Last night I had dinner with a skeleton in my closet. It was an odd experience… I think for the best… but still hauntingly strange.
If this had been the first time I interacted with this individual, I would have thought I had made a new best friend. This was another green-minded science oriented type… but with more artistic sensibilities. I can meet green-minded hippies, I can meet people who can appreciate science… and I can meet people who can look at the world around them and express it passionately from minute to minute. It’s really rare to find this all in one individual.... It’s a refreshing mix. Plus… he thought ninjas were cooler than pirates… definitely worth having another ninja in my circle of friends.
However this wasn’t the first time I interacted with this individual…. I was actually half expecting to meet up with this individual and drive off as soon as possible… or at least, I wasn’t expecting to feel like I wanted to make a new friend. This was an old friend and enemy: I knew him at a period of my development I usually don’t write about anymore, or think about more… who I was when I knew him, and even dated him… were very different from who I am now. 8 years ago I was an unabashed religious fundamentalist; I was a teenager trying to escape a rough childhood and adolescence through other people… I was more than a little removed from reality…. Ryan at this time was also more of a fundamentalist... and it’s safe to say we are both very different people now then we were then. A lot of things happened in that period of time and I believed a lot of things for which I am ashamed of…
It’s enough to say that when we parted… it was pretty ugly. I tend to stay friends with my exes… Ryan was a “Never talk to me again” interaction… more from him than from me, although both of us spoke those words. I remained obsessed with him even after the breakup. By the time I went to
Over the next six years I traveled… I dated… I fell in love with Mark. This part of my life became pretty well brushed under the rug. I don't think I told Mark much of anything of my fundementalist days.
After Mark and I had broken up I felt like doing something rash. That night I decided to full a “High Fidelity”. That is… since I had just blown things with the one I loved… I wanted to know how much of it was because of me being retarded. I felt the best way to compare current mistakes is to look at old ones… and that meant ex boyfriends. I wanted to know if any aspect of whom I used to be was still remaining…. I decided to hunt down Ryan… to perhaps find what happened to him, find resolution, and measure myself against his old perception of me back then. I looked around the internet and I found him… I’m not sure if I had fully reasoned through these things when I IMed him… maybe it was just the first rash thing that came into my head. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I had thought about doing such a thing in the past, but I was afraid it would hurt… a lot… Not much could really hurt me, but I felt Ryan knew about most of all of the things that truly could shame me. I contacted Ryan on a night where nothing else could hurt.
It was a good conversation… I was half expecting him to just block me if I IMed him… he didn’t. He was doing well… he had become a teacher, was getting back into writing, but had just come back from
Crap.
This was bad… and I guess I can’t tell you why without delving into some of the nasty things from back in the day. 6 years ago friend of mine at that point had had a dream he considered “prophetic” and from god. In those times I believed in such things. In this dream, God had said that I and Ryan were “made for each other”… presumably in a romantic sense. I had believed it. Ryan had known I had believed it… he didn’t believe it… for obvious reasons, and last he checked… I still did.
The last thing he wanted to hear from me was that I was in the same town.
I made sure he knew I didn’t want to meet up with him… I had called and gotten what I wanted to know: he was doing well; I got to apologize for who I was back then. But since I was also in the area… I’m not sure if he believed it fully. A few days later I found he didn’t.
A few days later I read his blog… his blog was part of how I ended up tracking him down… but I really shouldn’t have read it. Even so there was a post on there about me. He lamented to his friends that “the crazy” had re-entered his life (I had a nickname all this time apparently) and that she had probably been pining away at her computer wondering why he didn’t IM all this time… my words came out mangled and needy as he reiterated them. It was crap. I don’t remember the details… I didn’t go back twice.
Next time he IMed me for “pleasant” conversation, I ripped him a new asshole. He was upset I read his blog, but I was more upset by what he said… He then argued that he knew it was simplification, that he blogged for “creative writing” purposes. I argued that nothing was that simple… that his perceptions of me just cruel fantasy… But then again, here I was reading his blog… that was an invasion of his privacy.
He made some good points.
