Moment of Clarity: Part 5

I often say I spent the first thirty years of my life in St. Louis, but that’s not entirely true.  The bustling metropolis of Jacksonville, IL, as I have mentioned, was a far cry from urban.  I take pride in being born and bred in a town of millions, and have a mint of memories of my time living in the metropolitan area proper.  Years later, I found myself surprised at the realization that at heart, I am not for the city.

I adore the culture of a city. Museums, art galleries, playhouses, parks, sports teams and stadiums.  I love the accessibility of them, particularly in St. Louis where so much is free of charge (a blessing that few seem to appreciate, but of which I wholeheartedly approve.)  Humans, and their creations, fascinate me, from language to sculpture, from architecture to philosophy.  It is the actualization of emotion or thought in concrete form that moves me; it is the distillation of time into an enduring moment.  Art proffers life.

It perhaps comes as no surprise, then, that discovering how much I enjoyed rural life was somewhat shocking to me.  I didn’t truly realize it until I was on my own, in Illinois–not during college, but some years after, when She Who Has No Soul had moved on and I was left with a rundown trailer and a curio cabinet full of regrets.

My childhood memories of the areas surrounding St. Louis could be summed up similarly. "Rundown", perhaps, even "trashy" at times.  The city was surrounded by a crop circle of low-income towns, and crossing the river to East St. Louis was to completely understand the meaning of "segregation", driving through dilapidated houses en route to glittering neon strip clubs.

Finding myself now in the Pacific Northwest, I have a true affection for its ambiance. It is lush, it is free. It is astonishing to feel aligned with nature. I appreciate the silences of the earth, the speech of the wind, the sprawling evergreen horizon.  For all the years I gazed upon trees of concrete and steel, it did not take me long to rejoice in the purity of an unspoiled environment.

Well, mostly unspoiled. My only major complaint is that due to geographical limitations, traffic along the I-5 corridor can be very congested.  As a singular criticism, that’s fairly tame.

This affinity for nature is relatively recent, and it would probably be accurate to call it a product of the Oughts.  Conversely, in the early Nineties, I was still very much in love with cities, often disparaging Jacksonville’s lack of stimulation.  For example, I remember how excited the college campus was that a Taco Bell was opening. Yes, that was a major event, resulting in a number of students camping outside of said eatery in order to be the first to partake of its provisions. For any sort of excitement, we would drive to Springfield, which had the malls, restaurants, and theaters that I was used to having within arm’s reach.

Returning home in 1992, I was eager to escape the backwoods and return to familiar haunts.  At the same time, I was discouraged.  Having gone away with my life in order, I slunk home with it in tatters. Girlfriend? Gone. Scholarship? Endangered. Finances? Ruined. Whatever identity I had striven towards was obviously the wrong one.

I already discussed the Offworld summer in Investment. I can still remember so many of my friends vividly.  We had such a myriad of personalities and backgrounds that it was like a handful of paint samples, all unique and interesting and with various screen names both eclectic and esoteric. Some of them I only remember their real names, some of them I only remember their handles. We were Gryphon and Tigra and Zebra and Roadtoad and Antichrist and Nazgul and Doomer and Mike and Jeff and Morrison and Harlequin and Pandora and Sigmund and Dr. Tone, and Stephanie, and Kathy, and Bean, and a hundred others that you could mention, my head nodding in recognition.

During my time at college, the Horde had mostly dissipated or fallen prey to internal drama. The only person whom I remained in touch with was Chris, and the two of us quickly reconnected once we both arrived back in St. Louis.

Chris was the product of a largely chaotic family. He suffered from mood disorders as well, and his parents were divorced (though at the time, it might have just been separation), painting an almost typical image of a broken home, the four kids left largely to fend for themselves, the overbearing mother trying to make ends meet and unable to deal with the stress.

Most of that summer, I spent at his house, mostly hanging out with he and his younger brother Joe. It was pretty much a neverending series of movies, Mystery Science Theater 3000, gaming, and hanging out with Offworld people at Denny’s. Most of this was funded by his dad’s credit card; in lieu of a relationship, he represented cash more than parental influence, and between that and my own rapidly diminishing lines of credit, we had an excellent time escaping our various black moods together.

