Metro Memori

I have to address this feeling of frustration and farewell.

For parts of this blog post, I'm just going to cheat and lift entire sentences I'd typed in private conversations.

But first, some background--in a nutshell, just enough so that you know what the hell it is I'm going on about this time.

After finishing grad school in Ohio's armpit in the summer of 2006, I moved to Kansas City. I was at last free to find my own way, and I was okay with not being sure what that way was to be. I didn't expect or intend to settle down there and live the rest of my life there, but I knew it was a good place for me to figure things out. I moved there because of a couple of friends from college who made me feel like I was at my best, but since I wasn't entirely sure of their accessibility at the time, it was mainly to commit myself to the South KC Shotokan Dojo, which I'd trained with a few times in the past.

I had an epiphany in December 2005, listening to "The Breaking of the Fellowship," on the drive to the music building at BGSU one cruel evening while pondering my plight, with the brassy moment in the music when Aragorn says, "Leave all that can be spared behind. We travel light. Let's hunt some orc!" That was the moment when I vowed to myself that I would get out of this horrible, downright abusive grad school situation with corrupt faculty and reward myself by moving to Kansas City just for the martial arts. Ah, goosebumps just remembering it.

And so I did. Labor Day weekend 2006, I moved into my apartment. It was a little rocky getting started in that next chapter of my life, since hiring was unexpectedly delayed until well after I was already paying rent, thus starting me at a distinct disadvantage. But, in short order, I found myself loving at least the potential for the lifestyle I was attempting to build in that city, with my own freedom, with my own choices.

I soon found a church that I liked. It was refreshing, not quite like what I was used to, and most importantly had an amazing community of other twenty-somethings who would meet regularly on the side. The church was Metro Christian Fellowship, which also had peer groups for Bible study, prayer, etc. called Life Groups. (Or is ie one word, Lifegroup? I never could figure that one out, and I've always seen and used them interchangeably.) There was also a sort of spinoff prayer/discussion group that met on some weeknight evening, called Chapter 29 for reasons I wish I could remember.

This post is not about religion at all, I assure you, o discomfited reader.

This is about people.

A quick timeline for you. That fall, I started going more and more to that church, and at some point, joined a Life Group full of people whom I would develop a deep fondness for. But it was not without frustrations and complications. Yada yada yada, a year later, financial troubles caused me to be forced to take on a free-rent situation that entailed being a live-in, part-time personal assistant to a quadriplegic lawyer. The other helper roommates were both moving out by Christmas 2007, while I'd just moved in, which screwed me over, and the two new guys we found to replace them didn't make things better for me. 2007 was a downward spiral in many ways. And then, at the top of December, I was laid off at work. I was stuck in that living situation, and couldn't find a job to accommodate the semi-demanding schedule at the house.

By November, just before being laid off, I was finding myself left out of every good aspect of KC that I'd previously had going for me. The community connections I had been building, my individual friends who were independent of my other assets, my church, my dojo, everything... I was forced to become more and more absent from my community, from my own life. And it hurt to miss out, to be the underdog just biding my time for a glorious return, promising myself I'd make up for lost time, while meanwhile everyone else trucked on without me.

Ultimately, in April 2008, I begrudgingly left for St. Louis. I had to move in with my brother until I could find work. For the longest time after that, I pined for my glorious return, to re-insert myself into the same scenes I'd been forced to abandon. It was always my intention to move back to Kansas City and make everything work out well. I missed a lot of people very dearly. And just as much, I missed the feeling of hope I'd had there.

Kansas City circa 2008 was, to be fair, just an average damn city. Full of great amenities if you know what you're doing, don't get me wrong--but it was no more Xanadu than dozens of other cities of the same size. For the past eight and a half years now, up to the present, I've been in the Austin area, which honestly, in terms of amenities, is like going from a tub of off-brand Neapolitan to an entire Baskin Robbins. On the other hand, also in the interest of fairness, I did leave KC before the renowned Power & Light District was finished being built. I'm sure the city is more praise-worthy now. I passed through it this past July and noticed how built-up I-435 and I-470 were, in terms of entertainment venues. But I didn't have time to stop, and it was 11:00 at night anyway.

Not the point.