But whatever. I wrote him off as an asshole… we parted on neutral terms, he said I could update him once in a while if I felt like it… as long as it was in 6 months intervals or more. I didn’t plan on it. I felt his trespasses were much greater than mine.
He IMed me a month or so later, saying he was writing a book and I was in it somehow. I was afraid to learn the details… Was there an obsessed fundi girl stalking one of his main character? He explained not… that the book was about how people can perceive an individual in vastly different ways… and it can be the same person. In this novel we would be introduced to a character through other people, one stereotyped perception to another… and eventually the main character would become clear. It sounded kinda Citizen Kane-ish… it sounded like a great story and it also sounded like it was an attempt at an apology being that this sounded a lot like what I was saying in our last argument… I was glad he saw things a bit differently… but I still didn’t plan on talking to him again. I thought about IMing him to tell him not to talk to me etc again, but I didn’t. It would defeat the purpose to contact someone to tell them you weren’t going to contact them.
This weekend he IMed me again… He apologized for being an asshole. He also said he wanted to meet up before I left town. I accepted his apology… but I was skeptical about his motivations in meeting up… this had to be a bad idea. I explained I was worried that he would still see me as he had in this past… I wasn’t that person anymore… in the end I agreed to meet up… but as strangers. I figured the worst that could happen was he pissed me off, and I’d get in my car and drive home.
But I met a really cool stranger. …
I find myself thinking over his book plot… my old side of the argument. It would be really easy… really simplistic of me to say this guy’s an asshole underneath this façade… that it will fade and the past will explode all over again. It would be equally easy of me not to be his friend for fear of the past on my end… I believed some retarded shit back then, and hey… he knows about it. That shame won’t fade overnight. If he is truly how he presents himself then I don’t feel like I deserve to be his friend based on what I put him through. He expected me to hunt him down some day, looking him up on the internet… saying “guess what, I’m in town” or something. He got something pretty close to that… with key differences, but still… I could understand his fears. But I’m not how he perceived me, I am no more my past than he is his. Should I deliberately keep away from him regardless? I suppose it doesn’t matter too much, I leave town in July…
I suppose the creepiest thing is aside from the fundamentalist stuff, we had had a remarkable amount in common back then. Before he was my boyfriend… he was my “crazy twin”. We both had swords on our wall… we finished each other’s sentences… and he did a lot of things I thought were really awesome like have a rubber chicken on a noose in the corner of his room so he could be “choking the chicken” constantly. (None of you will probably get why that’s awesome, but I thought it was damn cool at the time). Though the two of us have both changed remarkably… he still has a lot in common with me. He’s registered green party and very into liberal and environmental causes… he’s a vegetarian (for those of you who didn’t know… I tried for a while, and I still don’t eat much in the way of actual meat). Oh yeah… he’s not a fundamentalist, he’s an atheist… although a happy one. I haven’t gone that far, but my parents do think I’m going to hell for believing in evolution. God is a hypothesis I cannot test, and if he does exist I doubt he wants to be tested… My ethics are pretty strong; my reasons for retaining them are much fuzzier. In any case… it seemed we still had a lot in common… we both evolved to a great extent, a lot of that evolution was congruous.
So I’d say it’s like having an old friend back… even an old twin… despite years of fluctuations and changes in our lives. But this was a part of my life I expected to have closed forever…. I wanted resolution, I never thought he’d be in my life… and possibly hanging out with my friends or mine with his in the near future. But here comes a ghost from my past with a new face, yet a familiar one in that we still have a lot in common… I’m not sure how quite to react…. It confuses me… greatly. A few months ago I was content to just know he was doing well, now that I’ve met up with him… I DO want to be his friend…. It’s just not logical.
Last night all of this was rolling over in my head and Roberto accused me of “obsessing”… He was acting well… jealous. He kept dragging it out of me and making me talk about it. Despite my affirmation that this particular ghost from my past was not going to be a source of attraction or competition (Based on the past Ryan is placed pretty high on the list of people to never have sex with… if this is a”last person on earth”scenario he’d win out over genetic family members, women and maybe Colin…)
Even so I was still trying to sift through what had happened and how to precede hours after the incident... Maybe Roberto is right… I’m thinking about this too much.
I am who I am, complications and all. What happens, happens…
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