I want to title this one: Connection

We're coming up on the 250th birthday of America. In my ballet class, we've been celebrating by learning about George Balanchine, the Russian man credited with creating American ballet as we know it, and reading Balanchine Finds His America.

My Dad has been celebrating too. Oh, wait. I almost forgot. He's requested I no longer refer to him as Dad, and instead give him a character name as well. He believes Mr. International is getting more screen time than him and, unironically (so he claims), would like to be called Mr. Universe. Hmmm. Not gonna read into that one.

Mr. Universe's old college friend has been reflecting on America's 250th in his own unique way, wondering what the country will look like over the next 250 years, and who will be responsible for it. He invited friends who he believes will be the changemakers to discuss this via Zoom, and my Dad, shit, I mean Mr. Universe (still breaking it in), was asked to give a speech.

He opened by stating the obvious: he's probably the one person on the call whom his friend knows the least. Mr. Universe only completed 2.5 semesters of college (if you include the Jan term) before dropping out to discover Matchbox Twenty and tour the world with them. He played soccer with this old friend. I guess nothing makes you remember someone twenty years later and claim they'll change the world quite like the gamedays and road trips from a college you didn't even graduate from.

Here's what Mr. Universe said: “In America's 500th year, I wonder if people will get to their 50s and still be closest with their college friends. Or, even crazier, have friends from college at all.” Everyone furrowed their brow.

But then he kept going. We now have AI for just about anything under the sun, and if we look at what's happened in the last decade and extrapolate 250 years, we can only imagine whether college will even exist. And so he raised the age-old question: “What is the basis of human connection, and what are the conditions for its lasting impact?”

When asked what he’s been up to recently, Mr. Universe shared that he’s been, of all things, working as a finance consultant with an African mining company. He reflected on his trip to Zambia and the impact of access to technology. He saw some of the biggest smiles he had ever seen on the faces of children with access to nothing but life in front of them for entertainment. When he met kids with even limited internet access, the conversation would quickly shift to whether my Dad knew the Kardashians, since he was from Calabasas. In that moment, he missed the smiles, wondering how the internet had the power to replace a deep conversation with a superficial question. The rotten fruits of knowledge.

I could barely believe what was coming out of Mr. Universe's mouth, because I'd spent the week on a high from watching Rental Family, a film Mr. International recommended because, as he put it, it's about my favorite thing in life: connection. The film (note I say film, not movie) is a satire on what people will do for connection when they lack intimate relationships or have lost them, literally renting family members and friends to fill the voids in their lives and hearts.

Last night, my roommate and I stayed up late hours connecting over Bieberchella and my first love, Justin Bieber's, new devotion album. We planned to watch American Idol, but ended up talking about God, religion, love, and connecting over the concept of connection. I played Bieber's "Story of God" for her, and we lay in bed marveling. He told the story of Genesis, honestly something we needed a refresher on, and wow, was it all too relevant to this AI-age double-edged sword of pursuing knowledge.

“There was no fear here, fear hadn't even been invented yet

A lion, this massive, beautiful creature, would lean his heavy head into my touch
Everything was connected, everything was exactly as it was meant to be.

And after eating the forbidden fruit; Relationships will be complex, painful, and death
That word we didn't understand now has a shape, it has our shape.”

The next morning, I woke up thinking it was Sant Jordi, my favorite holiday in Spain, basically Spanish Valentine's Day, where women receive flowers and men receive books. Last year, I asked Mr. International what genre he liked. He said, “Your column, I just want to read a new column."

This year, with one extra day to prepare, I thought: let's go bigger. Let me start writing a book, one chapter each Sant Jordi dedicated to my love.

And that’s precisely when everything between my Dad, America’s birthday, the sword of knowledge, and what defines human connection came together.

…

Ahem.

“Chapter One: Connection

I was happy to get Sant Jordi wrong and be one day early. It gave me time to think of this. This beautiful Spanish holiday, my first one last year, characterized by you telling me you didn't need a book, you just wanted to read my column, comes around every year. I've almost written a mini book on our love story through the column itself. But I thought this second Sant Jordi could be the start of a lifelong tradition. Each year, I will write a chapter of our story.

So let's start at chapter one.

I want to title this one: Connection.

The oldest love story, and the origin of human connection, begins with Adam and Eve. I am not much of a religious person in the typical sense anymore, contrary to what you thought when you picked me up from one “crunch” to the next the first day we met .You even played the clergy movie, where we both know where that ended up taking us. But when I used to daydream about meeting my soulmate, I dreamed on the first love story of all time.

When I wrote in my journal about the non-negotiables of my person, the map that led to you, I wrote pages and pages that you somehow perfectly embody. I vividly remember writing that meeting you would feel like the missing rib story.

At the time, my limited understanding was that God made a woman for Adam, and she came into the world with a part of him. So I wrote: missing rib, our life experiences have given us the seeds and fruits of our connection.

I felt it instantly. Sitting on the park bench in front of Jara the night we met, barely speaking the same language, learning we grew up on opposite ends of the earth, connecting on everything that shaped us. Soon finding the same snake on my neck as on your arm.

Since then, I have learned it goes deeper. God took a piece of Adam's rib and created Eve from it. Eve is of the same substance. A deep, integral, one-flesh connection.

In your column, your version of our history from one year in, you wrote that I broke through time and circumstances to find you. It truly feels that way. It was pure divine orchestration. And yet it feels like our lives could not have possibly been laid out any other way. You in an American bar. Me out on the one night I was supposed to stay in. Me halfway around the world from where I came from. You as well.

A drunken bet from your friends to find one beautiful girl in the room. You found two. I made sure I was seen. In the same moment you first laid eyes on me, I got an Irish tray spilled all over me, made you laugh long enough to catch your eye, thinking what an asshole. You spoke so few words to me, or at least so few that made sense. But I got you. My friends instantly recognized: that was something different.

Another line from my journal: love is our language. Something my mom would say a hundred times when describing us, before I even realized I had written it down two years before meeting you.

While the only thing I may have taken from you is a broken arm, not a missing rib, the fullest version of me has been created from you. Through you, I have found more femininity, more love, more dreams, more desires, more laughter, more imagination. More of anything good. Less of anything bad. What it truly means to be Hudson, the woman that she is.

Our partner is the only formative relationship in life that we choose. The closest we can get to seeing ourselves. The closest to the highest form of love described in God’s word and biblical times.

Thank you for offering me connection.

End of chapter one.

To be continued, every Sant Jordi…”

So, Mr. Universe, to address your question, though you never asked me. I think in 250 years, we can hope to have a title like Balanchine's: Hudson Finds Her America, written long after we leave this earth. Or whatever I end up finding while I'm here.

We can't know for sure if the place where we will change the most, or be most changed by the people we meet, will still be college, the way it is for so many of us now. But we can know that no matter the world, when you ask a girl to sit down for a holiday about love and write a story about connection, she will probably answer from the modern day with what has lasted since the beginning of time: that we cannot be human without connection.