Chapter 11

Life, The Universe, and Everything

I first read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was in high school. It was a dog-eared copy that I’d inherited from my sister and it sat on my bookshelf for years because at first glance it did not look like a book I would be interested in - I preferred gothic supernatural mysteries to science fiction. One summer day I was bored and had run out of other things to read so I picked it up and promptly devoured it. I fell in love with Douglas Adams’ wry humor and sarcasm, I fell in love with the characters, and ended up reading the entire trilogy (all five of them) as well as his other series featuring Dirk Gently. The books were among my favorites, so when it came time for me to put a profile on a dating website, I decided to use Trillian Astra, the main female character from the series, as my username.

I had been on the app for a grand total of 48 hours when it matched me with Andy, who then started messaging me. Andy was also a fan of Douglas Adams so he got the reference. On our second date, we discovered that we had recently both read the The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. An interesting coincidence in that not only did we have similar interests in books, but we’d recently read the same book and each owned a hardcover copy.

At our wedding, the officiant held a leather-bound folio containing all of the readings and pronouncements for our ceremony, on the front of which I had decorated to look like the cover of The Guide (including the words Don’t Panic inscribed in large, friendly letters). It was meant to be a marriage joke, but also a reference my username that ultimately was the source of our connection. The ceremony featured a reading from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and took place beside a monument commemorating the first use of general anesthesia in surgery, making it—almost certainly—the only wedding in recorded history to combine cosmic absurdity with medical mercy.

The Fundamental Interconnectedness of Things

Our first date was only a month and four days before Christmas. So what do you buy someone who you’ve only known for six weeks as a Christmas present - how do you make sure that you’re not crossing a line? I decided to buy him a second generation iPod Shuffle, which had just been released in a variety of colors. I opted for the silver one - a neutral color that did not make assumptions that I suddenly wanted to influence this person’s taste or imply I knew his favorite color.

When he opened the box he started down with a look of bewilderment and shock - and I was wondering if I had indeed crossed a line assuming a self proclaimed Apple detractor would be OK with an iPod. He looked at me and then gestured to the present he had given me and said “umm…open yours now.”

I opened my present, which had been wrapped in a deceptively larger box, to discover inside…a silver iPod Shuffle. I had never expressed interest in acquiring one because I already had a first-generation Shuffle that some kid had abandoned in his locker at the end of the school year - a device that held exactly 512 megabytes of music - enough for roughly one and a half full length albums. I had put it to good use when I was training for the marathon in the preceding months before we met, and had never once complained about its limited memory. But somehow Andy thought I needed an upgrade.

The first time I sat across from Andrea - that day that I had returned from viewing the apartment in Rockport, my escape from the hellish reality that was crashing down around me, the first day I agreed to see her as her true authentic self, she was wearing jeans and a dark green ribbed long sleeve shirt with ruching at the sides. I was wearing the same thing - only the top I had was brand new and had never been worn before, and thus Andrea would have no knowledge that it was part of my wardrobe. More recently she has texted me photos and will be wearing the same thing I have on that day. One might assume she was influenced by my sartorial choices over the years, but then I take a look at the rest of the the things in her closet and think “not so much…”

The Restaurant At The End of the Universe

Until we split up, we had this ongoing weekly routine of Friday date night. We went to the exact same restaurant every Friday night for over 10 years. We had become such regulars that the entire restaurant staff knew us, including the owner, and as a result we had “our table” - a corner two top by the front window. Sadly, the restaurant closed in October after nearly 30 years in business. It seemed almost fortuitous that “our restaurant” and “our table” were gone forever - an indicator that the comfortable routine we had established, the operating rhythm of our Friday nights was about to change in a way that far exceeded a simple need to find a new restaurant.

When I moved out we made a decision to set aside time every weekend for a new version of ‘date night’ - Andrea offered to come to me, and Saturday evenings would be our new routine - an opportunity for me to get to know her and learn more about her story.

The first weekend she visited, we walked downtown to see what Rockport had to offer and found ourselves outside of Feather and Wedge - the menu aligned with our tastes and the vibe reminded me of our old place in Nashua. We sat at a corner table by the front window and enjoyed the evening and the food, but for me there was a definite sense of novelty - not only due to the different restaurant with an unfamiliar staff, but the entire context of the evening. Unlike every previous date night of the last decade, we hadn’t simply both walked into our shared closet, gotten dressed and headed out to dinner (the number of times Andy and I had inadvertently reached for nearly identical pairings of colors and outfits I have lost track of). I was not sitting across the table from my husband. I wasn’t even sure who this person was or how to even categorize them.

A few weekends later, Andrea came down to visit me again. We had originally planned on trying a different restaurant, but we were running out of time, and decided to go back to Feather and Wedge. I walked up to the host and asked if they had a table for two and he replied “yes - we have the same table you ladies were at last time.”

The same server appeared and recognized us and then asked if we were “wearing the same pants.” I hadn’t noticed, but Andrea was wearing a pair of gunmetal gray metallic coated jeans, and I was wearing a pair of silver metallic coated jeans.

So there we sat - in a different restaurant, in a different town, that we had been to once before, at “our table” - the corner table by the window. Wearing similar outfits. And the staff already remembered us.

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

When I made the decision to start writing this Substack, it was born out of a desire to help process my emotions as well as serve as a creative outlet as I settled into the long dark months of winter, living alone in a different town, trying to figure out what my path forward was. When I started writing it I was not going to share it with Andrea. I published my first entry over the weekend, and when I had to return to Nashua the following Monday for an appointment, I took the opportunity to stop by the house and collect my mail. We started chatting, and Andrea said “By the way, I took your advice to start writing about my feelings.”

For years I had been telling Andy that he should consider journaling as a means of helping him process his anxiety, but his response was always “no that doesn’t work for me” - which is Andy code for “I am not ready to acknowledge that there’s a problem, so instead I will bury my head in the sand and refuse to even try.”

Intrigued, I replied “oh really? Nice.”

She said, “I decided to start a Substack this weekend. If you want I can share it with you.”

I paused and then told her about mine, and how I had started it this past weekend.

The coincidences we’ve experienced point to a connection that runs far deeper than two people who simply lived together for eighteen years.

• The matching iPods.

• Her name change on the 18th anniversary of our first date

• Finding a brand new condo that is 2.5 miles away from our existing house, then closing on it 18 years and one day after I moved in.

• Matching outfits selected sight unseen

• The table in the corner by the window. Our table.

I do not believe in God (see The God Delusion). And yet, I find myself wondering whether we are connected at some deeper, almost quantum level—whether the universe had plans, whether it always intended to place the two of us together.

In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Dirk describes himself as a holistic detective, one who relies on the fundamental interconnectedness of all things to solve not just the crime, but to find the whole person.

I have spent nearly two decades connected to Andrea, and yet I am only now beginning to understand who she is as a whole. In that sense, I feel less like a spouse and more like a detective—piecing together clues, reconstructing the crime of a missing relationship, trying to make sense of the last eighteen years. And in reading her Substack, the mystery is no longer abstract. It is finally beginning to reveal itself.