My wife, who is Baha'i, sometimes enjoys listening to the same Christian rock / praise music that I would here there, at Metro. It takes me back. I was never into that genre of music before going to KC, though I'd been exposed to that church format by friends in BG, and even when I was a regular at Metro, it had to grow on me first. But I remember many Sunday mornings where I'd sit in the lounge area outside the basketball stadium to the Lutheran School that let Metro CF have its services there every Sunday (apologies for my sentence structure here). I'd sit there for the hour-long praise music concert prelude to the proper service, while drinking my coffee, wearing blue jeans like everyone else. I would absorb the music while peeking through the door from the lounge area to see the people, the band on stage, and the lyrics projected on the screen above the band. Most people I know downright loathe the entire genre of praise music, and while I appreciate their criticisms, I have also seen firsthand some of its merits. I don't go out of my way to listen to it, but when I hear it, it always takes me back to that time, when I would find sanctuary with people who were true friends to one another, genuinely pure-hearted, people who wanted to make the world a better place (and did a hell of a lot more than I ever have to make it happen). Actual Christian disciples, not just the Average Joe Believer who is just as much of an asshole as anyone else, yet just happens to name-drop Jesus often enough to let you know that he thinks he is a better man for it.

Just that little Sunday coffee ritual alone turned into a rejuvenating sanctuary for me. It was a safe haven, and I was looking for answers to equip me to face the challenges in my heart for the week ahead. Then, once my coffee was finished, I'd enter the arena properly, mid-song, acknowledged by warm smiles from a few people I recognized from Life Group.

It was a time when I was reaching out to people, seeming to actually make their lives just a little better for it. Fellowship. That was the pinnacle of my involvement in any sort of Christian sense. Ever since, I haven't been interested in church, don't really get into prayer groups, and mostly consider myself a spiritual rogue, and an enigma at that. Some of my close friends, in fact, are atheists. But there was something truly genuine about that experience, about that group of people. There was some Truth happening there.

I'd mentioned this before, here on the blog, that in December 2009, I visited for a few days. I had occasion to chat at Scooter's Coffee with an old friend from Life Group, who informed me that the peer fellowship had actually disbanded shortly after I left, so I hadn't missed much. I found that revelation to bring a mix of emotions. On one hand, I was strangely relieved to know that, especially since I was then planning on moving to Texas, that I wasn't missing out after all. On the other hand, it saddened me to hear it. I had taken comfort in imagining the Life Group growing in its bonds of fellowship, like a TV show that flourishes after my character's mid-season departure. In the time between, I had increasingly regretted that, even if I could have moved back to Kansas City, everyone would have been the best of friends and I'd feel like even more of a fringe member than before.

There are a few reasons why I never quite felt like I was thriving in that circle. First, a lot of those people had been friends since high school, and/or had bonded over past mission trips and retreats, and that's the sort of rapport you just notice as being stronger than anything you'll have with them. It was nice to be around it, to bask in its energy, but I somehow always felt like "the new guy," even after a year. (Then again, early on, the head pastor himself had sagely commented to me that it takes about two years to really feel at home anywhere.) Second, as I said, I had to disappear more and more as Fall 2007 began to ruin my life, getting worse until I stopped attending entirely. Third, I was coming from a different background, and the language I used to convey some of these big ideas was informed by Eastern philosophy and vernacular, which sometimes added a layer of things being frustratingly lost in translation when talking to mainstream Christians. That, I'd blogged about even back then.

For a long time, I always wanted to reboot Kansas City since the day I left. But, come March 2010, I left Missouri altogether for a fresh start.

I never stopped caring about those people, though. And this is where it starts to hurt...

Fast forward to 2018.

I am stuck pondering how to make each past chapter of my story still relevant today, in a vague quest to "redeem" past failures. (I'm using bold print because I know you are skimming, you lazy bum, and I want at least these sentences to stand out in your mind.)

After the past few years of my wife's series of life-threatening medical hardships (notice I don't just say "illnesses," because even that doesn't technically encapsulate the crises), I have had a lot to think about. I spent years clamping down on anything that wasn't about survival, and now I come out of the storm shelter to find that the clouds were only over my house, meanwhile everyone else has continued to live and change without my involvement. Now I am just trying to retrace my steps, and validate things from the past in an effort to make it matter or something. 

I am trying to salvage the best parts from each place I've lived and keep them alive. And today's rumination is about not just Kansas City, but a specific side of it. It's foolish to look back for too long, but sometimes I can't help but wish I had become better friends with the people from Metro Christian Fellowship and my Life Group.

