Author and Columnist
About Nick (herein referred to as the Bastard because I was having a bitter day).
At least you are in part not pretending that this is meant at an objective stance. How could it be?
Basically, he was my best friend for a great many years. Kind of the inseparable, wonderful friendship thing.
I don't know how true this was. You were friends, certainly, but much like other love you will find as you grow older, it seems thinner with the benefit of other relationships. It was a high school friendship that would have been forgotten when he went to college and you didn't, something I suspect he knew. How many college students want to be dragged back to their high schools?
Yes, you had shared experiences. You were both in Godspell at a church where Jesus was gay and dating an apostle. You went to the mall together, which seemed like the height of bonding for teenagers in the nineties. You worked together at the Haunted Mansion and were once in an outdoor production of the Rocky Horror stage show on a few cold October nights where you wore nothing but white briefs and shivered behind Coley.
It is what passes for best friends in high school, I'll grant you.
I appreciate that you are acknowledging that the issue is not only that you lost the attention of the young woman to whom you lost your virginity, but also that a man who you thought was your trusted friend would boast to you of betraying your confidence and trust.
You lost a girlfriend--and the friendship you had built with her over the years--and you lost a friend in one swoop. Two adolescent anchors at once. I can't pretend that isn't a significant blow at your age.
You believed that the people around you cared about you unconditionally and would not ever seek to harm you. of course, you knew that he was no longer your friend by the end (here, in the future, we have coined the evocative term "frenemy," which is what you became). The fact that you were gone for two weeks pushed them together because your influence went from a mile away to an hour.
Had it not been for this, you would not have met Kate, who almost at once became one of your favorite people and a woman whom I am still glad to know. They did something hurtful to you, but it ended up well for you on balance.
And you were not the most innocent of parties while with your gifted peers. While you were away, living in a dorm with attractive girls, hormones raged. There was Sheela, who tried to sit in your lap a few times, though she insisted that she didn't mean anything by it since she had a boyfriend. There was Sara Y., who overtly told you that she wanted you to be her first kiss, even though there had been nothing romantic or sexual between you prior. (When you declined, with slight reluctance, she easily found another boy to do that enviable deed; she wanted a kiss, but she did not necessarily want you.) You were keenly aware of how easy and momentarily satisfying it would have been to be otherwise. You said later, both bitter and honest, that you wished Jen had the kindness to dump you before Summer Scholars so that you could better enjoy it.
Oh, and for the sake of full honesty, let us not forget the few times your group and Marist's mixed and you reencountered Sarah, your dear songstress, in the flesh. The two of you took on an escalated fondness because you hadn't seen one another in a year. The second time your groups mixed, when the Bard encampment went to see some bizarre puppet show at Marist, you nearly vibrated sitting beside her on her bed. When she applied lip balm, you asked if you could try it and, when she said yes, you tried to kiss her. She turned away, so you did not, in fact, kiss her. But you would have, even though it wouldn't have meant much more than that; you did not want to date her, you only wanted to kiss her that once in that moment.
She later wrote a song about having not kissed you, which is one of the most flattering things anyone has ever done.
That was, however, until I began dating this girl who we shall refer to as The Harpy.
She was just a girl, not some mythical beast. She wasn't always kind to you, sometimes overtly, but she was just a girl. The wrong girl for you, no matter how she triggered your lust for a few months.
Did you love her? You would swear you did, but it was such a pale emotion when compared to how you felt for Kate, whom I would like to remind you that you were over a year into dating at this point. You are now attending college. So, you know, cool it with the melodrama over being dicked over in high school. It is practically a rite of passage.
I find it embarrassing, but this is how younger people think. It's all black and white, the starkest contrast. But Jen and Nick weren't villains, and you weren't an aggrieved hero. You were all just people doing the best you thought you could. Jen was, and all likelihood, better with Nick. He stayed with her longer, certainly.