Depression is a funny thing, but it’s even stranger when it’s shared. There’s joy in companionship, and danger as well–we fed one another in our bitterness towards the world. At heart, ironically, both Chris and I are social, friendly, intelligent individuals. Thus, it was a constant yin-yang of finding something to do, then returning home to sit and mope about how much life sucked.

When Offworld began, we quickly became part of the community. I had a double-digit user number, which later became a sign of status, amusingly enough. The person who owned Offworld was Joey Jay, and he threw a party shortly after launching the site. Having nothing better to do, and accustomed to hanging out with people online, Chris and I decided to go–and out of the goodness of our heart, we gave a lift to another user, Bean, aka Janica, who didn’t live far from Chris’s house. Ah, Janica. She has a story, too, of course.

I don’t think anyone ever understood our relationship, any more than she or I did. We hit it off quickly. She was cute, a bit strange, and very personable, but with a wry and sarcastic nature that complemented my own. It wasn’t long before we were spending a lot of time in one another’s company; if I wasn’t with Chris, I was with her. People began to think of us as a couple even though we weren’t, and we played pretend–she called me hubby, I called her wifey, and many people assumed it would only be a matter of time until something happened between us.

Quite often in relationships we are attracted to traits in others that we lack, but over the long term it’s more often the similarities that keep you together. She was what I was striving towards; that easy extroversion, that free spirit. I had been shackled by depression and was hammering at the bars of my cell, and I thought perhaps she was the one holding the key.  Later in life, of course, I would learn that no one held the key but me.

I don’t think she led me on purposefully.  She did not want me, and yet she loved me, and I allowed myself to maintain false hopefor too long.  Our charade went nowhere.  While she was sleeping off one-night stands with men who treated her like shit, I sat there and waited my turn, which never came. It was I who held her, I who comforted her, I who provided what she needed, only to watch her walk away time and again towards something fallow. She was the first one to say that I was too good for her, during one of those "why? why?" conversations repeated in infinite forms among infinite teens. Eventually, it culminated in a moment of clarity that altered the course of my life.

Meanwhile, school had started once more, and I had returned.  I was less than eager in some ways, because of the constant community of Offworld.  Janica and I wrote long letters to one another, her return address attaching a Mrs. to my last name, which made me smile even as it made me wince. At approximately the same time, I found myself talking again to Laura.

It’s interesting that I can’t remember how Laura and I got back in touch.  I was infatuated with Janica, and Laura thus slipped in the back door.  We had been best friends, and I missed her.  One weekend in September 1992 while I was back home visiting Janica, I stumbled across Mongoose on some bulletin board, and e-mailed her. I proffered an olive branch and said, look, that whole Nancy thing kinda ruined our friendship and it shouldn’t have, let’s talk about it and be friends again.

Wonderfully, she accepted, and we began the process of reacquainting ourselves with each other.  I discovered why she’d been relatively uncommunicative and supportive after my break-up with Nancy.  While I’d been fighting off depression, she’d been struggling through an abusive relationship with a man named John.  She’d withdrawn, isolated herself from her friends, and was trapped. 

Abusive relationships are hard for some to understand. Why don’t they just leave? What’s wrong with them? I can only state that it’s never as easy as it seems from the outside.  I’m sure many of you reading this can think of relationships you should have gotten out of; loveless, cold, perhaps cruel–yet you kept persevering, out of despair or naivete or indolence.  All abuse is wrong, but it often comes upon people unawares.  Abuse typically revolves around control, and the gradually increasing assertion of it.  Things seem positive, until something trips the abuser’s circuit, and they lash out–well, they’ve been great to that point, so we’ll forgive that. He apologized, and hey, I’m the one that did it anyway, maybe I just need to be more careful. Ah, crap, there, I did it again, well, certainly people are going to be in bad moods, and he’s been busy with work and stress, I’ll make it up to him by being extra nice. Fuck, wow, this is really a bad time for us. That’s ok, we can make it work–how great were those first few months? We’ll get through it, and things will get better…..

