Author and Columnist
Miss Katherine has returned. With a vengeance.
How much I did not miss her influencing your life.
I shall begin this sordid tale, I think, with her own words (with slight corrections for punctuation and capitalization because I have acquired anal retentive syndrome).
Don't share other people's writing without permission. However, if you do it anyway, don't edit beyond a [...] when you omit.
I refuse to comment directly on things Kate wrote.
She has story-worthy adventures and is somewhat dating someone. I know which makes you more jealous. It is not the one that should.
Also, though I am not commenting on it specifically, I find her writing style occasionally sparkling.
Before I went on my vacation to Lake George with Emily
You brought all of your significant girlfriends there. Since this occurs after the cut-off where I separate "you" and "me," I will say that this happened to me. My parents thought it was too early to bring the woman who became my wife on vacation, as we had been dating less than a month and a half and committed about a month. I begged, promising I would pay for her to the degree I could, they relented, and I believe it was the right move. They were forced into contact with her, so they decided to like her sooner. It deepened my feelings of love for her. It could have been a disaster and might have been with another woman. No other lover worked as well with my family.
Seeing her... it should have elicited this torrent of thought and emotion that had been stewing since she left, seasoned by her occasional letters and postcards from Philmont. But... it didn't. I gave her a sincere hug but otherwise felt little. To me, in ways I can't begin to describe, this was not Katie. Katie was a whole other species, with muscle, bone and blood I knew by scent alone.
This could be overdue progress, but you will eventually resent that Kate stole away Katie.
I... didn't love her. Not on the level I once did that transcended the words I spoke.
Yes, you did. You are overcompensating in writing again.
I love Kate (more your Kate, as I do not know my Kate well). She is lovable. Even after jerking you around for months, I think your parents are still favorably disposed to her. Possibly more than they are toward Emily, but don't quote me.
Not as I love Conor or Sarah.
You might love Conor, though I will maintain you did not know him as well as you assumed. I do not know him at all now. His sister, Margaret, was recently married. She looked radiant.
How you feel about Sarah is too informed by lust and shared movies. You know this bitch goddess construct you've collaboratively built around her, but I don't think you get through it enough to love her honestly.
I honestly feel that where she is at the moment is far closer to her path than she ever was around me and the world is truly less for it.
She is closer to her path, which is more fascinating than yours. It's a pity that she doesn't have whatever personality defect makes you an inveterate chronicler of your life. I would love to read it.
The world is not less for it. She does something governmental, saving the world by degrees. I fail to teach murderous minors and write unread books. Most people would say the world is better improved by Kate.
Whatever sacrifices she made in order to love me as she did, she rescinds them now. I do not fault her for this, not know that I have perspective.
There are glimmers of self-awareness here, though I could do with more of them. Kate changed who she was to entertain her first serious relationship. Given that you began dating the summer before senior year in high school and kept it up until the autumn of your sophomore year, she did an exemplary job.
She left you and reoriented with who she had been. We've covered this.
Yet, truly, the one whom I loved so is as dead as Todd and was perhaps never as real as he.
Wait, I am given an allotment of gagging at your entries! I had forgotten.
I do not think spending all those stored gags for this sentence is unfair.
This is horrid. Do not use your dead friends as analogies. If you must, do not use them for *this* sort of analogy.
Katie was real. She was only a facet of the young woman still in front of you.
If I may be permitted exception for want of better analogy, it reminds me, in no small way, of the vampire mythology in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I'll explain why.
Don't. You are forbidden from analogies for the rest of the day.
You are prohibited from comparing her unfavorably to a boy who killed himself to calling her a vampire.
She is going though some stuff, I do not deny that for a moment, but she feels that this is what is needed in her life and can't learn the lessons she seeks without these sorts of teachers and classrooms. That is her right.
Your spirituality is self-serving and condescending.
The details of the day we hung out with Katie are largely unimportant or inappropriate to this forum, in my eyes.
I disagree intensely. I want to know the vital minutiae. Your haughty thoughts are less compelling.
We wandered around the bookstore briefly, ate a greasy meal at IHOP, and went on a long scavenger hunt.
A scavenger hunt makes for better reading than being a dick about your ex-girlfriend again.
Melissa, incidentally, thought Kate was great company.
I fear that, in the above paragraphs, I have painted a less than gregarious picture of the friendship between Kate and me.
That is not how one ought to use the word "gregarious."
And, no, you make it sound like you are borderline enemies when, in truth, you think she is wonderful, and she reciprocates.
You know how I tell you that you would have been happier if you had been strong enough to treat Emily as your best friend rather than your girlfriend? (Though, by this point, you do like having her as your girlfriend; she has grown on you) Yeah, same with Kate, adding in the prefix "ex."
Perhaps this is because I expected quite a different scenario upon her return and I am in a mist as to where she and I stand. Friends, certainly.
Did you think the two of you would get back together? Why would you think this? I assure you that you would not have wanted her and would have dumped her within a month.
Did you hope you'd be intensely fond of one another rather than playfully friendly? I don't recall the content of your letters well, but they were not overwrought with emotion. They might have been if you were both more honest with yourselves and one another. However, you both kept to a more superficial version of your experiences.
I think there are issues between us but they don't matter to me except in a vague numb way. As though our history was a fantastical dream whose details have left me fuzzy about the contents of reality.
Maybe you are finally falling out of love with her. I don't think that is an "issue."
Looking at her now and knowing the little of this ashen phoenix, I cannot honestly imagine falling in love with her.
You love her. You would not fall in love with her. As you've said, you had both become different people. Though she has more so become a different person (who happens to be closer to the Core Kate). You are basically the same. What experience would have transformed you as much as her Arizona adventure, where she was homeless in the back of a van after a car accident? After her boozy nights at New Paltz with a variety of friends? After her lovers and late-night dorm conversations?
If you want to change, you must allow yourself to have experiences that might facilitate that. Or -- and I know you would bristle at reading this -- therapy and psych meds so you can begin on your inner work.
I think that, seeing Kate and hearing her stories, bonded Emily and me much tighter.
That's a wretched thing to write and think. Your bond with Emily should have nothing to do with Kate. You cannot want Emily more because it might help you cling to Kate less.
As Eileen so aptly put it, "I had begun to think there would always be some hang up on Kate ...not in a bad way or anything, just in a natural 'I'll-always-love-her' kind of way."
You have more than given off that vibe.
Yes, I love Kate (your Kate; I respect and admire my Kate, but she is far beyond any Kate you've encountered). This love did not have to become the altar on which you have sacrificed experiences, relationships, and happiness.
we frolicked (for no other word suits what we did) in the lake, dunking one another in a rather impishly carefree game.
You and Emily were fun. She was a delight when you could get her away from school and training, away from some influences.
Near the end of the day, Emily and I decided to have caricatures of us done by the artist at the park. I had always wanted one done of Katie and me when we dated, but for one reason or another this never came to be.
I still love getting caricatures done. I have one of my wife and me hanging in our bathroom.
My wife looks reasonably accurate, so I assume I must be approximately as handsome in real life as I seem in a drawing.
(I am not.)
It was at this meal that Emily and I realized that we couldn't sweet talk my mother into letting us stay the extra day. Okay, here is the deal... oh, shite... I must sleep now. I may write tomorrow. Encourage me.
You are such a tease.
Don't be. At this point, you barely have something that people want.