Memories, 2003-2005, Part 1

This post is part one of a series about what happened to me after I graduated from college. Everything in my life went horribly wrong over the course of 2003-2005, and I’ve written a long story (or a short memoir) all about it. I think it typifies the challenges that face my generation that no one is really talking about, but it’s also a story about heartbreak. These posts will go up automatically every Sunday until the story is over. All names have been changed, and some situations have been changed slightly for the purposes of anonymity.

Eric/Spring ’03

In April of 2003, I made up with my former best friend and roommate in college, Kara. I was set to graduate from college in May and I thought it would be better to let go of all my old resentment with her and graduate with at least one close friend. One of our activities had historically been LARPing, Live Action Role Playing, at UMass. For those of you not in on the hip LARPing culture, it means a bunch of weirdos running around a designated area pretending to be vampires or werewolves or something similarly fantasy-oriented, playing out a prefabricated storyline, and acting on the various events that occur over the course of the evening. A storyline lasts for a season (in our case organized around the semesters), and the process of setting up and then playing one’s character is remarkably complicated.

I had loved roleplaying with Kara during my sophomore year. I liked the actual LARPing component, but more than that I liked the people. I started showing up just to hang around out-of-game and talk to the (mostly) guys who played. I remember each person I became friends with through LARPing with sincere fondness. One of the people Kara had grown close with over that semester’s storyline was a man named Eric. He was five years older than us and had been LARPing for years, and playing D&D and other games for many, many years before that. He was well-respected among our circle of friends, and I remembered much later that I had met him once briefly two years earlier. I’m not sure why he was less closely involved with the LARPs I’d participated in then.

Anyway, I re-met Eric for the first time in April of ’03 when I went to a LARP with Kara. I didn’t even bother making a character because I didn’t want to play, I just wanted to see my friends again – I hadn’t seen this crowd in two years. I don’t remember very well how it happened, whether over two meetings or three or what (LARPs happened weekly on Fridays), but I discovered that feelings for Eric were stirring in my stomach. I got that old nervous feeling around him that I got around guys I liked. I thought of him way more often than I should have. I tried to find excuses to talk to him or be close to him. Etc.

I was baffled by these feelings, because Eric was far from my type, and he hadn’t done much of anything to win me over other than talk to me and show me that he was quick-witted and sweet. According to Kara, he and his wife had recently split up and he was not very okay with it, and he was really a wonderful guy who deserved wonderful things. When I told her I thought I might like him (“Like, like like him?”) she was happy but almost as baffled as I was.

On April 25th, 2003, there was a LARP and somehow it got back to Eric that I like-liked him. Kara tried to gently nudge him in my direction with all her usual tact (“You should definitely hang out with her sometime…I mean, definitely“), and so that evening we were in the same backseat of a car heading to the pizza place where the group always went after a LARP to eat and chat over that evening’s events.

I wanted just to tell how I met Eric, but I’m realizing writing this that it’s impossible just to tell that without explaining a little (or a lot) about him. So here goes: Eric was not a contradictory man, but he was a complicated one. He was carrying around the most unbelievable baggage from his marriage to Lindy, who had left him for another woman. Because of Lindy, and because the first woman he’d really been in love with, Alice, had also left him for someone else, he had very bad self-esteem problems. His appearance did not help this. He was overweight, and hated it; he had crooked teeth, which is almost (unfairly) like being deformed in America; he didn’t think he was handsome, and his hairline was gradually receding at the corners like Bruce Willis’s; and he was tremendously self-conscious about his left ear, in which he’d had a massive tumor as a child and which constantly leaked. No one but him cared about any of these things, but they were all things that he was immensely troubled about, and no one could convince him that they did not matter.

He was hilariously funny. He was smart, but the fact that he hadn’t gone to college weighed on him. He was charismatic, and had one of the loveliest, deepest voices I’ve ever heard. He believed in the same mystic things that I believed in, but he had once practiced as a pagan (and ended up hating it). He cried often, and was absolutely insistent on honesty and attention from me. He was generous and loving, and immensely sensitive to his environment. He didn’t want children, like me, and loved sex, like me, and thought that everything in the world had some kind of beauty, like me.

