Other People’s Lives

I came across something the other day that reminded me of a time about 12 years ago or so that I briefly cyber-stalked this couple who ran adventure biking tours in the Himalayas. Well, cyber-stalked is an exaggeration, but I did end up spending literally hours Googling to find out what had happened to them, what had gone wrong.

Let me back up a bit: Sometime in 2008 or 2009 I read an article in an adventure cycling magazine my then-husband and I subscribed to because we liked bicycle touring. I think the article was about a bike tour in Norway, I’m not sure. The prose was written primarily by the woman with photos taken primarily by the man, and I think that’s initially why I was attracted to them—because my husband and I had talked about doing something exactly like that (and indeed, we ended up publishing a couple articles this way, with more planned before he left).

I looked the couple’s blog up from their author bios and read the older articles. They lived in England and led tours in Asia in the summers. Charles, I’ll call him, was a talented photographer and peppered their blog with beautiful shots of everything from Kanchenjunga to weekend excursions to the composting center with their bike trailer. Cassie, naturally, was featured in many of his photos: an adorable, pint-sized, tough-as-nails Irish American girl, a lively and straightforward travel writer. I don’t honestly remember the story of how they met (how good of a cyber-stalker am I, really?). But I instantly fell for them—their personalities, their story, the future I imagined for them full of family and world travel and good deeds and joy.

Over the next week or so whenever I had a break from work, I read more of their blog entries. They adopted a dog in Pakistan. They baked bread at his parents’ house over the holidays in England. Everything was coming together. And then suddenly, without any explanation, the blog posts went from “we” to “I”—the “I” being Charles. Cassie was…where was she?

It’s hard to describe the shock and dismay I felt. How could such a perfect relationship just come apart at the seams like that? I realized I was reading posts that were a few years old at this point, so I frantically started Googling to see if I could find out what happened. I managed to piece a few things together: she had moved back to the States and applied to nursing school. He continued to write gear reviews and tour with sponsorships. They continued to run their summer tours together as business partners for a few years. And then he found someone else, and she found someone else. Every now and then, she would pop up in the comments on his blog to compliment a photo or to cheer him on as he made an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to ride his mountain bike from Alaska to Patagonia. I kept hoping against hope they would get back together. But when the kids showed up—first for him, then for her, I had to acknowledge the gig was up.

It wasn’t too long after that that my own gig was up. The future I had imagined for my husband and me—the future that looked an awful lot like the future I had imagined for Charles and Cassie—was gone in the space of a dim conversation at the dining room table after a weekend climbing trip I wasn’t invited to.

When Charles popped back up in my news feed this last week, I remembered the rabbit hole I had gone down with him and Cassie over a decade ago. I also realized for the first time *why* I had gone down that rabbit hole, why I had stayed up until midnight at the dining room table tensely searching for clues to their break-up, for hints of reconciliation. I had made Charles & Cassie my own personal relationship oracle. My own marriage felt precarious, and I was using Charles and Cassie’s story to convince myself that it was all going to turn out OK. That oracle turned out to be accurate in ways I didn’t, and probably didn’t want to, recognize at the time.

At some point after that, I realized that my problem lay in refusing to live my actual, present life. In focusing on the future—mine and Charles & Cassie’s both—I had stopped living in the present. By shifting my gaze to other people’s lives, I’d stopped living my own—because it wasn’t matching up to my expectations, or because I was afraid to admit the facts in front of my face. Not here was always better than here. Not now was always better than now. The problem with that strategy is that I was essentially putting myself, my life, in a coma while pretending to live another life—either an imagined version of mine, or someone else’s.

I’d like to say I’ve stopped doing that. I’ve tried. I’m trying to stop escaping from my life into other people’s through media, mostly, but also through worrying about things and times that haven’t happened yet, and regretting things and times that are past. It’s “tough sledding,” as my stepfather used to say. But when I do manage to live my own life (the only one I’ve got, as it turns out) I have to say I’m happier for it.

I do and sincerely hope Charles and Cassie are happy, too, with the only lives they’ve got.