Author and Columnist
Still jobless, still sleeping late (though I am doing it in my own living space with a decent amount of personalization), but at least no one else is dead.
Ooh, edgy.
I am currently a trifle irritated with Coley. Pretending to be me, she listed the group I created nearly two years ago The Mid-Hudson Pagan Network on her boyfriend's web guide without my permission and I received an e-mail informing me that I had listed it there, something I had no intention of doing.
Oh, Coley. I feel the desire to try to sum your relationship in a parenthetical "(Jewel; vampire; Janet; virginity)," but that does it a disservice.
Your relationship with Coley never heals to my satisfaction, in part because you resented that you could not have the relationship with her that you wanted. Recently, our mother misunderstood something Bryan said and told me Coley was moving to North Carolina. I was surprised to receive this as a gut punch. I do not see Coley often, but I retain this constant hope that we will become friends somehow. We are friendly and follow one another on one social site. We accidentally text every six months or so.
I considered after the revelation that she was not moving away that I ought to send her a text letting her know I wanted to pursue a closer friendship with her. Then I didn't. I think our relationship at present is a tenuous thing. If I don't press on it, it will remain, and I will keep something of her.
(As usual, it is crucial to understand that your version of someone is only distantly related to my version, but they are not the same; the ex-girlfriend for whom you cannot admit you still pine a little is not the woman whom I appreciate from a slight remove.)
You met her at a Jewel concert at Marist College. I assume you were dating someone else at the time. You were always dating someone else. Still, you took to her and somehow stayed connected despite the inconvenience of technology at the time.
You tried to date her twice.
Once, she left you because a chatroom told her that her fatigue was because she was dating a storybook vampire (you). This is at least the story she told and one you accepted without much of a fight since she had seemed curiously distant during your relationship. It was two months in total, and you kept having to work off the long-distance bills you racked up calling thirty miles away.
Yet, even after leaving you, she insisted that she loved you and always would. She was sixteen, so what did she know?
You loved her too, as much as you understood the idea. You dated other girls, however.
A year later, you were cast in a stage show of Rocky Horror Picture Show. (I will skip over everyone but her in this recollection. You'll forgive me for not getting off-topic.) She was Janet, and you were inexplicably Brad. It meant you spent much time publicly cuddling in underclothes, so you began dating again. How could you not?
I cannot tell you how long it was this time. She swore she wanted to lose her virginity to you. You wanted this just as much, the first time you didn't panic at the idea.
In person, she didn't seem too interested in you. In letters, she was adamant.
You kissed Jen repeatedly. This was not her fault. You decided to stop cheating and break up with her to be with Jen.
She came to your house once and made you read the lyrics to "Untouchable Face." You cried and knew that you had chosen the wrong person, but you didn't see how you could fix it.
When Jen left you, you saw this as an opportunity to fix it, though "fixing it" wouldn't have. You just wanted a second (third) chance with Coley.
Your mother told you that you could not do this to Coley, and she deserved better. It is not for me to say that she got it.
She began dating a man much older than her. You would not process that you resented that he got a chance with her -- though he did not help this by doing things to irritate you, like emailing you pictures of other women whom he had slept with -- so you decided to take any excuse to be irritable.
They do eventually marry and stay that way for years. I cannot imagine that Coley would have married you or should have. You have much growing up to do before you are ready to commit to anyone.
Anyway, a friend of hers, also in my group told me, basically, "For shame, you know who did this! Why are you making such a big deal of it!" Really, I was making nothing like a big deal. I wrote three sentences and ended with a cyber grin.
This is the inherent nature of the internet. People always favor fanning drama. You are best served avoiding it.
As a retort to my letter, Coley forwarded a letter from her boyfriend, basically chewing me out and behaving as though my disinterest in being listed was a personal affront to him and that this all stemmed from issues between Coley and me, which it did in no way.
The issues between her boyfriend and you do not flow only one way. I do not know what Coley told him about you, but it seems possible that he found reason to be insecure about you and act out.
In his position, I would consider you silly and beneath response.
However, her behavior thereafter, having her boyfriend yell and rant, with many words in all caps, leaves something seriously to be desired.
