Reih7’s Weblog

“I’m already 107 and I still haven’t got married,” the Chongqing Commercial Times quoted her saying. “What will happen if I don’t hurry up and find a husband?”

The first guy I remember liking was Greg in kindergarden. He was lanky, like all of us, with buzzed brown hair. I liked him because he was the best drawer in the class and he played on the swings with me at recess. Z must have caught on that I liked him because I remember some odd kind of flirting war where she pretended to hit her head on the swings for sympathy attention. Ha.

The next guy I liked was Johnathan, a dark haired boy with big brown eyes covered in thick eye lashes. He was beautiful and lived around the corner from me. I was already going through the awkward stage that would culminate in my 20s and so usually hid around him because I was embarrassed to have him see my face. My sister managed to become friends with Johnathan’s brother, and this led to the highlight of our relationship. One day I walked over to pick her up and Johnathan answered the door. I stood there in awe, looking first at his gorgeous eyes and then at his bare, knoby boy feet. Prefect! , I thought, he’s just like MY family! The only other time I spoke to him was when I was riding home on the bus, sick with a fever. My head was resting on my good friend’s lap and as Johnathan walked by he asked “What’s wrong with her??”. I looked up at him like the dying Queen of England and haughtly said “I have a fever.” Oh so smooth, even at that young age.

After that was Jordan. Well, it was really Jordan versus Brandon, but Jordan won in the end. Brandon was only in the running because he was popular and funny and had a huge bunch of dark Italian hair on his haid that made him look…floppy. Floppy and adorable. But in the end, he was really just a bit of excitement, nothing more. Jordan was different. I liked him because he was popular, but he still talked to the weird boys that even I didn’t talk to. He read Gordan Korman books and would talk to me about them and he was the nicest guy that I’d met. We sat at the same table in 5th grade and I was in love. In 6th grade he still sat at my table in English class (along with Brandon, who was quickly becoming history in my mind) and we become ‘closer’ in the way that only two prepubescents, one of whom was grossly awkward, could be.

I liked him, yes, but I also thought of him as a friend. We even talked in the cafeteria, an action usually not undertaken unless you were part of the rash of boys-asking-girls-out-just-to-laugh-at-them that was going around. He talked to me about the mixed vegetables they were serving. At first I was suspicious…but he really meant it and just wanted to talk. To me. To the Indian girl with unruly curls and Transformer glasses. Such began the years of socially appropriate interaction (i.e not in private and not in the cafeteria), while I secretly became a huge fan. The day Jordan and his class made the band teacher cry, I shared in his victory. I ran by him at track practice and worried with the rest about his bloody knees from jumping hurdles. When I walked by the cool kids’ hang out and saw Jordan there, I felt a thrill that he’d climbed the social ladder while staying true to himself.

We had the same pre-calc teacher my Junior year of high school. I’d about given up on the class since my propensity for talking always got me sent out in the hall. However, it turned out that the trick to pass was to get our hands on the old tests, which were pretty much unchanged year to year. I guess that’s what happens when you ask the football coach to teach math. Anyways, we would have these grand study sessions at the library where we’d all get together and study and work out the old test problems. I would usually study the book and the homework, then try to help other kids with the old tests, and thereby learn the old material indirectly. Some students showed up for only the tests, and some even copied the answers onto the allowed 8.5 X 11 cheat sheet. Jordan showed up a few times, but he never looked at the old tests. I offered them to him, like I did to everyone, despite the fact that I didn’t really want them myself. It was cool, you know, to act like I was into cheating my way to a pass. Jordan just sat against the wall, working out the homework problems, and I loved him for it.

Junior year is also when he started dating one of the prettiest girls in our class, the girl coveted by every guy and resembled some kind of Jane Austen character. It didn’t last, and by then I’d found a boyfriend of my own and he was off to Yale.

The last memory I have of him is as the pallbearer for Mark’s funeral. Valerie cried on my lap through the entire ceremony and, at the end, all of Mark’s friends carried the coffin past us while we nibbled at carrot sticks. Jordan was at the front left corner and as he walked by his face crumpled like tissue paper. He was the only one of the six sobbing openly in public and Mark’s death was forever immortalized in that moment.

