Divorced Before 30

It had been almost a month since I left John, and I was experiencing renewed attachment to Minnesota. For the past seven years, I had been only an occasional visitor to my home state, residing in zip codes ranging from 20009, to 01060, to 60618. I had lived in an astonishing ten apartments (ten!) since college. Now, I had a mind toward putting down roots. Hopefully not in my parents’ basement, but the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” was looking pretty keen.

I wondered: What would it be like to be established? I’d met wonderful people everywhere I had lived (Love to all the friends I met in DC, Noho, Chicago, and C-U!). But, as luck would have it, just as I started to feel settled somewhere, I would find myself behind the wheel of the next U-Haul. I loved the adventures that the new cities brought, but I longed for the stability that comes with a more permanent address—navigational confidence, favorite restaurants, and lifelong friends who are reasonably likely to stick around.

I was lucky to have several such friends in the women who had taken me out the previous weekend. Daniela was a college friend who I met through running, and we had—and still have—the kind of connection where it doesn’t matter how often we talk; we’re close. Daniela and her hubby, a psychology grad student, lived in a hip loft in Northeast Minneapolis. She was wrapping up a graduate degree in nursing, and it gave me hope in the world to think of her going into geriatrics. Believe me—you want this blonde sweetheart taking care of your grandma!

I met Andrea the first week of college, and before I got to know her, I found her incredibly intimidating. She’s a petite strawberry blonde from Boston with a great sense humor and a gift for running. She’s the only person I know who could smoke a cigarette at the starting line of a marathon and then proceed to kick your ass. We’d rented an apartment in DC together after college, but her dad passed unexpectedly and she moved to Boston to try to make sense of it all. She’d landed back in Minnesota and was attending law school and living near Lake Calhoun with her cats and her dog, Nora Lee. She was in a relationship, but neither she nor I was particularly impressed with the guy.

Megan—second bridesmaid from the left—was a high school running teammate who turned out to be one of my best friends. We first met through my brother, Andy, who was a very wise middle school boy to make friends with cool, older girls. In high school and college, Megan and I boxed up our entire wardrobes and exchanged them for a week or two during the winter. Her pants were a little short on me, but it was great fun to borrow someone else’s inevitably cooler look. When I moved home, Megan lived in St. Paul and was working on a PhD student in geology. To me, she was a big kid—the same fun, curly-haired girl with killer blue eyes.

Aside from these close friends, there were a lot of other great people to reconnect with in Minnesota. I had just run into one of my college teammates, Kate, and her husband, Jim, while out walking Tucker earlier that week. Kate was a senior on the cross country and track teams during my first year of college. She had figured a few things out and was very generous toward us newbies. She would come to our dorm rooms on Sunday mornings and rouse us from our liquor-accentuated slumbers to run ten or so miles through the countryside. And we still thought she was cool! Strangely enough, I had just run into Kate and Jim the previous fall at a trail race in Illinois. Bumping into them again prompted me to get in touch with a mutual college friend, Josh.

Josh was first-year roommates with Travis, one of my ex-boyfriends. The three of us took a spring break roadtrip to New Mexico in my Plymouth Horizon hatchback, which was snug given Josh’s 6’8″ stature. Josh also helped me cram for my Energetics & Genetics final after I learned the hard way that while college is fun, it should not be fun, fun, fun if you hope to graduate with honors. Josh and I stayed in touch after college, and when I landed briefly in Minnesota to save money for grad school, we went on a bunch of “pseudo dates”—dinners, a play, and even an amazing U2 show. We considered each other “off-limits,” so it was fun and uncomplicated to hang out, and it wasn’t even a big deal to crash in the same bed after a late night out.

I was also excited to reconnect with my three brothers and my relatively new sister-in-law. To be continued…