Before you know it, six months of unhappiness have passed, filled with excuses and rationalizations–and when you finally take a stand, that’s when the shit hits the fan. No, you will NOT leave, you will NOT abandon us.  She confessed the fear it instilled in her, the lack of trust, the reluctance to become involved–and I began to share my own experiences, the harm done to me by myself rather than others, and the two of us grew close.

I was, however, still chasing Janica.  Chasing is probably the wrong word; if she was the motorcycle, I was the sidecar.  If she was the front wheel of the bicycle, I was the back.  We were in almost constant communication (as much as you could be in that day and age); to my friends at college she was my girlfriend, though I never said that; I was her boyfriend to her mother, even though she knew we weren’t a couple.  When I was home our time was with each other, and when I was apart, we made plans to be together again soon.

One night in late September, we’d driven to a church to hang out with some friends of hers, mostly people I hardly knew. I didn’t want to go, because it was late, but she was adamant and wanted me to go along with her, as she always did, and always was.  Forty minutes later she’d disappeared behind a dumpster with some boy, and I was left alone in a crowd of cigarettes and strangers, the weight of my empty life pressing down upon me. I was angry; I was home and here to be with her, and she had left. I waited, and waited, and eventually wandered off.  If I was a fire, it was cold, after the air has been consumed and all that remains is smoldering ashes.

Somehow, in the haze, I managed to climb to the top of the church roof.  It was only a few stories high, and I can’t quite remember how I arrived up there, but when I did, the stars blinked at me, as if waiting patiently to see what I might do next, a million scientists studying me and watching where I went next in the dark maze of my heart.  In response, I quietly stepped to the edge of that roof, thinking I might jump. I was no longer going to press the lever to get a reward; I was tired of chasing the scent of my next meal. I just wanted it to stop.

There, poised over the beckoning sprawl of asphalt, I cried, and as I did, I felt something ignite within.  It was not the hoarse sobbing of grief, or the sniffling tears of self-pity.  It was silent, and angry, and as salty heat flowed from my eyes I felt the iron bars soften beneath my hands, and heard the key click within the lock.  Inside my mind, I said simply:

I will not let life win.

For many years afterwards, I approached life like a back alley pugilist, convinced I had to dominate it, overpower it, and beat it into submission with bloody fists. It was only much later that I learned that victory arose from yielding but not submitting, bending but not breaking, staying mobile but not wasting motion, viewing life not as a thinking opponent but as a series of chances and choices. I’ve become dynamic, phasic, flexible.

As I stood on the edge of the church rooftop, however, it was the flame of anger and hate that finally burned away the fog that had shrouded me. From that point forward, I fought depression with every fiber of my being.  It took years to learn to cope, but this was the moment that birthed the man I would eventually become.

My relationship with Janica changed, from that point.  If I was cleaved to her before, my newfound determination cleaved us apart, now.

The friends I had made on Offworld I kept in touch with via letters; many had gone to college, or I would see them when I was home, Janica in tow. As I began to separate myself from Janica, my friendship with Laura was blossoming.  I began spending time with her, instead, visiting her at her college, hanging out with her and her roommate. 

We’d already been friends, but we hadn’t been in each other’s company since early 1991.  We had both been through dark days.  There was a gravitas to us both of us, some aphotic aspects that each other’s presence helped lighten. She and her roommate were both friends of Nancy’s, still, and at one point I transmitted an apology to Nancy, which she accepted, and occasionally we found ourselves in each other’s presence inpassing. We were not necessarily friends, for the ending was terribly rough for both of us–and largely my fault.  Still, we were able to coexist pleasantly.

We went to movies, played cards, talked for long hours; I’ve mentioned those people that fit naturally at one’s side.  That was us–and quickly our friendship grew to surpass that which it had been previously, and become something intriguingly more.

