Memories, 2003-2005, Part 9

This post is part nine 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. Read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.

Elia/December ’04–January ‘05 (Part One)

I had known Elia since I was a freshman in high school. I have always gravitated more to men as friends than I have to women, and Elia was one of my best friends. After high school I started wondering why, because he acted appallingly superior to me and made me feel like an untraveled, naive idiot most of the time. I have never known anyone who better fit the label “know-it-all.” But his severe egotism was almost justified, as he was incredibly smart and capable of all kinds of amazing things, mostly with computers. The dynamic of our high school, especially in his class (he was a year above me) is too complex to go into here, but suffice it to say he was popular in a certain way.

Our friendship was strange. I thought he was a fascinating person, and he knew so much that I wanted to know – our interests overlap a lot – and he is also an extremely charismatic person. Yet I have a hard time remembering a single encounter where he wasn’t laughing at me in one way or another. Despite his obnoxious qualities, he combined his charisma with exceptional competency to get pretty much everything he wanted (including my friendship). He was one of those people who was living an adult life while still a teenager, and he parlayed his extracurricular computer activities and the work he did on off times in college into a six-figure job immediately after graduating from college. During college we didn’t have much contact, but when in high school there were months where we hung out almost daily. He lived in a gorgeous house in a prestigious neighborhood in Annapolis, with a younger sister who grew into a beautiful, artistic snob, and an extremely tough mother who I think really liked me, and a father whom I rarely saw but who was kind and a highly regarded neurologist.

While in high school he met Melissa, who was in the class above him, and to whom he proposed even before he graduated. They were off and on during their college years, but they did marry a few months after he graduated from college. I never understood exactly what he saw in Melissa, because she barely said two words to me in the space of four years, and I thought of her as a very average person – while Elia was anything but average. I learned later that Melissa was smart as hell, a lot smarter than me, and that her mind and her devotion to Elia were what drew him in. (The reason she hardly spoke to me, in Elia’s opinion, was that she was jealous of my friendship with him – we’d been friends before Elia and Melissa had been together.)

One night when I was a junior and he was a senior in high school, and Melissa was at college, Elia called and none-too-subtly propositioned me. I remember him whispering “but why not?” about 50 times, but not only was I not ready to have sex, I definitely didn’t want to have sex with him. I felt strictly platonically about him. The next day he apologized and said he didn’t know what he was thinking, but I never forgot that incident, nor the fact that Melissa was wearing an engagement ring a few hundred miles away when it happened.

On one of the few occasions we had contact in college, Elia told me honestly that I meant a lot to him as a human being and that he was sorry he’d treated me so poorly most of the time. These kinds of apologies come along so rarely in life, and I was bowled over by it and thanked him. He added that if I ever needed anything, I should call him, and he would try to help me however he could.

Well, on that December evening in 2004, I needed something. I needed someone who knew me and cared for me to talk me down from the skyscraper I was standing on, someone to tell me that my life was worth living. I needed help. When Elia called me back, I had no idea how to tell him that I needed the help he had offered so long ago, but as I recall, the sound of his voice said that he understood I was in serious trouble. Eventually, after we’d found the way we used to talk to each other again, I told him what I had done with the bathtub and that I needed to get out of there. He offered to let me come and visit him. I hadn’t known that he had moved back to the east coast – I figured he was still in California – but he had moved into a rich neighborhood in northern Virginia, about two hours away from where he’d grown up.

I don’t remember much about the next couple of days. I told Eric I was going to visit an old high school friend, and he was immediately suspicious. He was shaken by the bathtub incident and gentler with me as a result, but I think it also served to make him more insecure and hold on to me all the tighter. He wanted me to do what I needed to do for the sake of my mental health, of course, but he didn’t want me to visit a male friend and stay in his house hundreds of miles away. I said this was stupid and that I had never once thought that way about Elia. He reminded me of what happened the last time I was hundreds of miles away (Maria), although it was in the guise of explaining why he was upset about me going. I tried again to explain about the extenuating circumstances of that incident, but for him the facts remained. And on and on.

After all this haggling, I got in my car and I drove south. The house Elia and Melissa lived in was a paradise to me. It was hidden away in the woods of a private neighborhood, with lots of large windows, and it was decorated quite nicely. Everything there was soft or comfortable or beautiful. They had a huge, gorgeous, department-store-style Christmas tree, and I was a little amazed when I saw it because I hadn’t been in a home with a Christmas tree for years. Eric and I couldn’t afford them, and my parents didn’t think I cared. I really didn’t, but still. It was a home-touch that I missed a little. Also, it was such an adult object, with gleaming ornaments and tinsel and tasteful lights and a tree skirt. Elia was only 24; what was he doing with a middle-aged Christmas tree?

Melissa wasn’t at home when I arrived, so after I took my stuff into the little bedroom where I was going to stay – which was more welcoming than my bedroom at home – we sat and talked for a little while. This was mostly catching up, and planning what I was going to do while I was there. My idea in going there was just to rest, to have three days without Eric and without my roommates, to read and relax and recover from what I was fast realizing was a nervous breakdown. Elia asked me if I wanted to do anything in particular, and I said no. He explained that he planned to work from home during these days so as to spend time with me, but that Melissa had to go to work as usual. Melissa worked at an art studio in the area, and Elia did something high-level and complicated with computers and networks that I didn’t really understand. He made literally ten times as much as I did at Palin Drome.

All this money was something I had a hard time with. It was difficult not to stare wide-eyed at my surroundings, looking at all the nice things. I remembered this dimly from my days living with my parents (who didn’t do as well as Elia, but who certainly had more than what I had in Enfield), but those three days with Elia reminded me of what I expected out of life. For a year I had listened to Eric telling me that check-to-check is how most people live, and that a job you like which will also pay you well enough to survive is just a pipe dream. For a year I had lived hand to mouth. I had pretty much forgotten that places like Elia’s house existed, where the food was fresh and delicious, where the lighting fixtures were beautiful, where the bedspreads were clean, and where there was enough. I wanted to wash my clothes, which seemed dingy in this house. I wanted to spend hours in their shower scrubbing the filth off my skin, and dry off with their Ralph Lauren towels. I wanted most of all to stay here, where there was enough to eat and enough time to relax, where you could leave all the lights on at night if you wanted to.

Forgetting about places like this was how I started to look only at my feet, trudging one step and then the next, ignoring that there was somewhere I should be getting to. It’s how I got down to taking a job in the mall and being really excited about a job sorting papers in a basement for $10 an hour. It’s how I started believing that I didn’t deserve anything but drudgery, and how it did start to seem silly what I was saying to Eric, that we should be doing better, that there were good jobs that paid well and were pleasant to endure, and that we should have nice things and a nice place to live. Eric had never been here, had never seen this, and so he couldn’t help but think it was silly. The sin was that after living in his reality for a year, I had forgotten my own.

I’m not really talking about lifestyles of the rich and famous. Being rich is the American dream, we all know that. And sure, I’d like to be rich. But what I was yearning for was not “rich”, it was “enough.” I wanted to have enough to buy a CD without worrying that I’d wrecked my budget. I wanted to have enough to eat. I wanted to have enough home furnishings not to be ashamed about inviting someone over. Elia had these things (and he also had plenty to spare), and I was reminded by this that it wasn’t crazy for me to expect it.

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Read part 10.