The Single Greatest Thing

The theme this month is Interdependence, and I depend a lot on my friends. Occasionally I figure out a way to return the favor, and I decided that this month I could use this newsletter to make a dent in my debt. Please read on if you have within yourself a call to adventure and a secret loneliness. If you don’t have those things, have a nice week.

On the 28th of this month, there will be a show written and performed by Flourish’s own Noah Koski at the Liberty theatre. Noah is one of the people I have been most dependent on ever since we made the decision to be friends in high school. Noah has always been hilarious, charming, and intelligent, but no one really got to see that quite like I did. That’s because Noah refined a lot of his humor and his ideas and his ways of gathering wisdom while we were in my car driving around Idaho looking for Magic Cards. His personality wasn’t a secret, but l had the privilege of witnessing a lot more of it than most people did. This was a problem for me because I was frequently trying to describe him to people who had never met him, and they’d always come away thinking that I was lying. “No person is that THAT compassionate,” they’d think, “no person is that clever, that fun. People just don’t do those things you say this person does.” It made me look like a liar! And I do lie, but not about this!! It was adding to my air of untrustworthiness, making it more difficult to get away with other lies… this needed to stop. 

Given what a gem of a person he has always been, why, then, had he never been on a date until well into his 30s? We need a good research study to be done into this question, and I’m no scientist. But I do know that this delay in his romantic journey weighed heavily on his soul. It was always obvious to me that Noah would be the best partner imaginable to whomever was lucky enough to snatch him up, but I shared his fear that perhaps that person was not going to arrive on time. I was in no particular rush for him to find a partner, since as long as Noah is single, I will continue to be the main beneficiary of his compassion. However, I did want the essence of his soul to burst forth onto the world stage, and I should have known that the moment that happened, there’d be a line out the door to date him, thereby ending my free ride. This, dear reader, is in the process of happening now.

Noah lives his life like it’s an adventure with plots and seasons and character growth and all that stuff. He’ll take this to a charming degree sometimes, like the year in his late twenties when he decided he was going to “grow up every Thursday,” which meant on every Thursday he was going to do one of the things adults finally do, like getting a license, a phone, etc. So when Noah began a proper quest for love this year, he did it in his own true fashion.

He asked his friends around the world if they knew anyone strange enough to go on a week-long blind date to Belize, and he found that strange person. She friend-zoned him in a sense, but it was more like the Best-Friend-Zone. She sent him to New York City to meet her community of like-minded souls, firemen, and erotic poets. When he arrived, he announced his intention was to find love while he was there, and the boy who had never been on a date racked up a whopping 17 first dates in a single trip. This dude showed up in New York for one month and told everyone “I’m here to find love,” and the entire city got on his side in a way you can only expect to happen for Forrest Gump or Honey Boo Boo.

The details aren’t mine to tell, but suffice to say, they’re very odd. Exquisitely atypical. Movie magic. He’s going to be telling the story on the 28th. As with anything that comes from Noah’s heart, it will be full of wisdom, shockingly funny, and—to my own detriment—torturously attractive. If you have any part of you that can relate to feeling unlovable and the quest to find one’s place in the world of love, I implore you to go to this show and witness my best kept secret for yourself.

I’m also single,
Harry

P.S. (The “Single Greatest Thing” from the title was supposed to look like interdependence or love as the keys to life, but those were just red herrings, and actually it is Noah)