Ethan and I are captive to a perpetual split-screen narrative. Watch me on the left side sipping my grande Christmas Blend from Starbucks for 2.5 hours every morning, while I wait for 11 a.m. to send my first text of the day. You would see him sleeping on the right. You would then see him wake up, right around the time I am starting to plan my afternoon. You would see him make French press coffee and a light breakfast while I go to the gym at lunch. You would see him send me a text response. Me, running on the elliptical to a 2006 episode of “Law & Order: SVU.” Him, feeding the chickens. Me, blotting dry my sweat and reassembling my work ensemble in the locker room. Him, working on his laptop. Me…then him…and me. The screen remains split, 24 hours a day. We are together only over the phone, and anyone who’s ever digested the smallest bit of visual culture knows that even phone calls are illustrated through the split screen device.

I have a confession. It’s getting old.

I want to be the resilient one, the Civil War widow, nobly awaiting sooty, grease-smeared communiques from the battlefields and savoring the pair of long woolens left behind in the mending bin. I want a daguerrotype to moon over.

I want Ken Burns to orchestrate a moving soundtrack to our story.

Given the absence of a daguerrotype or an intensely passionate correspondence that stokes the embers on its own, I find myself using an awful lot of pragmatism. “Well, we can’t be together, so I may as well cope…” or “I can distract myself by participating in vigorous physical hobbies such as vinyasa yoga.” The more I think about what I’ve set up for myself — through no fault or ill-considered decisions, just whim and inspiration — I wonder what a therapist would have to say about it all. Frankly, even writing about it in this forum feels like a fluorescent-lit high-school basement classroom: chairs encircles, emotions and baggage laid out for inspection, the nakedness of a support group.

My name is Edie, and I keep love at a distance. Or at least that’s what I’m here to work through.

“Real, off-the-boat Irish, or ‘I’m from SOUTHIE!’ Irish?” I ask.

“Real Irish, from Ireland,” says Louise.

“I like Irish girls.” Or at least in my head I do. I’ve never dated an Irish girl at that point in my life, but the accent is sexy. So why not.

“What do you think of Irish doctors?”

“I like Irish doctors,” I say. I like smart, overeducated women. In fact, in the world where pornographic movies are made just for me, “an Irish doctor walks in” is not an entirely inappropriate start for a storyline.

“What about Irish doctors who are in America on sabbatical to write a novel and who will be moving back home in September?” Louise says.

I’ve long considered myself a commitophobe. A commitophobe who likes smart, overeducated, creative women with accents. Who really, really, really likes relationships that start with an expiration date.

“Sounds like the perfect match,” I say.

“I think you’d like my friend,” says Louise. Let’s call her friend Tessa. Because Tessa is easy to type and we’re going to talk a lot about her.

About a week later, we’re introduced. It’s an odd sort of night. I’d been location scouting for a film I was hoping to produce at the time, and when I arrived at the Druid in Cambridge on a sweltering night in August, I had that crazed gleam in my eye I’ve come to recognize as the high of creativity. I’m with a cohort of mine from the film. We meet Louise and Tessa just after dinner. Oddly enough, I almost didn’t make it–I had stopped by my cousin’s bar in Boston and we’d talked about grabbing dinner together. I almost, honestly, skipped out on meeting this now infamous Irish doctor turned novelist.

Instead I stroll into the Druid, crazy-eyed, maybe even a bit arrogant, and I feel a hammer slam into my chest. It wasn’t love at first sight. I won’t call it that. What it was, I believe, was the knowledge that I would fall very hard for the dark-haired Irish doctor sitting across from me that night, and I would quite possibly make a fool out of myself for her, and I knew, right then and there, that she would rip my heart right out of my chest when she got on an airplane a month later. I knew it as certainly as I know I woke up this morning. There was never a doubt in my mind I would chase after this woman, with her fine cheekbones and huge green eyes and expressive mouth, with all the energy of a man who has just bet his last dollar.

Things would turn out a bit better than that, in the end. And for someone whose love life has consisted of rotating relationships in which I ran away before the woman could become attached to me, or got attached to a woman who would inevitably leave… this meeting, a meeting I almost skipped in favor of a few rounds of Johnny Walker Blue and overpriced burgers with my cousin in Fanueil Hall, would set me on a path I never planned on finding, let alone following.

But more on that later.

We stayed and talked until nearly closing time. We shouted lewd and funny stories over the traditional Irish band in the corner. I wouldn’t get her number, because Louise had to rush home and we all bolted so fast I lost my nerve to ask Tessa if I could see her again.

On my way home–I would get lost in Somerville, where I was born, a town I know better than almost any other, because I was so adrenaline-addled and love-struck I missed multiple turns to get myself to Route 93–I’d find a few comments via text from my cohort. The first being typical guy talk (he slipped into the men’s room and texted me, hours earlier, “Wow, dude, wow”), and the other being this simple yet profound comment:

“You know she’s the type of woman you change for,” he wrote.