I often wonder if anyone else I knew from Life Group, back in the day, still thinks about those times, of each other, and of me. I wonder what their journeys have been like. From Facebook, I glean that some of them are still close-knit. Several of them moved (in some cases "back to") California.

Ten years is a long time, and life happens. I remember when the pastor (I don't know why I hesitate to use names) said something about how we all thought we weren't that young, but that he was 37 and so he knew just how much we had ahead of ourselves... or something like that. I may not remember what he said exactly, but I remember the sentiment behind it, and now that I am 37 myself, I see it clearly. Oh, to be 26 again.

I tried to reconnect with these/you people. I'm not sure if I should be writing about them in the third or second person.

I always had a fondness for the people for Metro, but it seems all of their memories have faded now. Some people haven't even accepted my Facebook friend requests, which proves it. A few others are still passively "friends" on Facebook, but I think I am not in their inner circle of security, because their timelines show hardly any involvement, leading me to speculate that I am not privy to the content of their higher privacy settings. Still others just ignore me completely when I say something on their posts, or even in private. If the adage "We'll always have Facebook" is the last vestige of socialization, then it's a piss-poor one at that.

I realize that I have been forgotten. But I wonder what it meant to each person, long-term. For me, that was a very complicated but important time in my life. For me, Metro in particular represented a very big "What If?" But even during the heyday of my tenure there, I felt like a fringe member, as though the sense of fellowship I was promised was always just slightly out of reach. I just needed "more time" to invest in it, time I never had. Or maybe I was always just too much of a spiritual rogue. Maybe that's the downside of multi-classing as a Bard and a Monk: you never gain the upper-level abilities of a true Paladin.

Most people don't look back as much as I do, I know. But did that chapter of time matter at all to anyone but me? It's ironic that I would ostensibly be the only one to still care, since I keep saying I was only on the fringe of it.

I contacted a few people on Facebook about this, but got very little feedback. And that's from the few who did respond. And that's from the few who actually still remained within my cyber-reach.

On my journey, as life kept shifting around me, I would mentally bookmark all these friendships and unfulfilled goals of each time of my life to sort of "come back to later," but it seems to have been in vain. More and more, lately, I find myself confessing to my wife that I feel abandoned, forgotten, and irrelevant. My friends from various walks of life stopped caring about me. After a long enough time, I just became a sob story that no one wants to think about.

Why do I address Metro now? Why reach out to people I know I will never actually share real fellowship with again? I guess, more than anything, nowadays I am just curious about different perspectives. We're all different people now, of course. At this point in my life, I am just trying to take stock of everything from the past that feels remotely like a failure or an incompletion, so I can do something to feel better about it. It's hard to explain, but it matters, and I'm not hanging onto the past so much as trying to tally up points from it. I'm trying to save what I can, and I'll grant you that I'm trying to stay friends with as many people as I can, but I'll be damned if that is considered a bad idea.

My 2018 aspirations for The Metro Redemption have failed. There is nothing left. I am forgotten, and I hereby give up and say a bitter farewell to the fellowship that was once something very wondrous indeed. I will always feel a fondness for those people, for those times. But, ten years on, it is nothing but an apparently already faded memory. Hell, even Dunn Bros. Coffee on Red Bridge and Holmes is long gone, and even the restaurant that replaced it is long gone, too. (I stopped by there in 2015 on my way back to Texas after my sister's wedding, and was shocked to discover the remnants of what looked like it might have been Chinese buffet.) So, in terms of coffee shop turnover rates, 2006-8 was eons ago. The slowly fossilizing husk of that old haven stands today as a solemn metaphor for all of these thoughts, of this, my damned blog post. (Actually, I just checked Google Maps, and it appears to have been recently reborn as a place called Crows Coffee?)

I never found another church after that. And I don't want to anymore. It's not my thing, and hasn't been for years. But you were all special to me once. I wish it could have turned out differently. I wish it could have mattered.

Maybe I'll try again in a few months, but I doubt it. In the quest to redeem past aspects of my identity, I'll cross this one off the list. Important distinction: I said "cross," not "check."

Life goes on. Has gone on. How absurd to write an essay about a circle of friends over a decade defunct, perhaps. Or perhaps I am just mourning the loss of my own youth and idealism.

Whichever: Good-bye. I'll try to cherish you less from now on.