Likewise, you and Coley have static that you deal with in a proxy war via emails.
Emily certainly did not equip her self with verbal weaponry in my defense, nor could I imagine asking her or having cause.
Oh, Emily will not be above using email to stoke drama.
I can leave Emily's side and be a whole person.
Only by Emily leaving for good, many years from now, do you start reassembling yourself into a whole person. So, let's not get too full of ourselves about how other people fill their days.
I could not be with anyone for a while after the Katie break-up, because I had suffered a loss.
Hey, buddy. How many days did you take after the breakup before you met and kissed Keilaina?
I remember it not being a week.
You "could not be with anyone" because you could not find someone with whom you wanted to rebound, but you absolutely would have. If Kate had done you the favor of cutting off contact for a while, you would have allowed yourself to explore proper dating.
Yet it was not a loss of self. I, myself, was entirely whole. I knew who I was, what I was and where I belonged.
You overestimate yourself. You clung to Kate in part because you had defined yourself by love -- and love with her in specific.
As I stated to Katie, she was not the main course of my life, just a spice that made the meal particularly more palatable.
Fooling around with Kate after she dumped you was like eating handfuls of salt.
With Jen, I was seeking to be made complete in love. She was to be my "other half."
She was no such thing. She was a best friend with whom you had sex a few times before she got bored while you were away for two weeks and decided to date her other best friend.
If you called her your other half, I guarantee she would have corrected you and used this as more evidence to dump you.
It was ghastly and as close to death as I think I've ever come. Not in that I was suicidal, as I don't imagine that thought ever crossed my mind, but in that I was closest to letting go.
Gods, you histrionic mess. I say this as someone who used to call the Crisis Hotline regularly: shut up. Your two best friends shacked up, leaving you doubly wounded. You weren't close to giving up. You felt sad and betrayed, though you were all doing what people your age do.
One of the greatest gifts Katherine the Great ever gave me was not trying to be my other half. She helped heal me, but she did not seek to fulfill me. She was never my other half. We were entirely complete on our own.
You didn't act that way. One of the reasons her smoking and drug use bothered you so much was because you wouldn't do these things. You didn't respect her autonomy. You could not have if you sought to be so hurt by someone else's choices that were not related to their interactions with you.
I state these things in terms of love and relationships, because this is how I relate to it best.
Unfortunately. You would be better served with a different point of reference to the world.
Religion is not you. Love is not you. You and you alone are you, wholly and completely. And I know so few people know that.
You are twenty. If members of your peer group had it all together, I doubt you would know them. In part, because I suspect they do not exist and thus would be hard to befriend, but mostly because you do not want complete people in your life right now. You would grow anxious because you were still composed of fractions.
I went to my grandmothers funeral last Friday.
You should have led with this. Were you trying to avoid the subject by delving into Coley email drama and your idea of completeness? You can confront the actual issue in your life head-on, you know.
At the bare minimum, it would be more interesting for your readers.
It should be noted that I was ailing, owing as much to the psychosomatic stress I was under as the dust allergy kicked up by moving into my own living quarters. As such, I was sniffling and red eyed for reasons that had little to do with my grandmother's passing.
Most of your nonsense -- I hope you are not too offended by my labeling it so -- is a haze. Standing outside the church in Wappingers, suffering from a cold that made you bleary, is sharp. The funeral to follow is maybe a few Polaroids in my mind, but I know how uncomfortable you were outside this funeral, wanting to use your illness to keep people from touching you.
The funeral itself was not really what I had expected. It was more like a church service. The priest was amiable enough, which I was thankful for.
I have been to several funerals since this one. I don't know if the number is unusual, though I won't give it to you. Otherwise, you will write it somewhere and count them down, the pall of them consistently over your head.
I can think of only one service that was about the person. The others were only on paper, but it was the priest filling the deceased's name into a blank in a readymade sermon. It's not the same sermon every time. Not merely because of the different denominations, but the cause of death. If they did not die of natural causes, they are contemptible. I have attended funerals where the priest was all but told to make the bereaved know that our friend or family member was now roasting in flames, and we had better repent before we join them.
I do not consider this either holy or appropriate, but it is what is done.