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Sep. 22nd, 2001 12:01 pm"We met for the fist time when I drove a friend who was traveling the east coast over to their place. It was during a blizzard, and I had simply planned to drop the friend off and head home. I instead spent several hours there hanging out, talking joking and snuggling.
I met her again when she drove the same friend over to my apartment where said friend was going to be our summer roommate. She achieved honorary household member status for being there for at least some amount of time every day for two weeks dispite going to school in NYC 2 hours away.
We wrote a lot when later that summer she went to Italy. Lots of long rambling letters sent about nothing in particular.
I was the one who organized her b-day party that fall, as she was on the wrong continent to do so.
When my housing situation went to shit she invited me to live in her dorm room in upstate NY, and to feed me on her meal plan until I found a new job.
I took her up on the offer, and we lived in a tiny 8x15ft rom together, We were involved by that point, and what we were doing would probably have been called boyfriend/girlfriend if I wasn't so twitchy about that concept at the time.
I moved out of her room and into a rooming house nearby, but we were still very much involved, spending lots of time at each other's place.
I later moved back home as my father had gotten sick and I felt I should be there for him.
I realized I was in love with her, but didn't know how to say it. I have never been any good at saying those words for the first time. I decided I was going to tell her, except that I was very shortly leaving on an extended roadtrip to see various friends/umfriends of mine. So I was going to wait until afterwards as saying 'I'm in love with you, and now I'm going to go visit and sleep with a bunch of other friends.' just seemed low class.
Except in the mean time she fond someone else, and fell in love with him. When she told me about him, I told her what I felt for her. She decided she had to choose between us.
She chose him, which in retrospect I don't regret.
Except that after she chose him over me, she kept trying to put more restrictions on how I could act in her presence. Not even to her, just in her vicinity. I couldn't hug, kiss, or scritch other women, I couldn't even brush their hair. Apparently I was supposed to demurely sit on my hands whenever I was in her presence, out of respect for the fact that she had decided I wasn't the one worth dating.
So things were bad, but when we really needed each other we were there for each other. I stayed with her and helped her when she had knee surgury and one leg was in an imobilizer from hip to ankle. She came over and helped keep me sane when my father passed away a week afterwards.
And our attempts at a friendship limped along. Sometimes things were really good and we got along like old times. Sometimes things were really bad and we screamed and yelled at each other.
Things settled down into a rythmn. We got along ok, then one of the other of us got really mad at the other and blew up at them. Then we'd have a big fight followed by an extended period of silence. Then we would make up and start getting along ok again.
We had, just before the school year started, patched up the silence that had lasted all summer.
Well she did something this past week that pissed me off, what it is is irrelevant now.
She has complained repeatedly about my not discussing things with her. So I sent her a note telling her that it had pissed me off.
She responded with a one line paraphrasing of something I had said in an arguement ages back.
I stared at that email for a while, then I deleted it figuring it wasn't worth the ongoing arguement to call her on it.
And I thought about that email almost constantly over the next day. I thought about the fact that we had not managed to break out of this loop of fighting and sort of making up for a while. And I thought about how it seemed like every interaction with her, whether good or bad left me more stressed and tense than I was before. And I thought about how even though she and I hadn't been involved for a long while, and she had been the one who had ended it, that I still felt like I had to walk on eggshells when I was with another female in her vicnity, and any encounters of this kind would illicit snarky comments from her. And I thought about how it hadn't felt worth confronting her about her response.
And I decided that a friendship that caused me such ongoing unhappiness that I didn't feel I could muster the energy to defend it. I decided that a friendship like that wasn't one I wanted to have.
So I told her what she had done in that email that had bothered me, and I ended it.
That doesn't make it suck any less. And is prolly going to make it hurt more for a while."
I met her again when she drove the same friend over to my apartment where said friend was going to be our summer roommate. She achieved honorary household member status for being there for at least some amount of time every day for two weeks dispite going to school in NYC 2 hours away.
We wrote a lot when later that summer she went to Italy. Lots of long rambling letters sent about nothing in particular.
I was the one who organized her b-day party that fall, as she was on the wrong continent to do so.
When my housing situation went to shit she invited me to live in her dorm room in upstate NY, and to feed me on her meal plan until I found a new job.
I took her up on the offer, and we lived in a tiny 8x15ft rom together, We were involved by that point, and what we were doing would probably have been called boyfriend/girlfriend if I wasn't so twitchy about that concept at the time.
I moved out of her room and into a rooming house nearby, but we were still very much involved, spending lots of time at each other's place.
I later moved back home as my father had gotten sick and I felt I should be there for him.
I realized I was in love with her, but didn't know how to say it. I have never been any good at saying those words for the first time. I decided I was going to tell her, except that I was very shortly leaving on an extended roadtrip to see various friends/umfriends of mine. So I was going to wait until afterwards as saying 'I'm in love with you, and now I'm going to go visit and sleep with a bunch of other friends.' just seemed low class.
Except in the mean time she fond someone else, and fell in love with him. When she told me about him, I told her what I felt for her. She decided she had to choose between us.
She chose him, which in retrospect I don't regret.
Except that after she chose him over me, she kept trying to put more restrictions on how I could act in her presence. Not even to her, just in her vicinity. I couldn't hug, kiss, or scritch other women, I couldn't even brush their hair. Apparently I was supposed to demurely sit on my hands whenever I was in her presence, out of respect for the fact that she had decided I wasn't the one worth dating.
So things were bad, but when we really needed each other we were there for each other. I stayed with her and helped her when she had knee surgury and one leg was in an imobilizer from hip to ankle. She came over and helped keep me sane when my father passed away a week afterwards.
And our attempts at a friendship limped along. Sometimes things were really good and we got along like old times. Sometimes things were really bad and we screamed and yelled at each other.
Things settled down into a rythmn. We got along ok, then one of the other of us got really mad at the other and blew up at them. Then we'd have a big fight followed by an extended period of silence. Then we would make up and start getting along ok again.
We had, just before the school year started, patched up the silence that had lasted all summer.
Well she did something this past week that pissed me off, what it is is irrelevant now.
She has complained repeatedly about my not discussing things with her. So I sent her a note telling her that it had pissed me off.
She responded with a one line paraphrasing of something I had said in an arguement ages back.
I stared at that email for a while, then I deleted it figuring it wasn't worth the ongoing arguement to call her on it.
And I thought about that email almost constantly over the next day. I thought about the fact that we had not managed to break out of this loop of fighting and sort of making up for a while. And I thought about how it seemed like every interaction with her, whether good or bad left me more stressed and tense than I was before. And I thought about how even though she and I hadn't been involved for a long while, and she had been the one who had ended it, that I still felt like I had to walk on eggshells when I was with another female in her vicnity, and any encounters of this kind would illicit snarky comments from her. And I thought about how it hadn't felt worth confronting her about her response.
And I decided that a friendship that caused me such ongoing unhappiness that I didn't feel I could muster the energy to defend it. I decided that a friendship like that wasn't one I wanted to have.
So I told her what she had done in that email that had bothered me, and I ended it.
That doesn't make it suck any less. And is prolly going to make it hurt more for a while."