Neither of us were really prepared to fall in love with each other.  Considering our relationship histories apart from each other, it’s no wonder we were hesitant to even broach the topic.  Our letters became frequent, and we began to look for excuses for me to come home and spend time together.  We were neither of us overly bold or willing to put ourselves out there.  However, in December, however, the vague hints became more frequent, the feeling out of one another more pointed.  With Laura I went to my first orchestra, to watch James Galway perform.  I had no formal outfits, a combination of poverty and gaining 35 pounds in college (no longer a stick, I filled out nicely), and Laura understood, putting away her formal clothes and going beside me to sit in the sixteenth row in flannels and jeans, amidst the prim dresses and suits of other audience members.  This touched me, that she never complained, and wanted my company enough to simply dress down to my level.  Later, we realized this was the first time we both started feeling the eventuality of our relationship; our minds were on one another, and we knew it. We just didn’t know what to do with it.

I was strangely unselfconscious at that concert, and that perhaps represents our relationship best: not just the unselfconscious, but the strangely part, because we were none too bold or shocking with our emotions.  If you can picture two people staring at each other desperately hoping the other person makes the first move, you can picture our relationship. We were comfortable with each other, loving, but shy, yes, hesitant, yes, scared, yes.

When my Christmas Break came, most of our time was spent together.  Our feelings were moving towards an inexorable conversation, nervous as we were, both afraid it was only we who were feeling this way, and that the other regarded us only as a friend. 

I’ve said before that I don’t know how to read women; I don’t, really. Or, perhaps I do, on a level that they don’t understand themselves. I am perceptive, but I don’t apply that to everyone.  When I am emotionally invested in a person, I am admittedly relentless, dissecting them because I want to understand Who They Are. Perhaps this is off-putting, though I can’t really control it.  I’ve been told I’m somewhat intimidating; it’s been said that I may be too intense. Personally, I feel that my greatest challenge has been overcoming my tendency to be Teflon Man, repelling the incisive probes of others. While I sometimes think I’m being blatantly obvious, I am not. I am innately cool, and by that I do not mean "hip", but impersonal and casual.  One reason I’m so expressive is to make up for it, because I hate for people to think I do not care–even when, ironically, I do not.

Laura and I share that trait; it’s one of our similarities.  However, it’s difficult for two cool people to get a feel for each other–invariably, someone has to be willing to reach beyond. Thus, it’s perhaps fitting that events finally came to a head during a snowstorm.  If you’ve ever lived in an area in which snow is less idyllic and more torturous, you are familiar with St. Louis winters.  Not all of them are savages, but snow and ice and hail are all common tourists, and even in the most mild winters we typically would have at least a week of blinding bluster, below-zero temperatures, and winds that would as soon snatch breath away as give it.

On January 6, 1993, I drove to see Laura at her school, braving the elements. I was one of five cars on the road; the highway was slick, covered in snow to the point where there were no lane markings–we just proceeded slowly and did our best to stay out of each other’s path.  I arrived, somewhat surprised I had made it without crashing, and held her fast–and there, in the solitude of her room, we opened ourselves to one another.

We danced around the topic. It’s humorous now, but at the time felt like the most important and intimidating conversation of my life. We told each other of our love by writing sticky notes to one another, too shy to speak, too nervous to relax.  While one person was writing, the other person read the only book she had handy, to distract themselves–The Joys of Yiddish. To this day, every time I think meshuggenah and bubelah, I think of Laura.

After awhile, our secrets confessed, we began to talk. We knew we didn’t want to ruin our friendship, and that we would take it slow, and take our time before committing to one another.  That time was four days, as on January 10, 1993, we decided that we really already HAD a commitment, and denying it was just being afraid for fear’s sake. (Those of you who were paying attention will remember earlier in the narrative I mentioned how January 6/10 would repeat themselves.)

Thus began our romance, and thus was my exposure to the beauty of true love.  Perhaps the best year of my life was 1993.

Friendship is a blessing.

In my life, I have had many relationships, with many women.  I think sometimes people opt for the road of friendship because they’re afraid of losing one another, in some sort of grand irony where someone means too much to you to become involved with. I’ve never feared that. I have always felt that you should become involved with people whom you trust, with whom you have a foundation that will serve you in the months and years ahead.

When people flare up brightly, unexpectedly, it is often attractive. However, the moth to the flame metaphor is apt–because oftentimes we are misled by the force of our own infatuation. It’s no surprise that the relationships I have had the most success with were the ones in which we were friends before choosing to become involved. The very thought "let’s not ruin our friendship" is a sign that you have something enduring.