You likely should not have ever been with her at all. You should have stayed with Coley, the girlfriend who loved you, rather than the best friend to whom you were oddly attracted. Jen never loved you, but she sometimes liked you and she wanted you for a while.
Well, as The Harpy and I continued to go out, I could detect him growing more jealous and competitive. And that simple was not a game I wanted to play. So, logically, the friendship degraded.
Your mother took you aside once and told you that she noticed this too. You gave it credence, but mostly by allowing a distance from Nick. You, for some reason, thought that Jen had no part in this. They lived houses apart for much of their lives. You live a fatal mile. How could you compete?
Also, he teamed up with a really ridiculous woman who has made me her loathed enemy. I don't have time to consider her anything more than a joke, so it makes her seems all the more pathetic to me.
The situation with Jen and Nick was, if not forgiven, at least understood by you. Falling under the thrall of this woman who tried to sexually assault you, who slid naked pictures of herself under your door and through windows, who tried to post naked pictures of an underage girl who no longer did her bidding around the girl's high school? (Oh, and where did she get pictures like that? She took them when the girl was not aware.) That is not so forgivable.
A lot of people who cleaved this woman's side, this woman who was so much older than them, and was so obviously both a loser in life and a predator. That is unfathomable, and yet it kept happening.
You heard through the grapevine that Nick continuing to hang out with this woman put a strain on his relationship with Jen, who was well and truly done being harassed by her. I don't know if any of that is accurate or merely the sort of rumor that people spread to explain things. It sounds too pat.
(On a complete side note, but it was on my mind) I cannot endure people who are false sounding in their writings. I am not this way, I don't think. It wears on me as a writer and reader. I'd imagine it would be easier and allow a freer range of expression to do so.
Hey, buddy. Bit of a hypocrite here. You needed to get rid of your bad habits, largely writing fancily when plain speaking would have sufficed. You are pretty much over that by this point, but it was the bane of your early prose.
I don't have the patience now to be other than I am in my writing since I need to get it down as quickly as possible. The Muse doesn't need to be edited to perfection in a first draft.
I am currently a communications major, preparing myself for the inevitable locking of horns with the head of the department. He's not known for letting good students graduate so they stay on as his lapdogs.
I remember this rumor from people who were held back at this community college for this man who thought he was Luis Buñuel. For him alone, you should not have been a communications major. He will, in a few years, lock you in a broken editing closet and threatening to fail you, even though he was never one of your professors.
I can draw quite nicely right now. Though I prefer to draw abstractly. It is more emotional.
Respectfully, I don't think you ever drew well. In middle school, you thought that you drew acceptably, but then you chose to be a writer rather than a visual artist because it was easier for you. Writing was in your blood, and drawing was something at which you would have needed to work, so you chose the think at which you were naturally adept.
There are worse crimes.
But I get these spurts of energy (usually accompanied but feeling very light and delirious, such as now) where I work quickly and for hours. So that tends to catch me up.
That sounds like being manic, my dear former self. It will be a long while before you accept that you have mental illnesses in need of correcting.
I went to visit my grandmother in the hospital and the feeling of death and decay was so strong that I could not breathe. I went out to the car to rest, but that wasn't good enough. I wasn't nearly dying anymore.
You are sensitive, and you will stay sensitive for much of your life. It is just your luck and a component of your mental illness. I remember that day. She lived for at least a fifteen after that, if not more. But she was sick then, and she was sick for so long.
The smell of death was there, a smell it has haunted me since, of failing bodies and bodily fluids the patients could no longer control. I fear ending up in a place like that. Whenever I smell something that reminds me of that hospital, I cringe.
This is not a unique state. No one wants to be around that sickness unless they're getting a paycheck for it. But I couldn't handle seeing and smelling that. I don't think that it was necessarily a psychic gift, just what one naturally feels. What you experienced was a panic attack. Life gets a little better when you accept that these are not psychic gifts.