Turns out he was right. I just didn’t know how much. Instead I was hurtling home, and hurtling, I was convinced, towards a singularly brutal heartbreak.

What none of us knew was that two weeks later Tessa would move into my apartment, or that a month later I’d put her on an airplane home, and a month after that she would pick me up at Shannon Airport. We didn’t know that tonight, I would be a week away from my second visit, and that, of all things, there would be plans for me to move to the other side of the Atlantic for her.

Change, I guess, is a funny thing.

-jack

I have this odd propensity for meeting or being courted by men who do not live in my time zone. I meet these people in my everyday life; I do not trawl Craigslist personal sections of far-flung cities, or Facebook-stalk friends of friends. Some people find four-leaf clovers on the side of the road. I find men when they’re away from home.

And this is not at the exclusion of meeting eligible men who live nearby. There are men around here. And I sometimes meet them. Especially after Lancelot (more on him later) finally rode off into the sunset, I pledged to meet people here. I had spent nearly a year fancying the life of an expatriate ESL teacher / travel writer / raiser of rabbits, sheep, and heirloom tomatoes on the Adriatic coast, and I was ready for a little local, low-key distraction.

And lo, the universe delivered. Within weeks, I met a guy locally. In fact, at the time he was about 520 feet from my front door.

The situation: My friend Julie was moving to Los Angeles, and there was a going away party for her at a friend’s condo at the waterfront end of my street. A supreme coincidence.  I had only planned to stay for an hour, then hoof it down to the waterfront for drinks at 9 with another friend.

I arrived at 8 p.m. and was greeted by a countertop full of wine, prosecco, half-sliced peppers, and gift wrap in the hosts’ galley kitchen. I poured myself a cup of tonic water with a lime wedge, then leaned against the deep, restoration-style farmhouse sink and surveyed the group. As other guests trickled in, I realized I had gotten myself wedged in the shallow corner by the stove, an awkward social cul-de-sac, free of traffic.

Just as I was plotting my three-point turnaround, a cute guy with gentle blue eyes and grown-up skater boy style made his way into the kitchen. Within moments he had asked me about my choice of tonic water, how I knew Julie, and so on, and our conversation continued easily, no frills, natural.

His name was Ethan, and he was a childhood friend of Julie’s. At some point, he mentioned he was just in town visiting family for a week or so.

The referee in my head pulled out a yellow card. I proceeded with caution.

“Oh?” I said, shaking the ice cubes in the bottom of my red plastic cup. “Where do you live?” I asked,

“Berkeley,” he said, with a hint of an apology.

The referee in my head ditched the yellow card and yanked out a red one instead. He waved it wildly, blew his whistle, and ran out into the middle of the field, waving his arms, stopping play. The fans hollered protest. “This man lives 3,000 miles away! It will cost you hundreds of dollars to get to know this guy! You’ve been here before!”

Was this a coincidence, a curse, or just some sort of deep-seated baggage — or luggage — stowed in my subconscious that I am unpacking slowly?

“This won’t work,” I thought. (And yes, I acknowledge that no, he hadn’t asked me out at this point. But still.)

We continued to chat, but I watched the clock on the microwave approach 9:00, digit by digit. I announced I needed to go soon. Ethan exhaled audibly, shrugged a bit, and said, “It was great to meet you. I wish we could talk more.”

In the back of my mind, I knew I was doing a silly thing, but I had set myself in motion and could not stop. “So nice to meet you, too,” I said, “I wish I could stay.”

I slipped downstairs to say goodbye to Julie and to thank the hosts. I locked eyes one more time with Ethan, who had come downstairs after me. I could not tell if he was leaving, too, or just verifying my story.

As I trotted off, I shook off the lingering feeling that I was forcing the evening’s plans into submission. Why didn’t I have the presence of mind to get his email address, to do something other than call the game? I had swept myself up in the faraway, imaginary big picture, letting the fog of recent history obscure my field of vision.

Maybe a frequent-flier romance is fine. Maybe it was the long-distance drama with the adventurous type who acts like a swashbuckling pirate, dagger in his teeth, laying waste to any conventional relationship courtesy that was the problem. And yet, I headed to the waterfront, and away from a really nice guy.

A few days later, I was given a second chance. Ethan sent me a Facebook message asking me if I’d like to have dinner before he flew back to California. I was elated, but I had to wonder: was I just setting myself up for disappointment? Would the chance for one date just make me feel cheated?

Enough, I said to myself. My instincts were telling me to go for it, to accept the dinner date and, for once, override my emotional immune system, which attacks invaders at their earliest sign.

And when I clicked “reply” that afternoon, I could not have foreseen that a month after our first evening of skee-ball at the Willows and dinner at Passage to India, I would find myself en route to the Bay Area for our second date: lunch at Chez Panisse.