. I never would have dreamed it up for either of us. Thinking back to the girls we were seven years ago, and looking at our lives now, to me it's just an amazing example of trust. Trusting that the road you're on is the road you're meant to be on, even when you can't see around the corner. And even when it seems it's taking you a lot longer to get to mile markers that other people have left in the dust. It just makes me want to take a deep breath every day and remind myself to let go and trust.