I spent two and a half years with this man, and I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone. During that time I wore a plain silver ring on the appropriate finger symbolizing that I was spoken for in a permanent way. Yet he and I hurt each other in innumerable ways. We fought almost every day for many months at a time. We were frustrated with each other in ways that went too deep to heal, and we were in love with each other in ways that went too deep to rend. With him I had my first orgasm, and with him I learned about what happens to me when I get really angry. It broke my heart so badly when we finally split up that I understood at last what it really meant to have a broken heart. I still miss him terribly, although I don’t miss the suspended horror of our relationship.

I don’t want to explain much more about Eric, because there’s nothing I can write that would make a single person reading this understand why I fell in love with him, why I stayed with him, why we tortured each other, why he loved me, any of those things. I could take twenty pages to explain his personality, and then another twenty to explain my own, and then opine for thousands of words about what happened when they collided. But that would be pointless. Relationships happen (and end) every day, and none of them is more special than any other. I am satisfied with introducing him with a few key facts and assuring readers that I loved him, passionately, and he loved me, passionately, and after the first six months we could not get along no matter how hard we tried.

The detour from the bright future that I thought was before me when I graduated from college was entirely due to him, but I don’t blame him for it. I blame myself. When we met, I was so goggle-eyed in love with him that I couldn’t see another choice than to be with him. I know now what I could have done not to have become derailed during those years, but I doubt that I would do it any differently if I could go back. I learned many valuable lessons, and I survived with the important things intact: my mind, my body, my dignity, my ethics. What else do you really need?

Let us return to April 25th, 2003, and the backseat of that car. Eric and I had been flirting in a very uncertain, awkward way all evening, and at the moment we were engrossed in a conversation about his man-boobs. Being overweight and of a certain body type, Eric was unfortunately possessed of them, and I was curious about them. Finally I reached over and squeezed one, a quick feel; in return he reached over and squeezed one of my boobs. Most of the foundation of our relationship was laid right there. The fact that he had the balls to return in kind, and not to make an exception because my boobs were of the female persuasion, ironically won him some serious points with me. If I hadn’t squeezed his boob first, of course, I would have thought he was a pig and dismissed him from my mind.

After the LARP crew had eaten and entertained each other at the pizza shop, I told Eric I wanted to talk to him some more and offered him a ride back to my dorm room. The hours that followed were how the rest of the foundation was laid. I don’t remember all of what we talked about, but we went deep, and he had cried a lot before it was over. My strongest memory of this evening is how smelly his feet were while we sat there for hours and hours, but naturally I didn’t care at all. I was falling in love with him that night.

At eight or so we went to Denny’s and got breakfast, smoking clove cigarettes outside the emergency exit in a threatening drizzle. We kept glancing at each other in quiet out there, realizing that we were already heavily involved with each other, and it had been about 12 hours. We later called April 25th our anniversary, because we knew on the day we met that we had a relationship going on, not something casual or short-term.

Every element of my life that was not Eric pretty much stopped after I met him. I was a month away from graduation, so my failure to do much in the way of schoolwork meant that the only thing I sacrificed was the thesis I had been working on all year. I had made it to the second round of competition for a highly regarded Director’s Guild internship, but I didn’t go to California for the next set of eliminations. These are things that I regret, deeply, but que sera sera.

I had been planning to go and live with my father in England after graduation if the Director’s Guild thing didn’t work out. He had been living there for a while, doing some fancy thing or other for the Navy, and I thought that I could have the fun of living in London for free, and save up the money that I would spend on rent and other expenses and have a nice pad of cash to start my life with after college. This sounds like a great plan, and I thought it was still a great plan after the advent of Eric. We spent the last weeks of my college experience and the first weeks of summer in a euphoria of love and a cloud of sadness at my anticipated parting. I told him I’d be back in a year, with thousands of dollars socked away, and it would all be fine.

How wrong I was.

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Read part two.