The truest of loves can withstand hurts. We are none of us filled with foresight, able to predict life’s every yaw and pitch. It doesn’t spoil the narrative to say I am no longer with Laura–and we did hurt each other, and I hurt her most of all. Likewise, life with Jennifer was a seesaw; we were either completely conjunct or completely opposed, and we lacked the necessary characteristic of balance–and it tore us apart. Despite that, we persevered. We didn’t want to ruin our friendship–and we didn’t. It evolved.  Time and distance have separated me from both of them; Laura and I have fallen out of touch, but I love her no less.  Jen and I exchange emails as regularly as we can, and I will always misshaving her at my side, my best friend. I’m happy for both of them, and how their lives progressed–and I look upon our time together as a gift, sometimes painful, yes, but something that was undoubtedly true.  True, because it echoed in our friendship afterwards, and resounds still.

Comparatively, many of those whom I was not friends with were the ones in which I was most misled, both by my feelings and by them, and perhaps I’ve merely had bad luck or a rotten set of experiences on which to base my life philosophies–but what it’s taught me is not to take what you have for granted, to look for those relationships that are special, unique, beautiful–and to cherish them, to be open in your love, rather than trying to paint it into a corner and label it "hands off."

I am ill-equipped, one might say, for casual dating.

During this time, Janica had become jealous, and sometimes angry.  I had stopped playing the are we/aren’t we game, and had settled on "We Aren’t", and she didn’t know why.  There were some hurried exchanges of letters back and forth–truly, it’s amazing how life without the Internet was–and it seemed as if she finally was realizing she didn’t want to let me go.  Unfortunately for her, it was too late.  It has been something of a recurring theme in my life that I’m destined to fall for people who never realize what they have until I am gone. "Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation," says Kahlil Gibran, and I cannot dispute that. Thus as Laura and I fell towards one another, Janica and I fell apart, and sometime during early 1993, we eventually stopped talking altogether.

It was months later until we spoke again.  She called me, saying she needed to talk to me, and I learned much.  Janica was in alcohol rehab. I do not recall if it was AA, but part of her healing process was to talk to everyone who she could think of that had known her, to explain her problem, and ask their forgiveness.  She had been an alcoholic during the months we were together.  Of course, I knew that she drank a lot around me, and my only excuse is that when you’re a college student accustomed to seeing alcohol on a daily basis, that’s nothing new.  We went to a lot of parties.  The summer of our not-relationship, that constant yin-yang of yes/no, partially involved her struggles with addiction. In retrospect, after her confession, things became clearer, but I was dumbstruck by one thing she said, which was how she had been hesitant to contact me as part of the forgiveness process because, as she said, "I never did anything wrong to you." I honestly didn’t know how to answer that, and at the time was offended. Over time, I’ve come to believe she honestly thought that, and that during our entire time together, she tried, very hard, to treat me like the one good thing in her life.  She could just never get past her secrets, and the feeling that she would never be able to live up to whatever expectations we had.

Janica and I did remain friends for a fairly long time, well into the year 2000.  We’d fall out of touch, then reconnect and hang out for a few months, then disappear again. I’m the godfather to her child, Abigail, which interestingly was the name I’d always wanted for a girl child (my choice has since changed.)  Time seemed to change us, however, and we just sort of drifted apart for good. I don’t know when I last saw her, though I hope she and Abby are doing well.  She’s on the list of people who I wish I could just chat with for a day. 

I think about people important to me often. I’ve never known whether it’s an excessive amount or not, but they make impressions that I don’t easily get rid of.  I don’t obsess over people, except for whomever I’m emotionally involved with at the time, but the combination of my personality and my memory result in significant time thinking about the past. I wonder sometimes, if I pass across Janica’s mind; if Brandy remembers me. I wonder if my college friends wonder how I’m doing, as I do them; I wonder if family members of friends that I used to always chat with remember that I even exist.

And yes, I wonder if sometimes Laura pauses, and thinks about me, and the love we shared, and how close we came to making it work.

(to be continued)