Years later, my by then ex-boyfriend was living with friends in New York and Jordan was crashing there for the night. In some fit of jealous ire the ex-boyfriend told Jordan about my little crush saying specifically “Dude, you know my ex-girlfriend was like in love with you.”

Prick.

I didn’t yell at him nearly as much as I should have because I think I’d have scared even myself with my irrationality. All I did was like this kid of years, and not ever enough to do anything about it. Geez, it’s not like we had a fucking affair. But still, to this day, Jordan is the reminder that there are such good, decent guys in the world. Every time I read a personal ad from some 20 year old father of 3, an overweight and balding middle ager looking for his piece of hot college ass, the graduate student with a thing for beating off in public…all of these guys are so easily refuted by the memory that I once knew someone out there that more than made up for this mass of male-kind’s inadequacies.

Jordan’s presence had faded by my freshman year of high school and suddenly I had new game. I got contacts, learned how to wear my hair curly and my usual outgoing personality won me many a friend. Starting freshman year I started the yearly tradition of having an insane man-crush on some random guy who I would then stalk and look forward to seeing every day. Freshman year was The Guy With The Cool Hair, some kind of punk freak who had his hair in platinum dreads gelled across his forehead and into his eyes. The next year it was Tak, a Japanese exchange student (which perfectly coincided with my starry-eyed return from a summer abroad in Japan), who I danced with at Homecoming (because my punk friend Judy with the spiky purple hair scared him into it), and later went out with my other Japanese exchange student friend, Naho. Junior year it was Mitch, this beautiful Filipino mix who was to date the only certifiable attractive guy of my crazy highschool crushes. He was tall, well built and drove a white two-door that looked like a Saturn. We used to practice for track by running inside the halls and one day Mitch was out there with us. I saw him as I rounded the corner, put on my best form, and tripped and fell into an alcove. Mitch and his friend jogged by laughing and the rest of the practice was spent with my loudly muttering expletives when I got around him. My friends and I laughed about it for hours afterwards.

There was Jeff, who I met while accompanying Nicole on some kind of rendezvouswith one of her guy friends. Jeff and I sat next to each other, taking turns making witty and deprecating remarks about Nicole and her latest toy. The next day I commented that I thought Jeff was kind of entertaining and Nicole just smiled. “He was saying the same thing”, she said and we parted ways in the morning. Hm. Nicole got started on a quest to hook us both up, which wasn’t really needed cause I was kinda into him anyways. He was funny and he looked really cute in his orange t-shirt and muscly pale arms. His blond hair ended in little points over his forehead and with his green eyes he was pretty good looking. We both tried out for the radio station together and we were fooling around before auditions, with him trying to grab me from the back and pick me up. The next day when I reported to Nicole that Jeff “was like…touching me.”, she laughed and said she was already fully aware and that Jeff said he was excited to be able to get that close. In a risky maneuver, I faked spending the night at Seema’s house, and instead went out to the Bean with Sam, her friends, and Jeff. I guess it was our first real date. We had coffee, talked, rode around in the back of the car, and I got to Seema’s super late only to face my mom on the phone screaming that she knew I was lying and I’d have to pay. I think the next day I made something up about Sam’s mom having breast cancer (which she did) and how I’d gone to see her (which I hadn’t). Or maybe not, all my lies from those times are getting confused.

In the end nothing happened with Jeff and I, perhaps because people kept interfering. All the medling confused and upset me and for three days I didn’t eat and ran on the treadmill. Also, I didn’t appreciate Jeff’s propensity to repeat stories, and something just…I don’t know. Didn’t click as much. Either way, a few months later I got word that he and a gay friend of Sam’s had fooled around and that was the end of that. I was now a Gay-Turner. Spectacular.

Next came Sach. Pages and pages have been typed and written on his subject, and I will likely continue to do so. We met in Spanish class. He sat behind me and copied my homework answers (along with RJ, but I loved RJ, so it wasn’t a big deal.) I was into appearing to be perfect, so I forced myself to get my work done so it was ready for the copying by others. Such was my mode of attention and popularity (along withmy charming personality, of course). I was also starting to develop a deep resent of homework (which I never really grew out of), so most of it was done in class when I probably should have been paying attention. All of this, coupled with my general tendency to be rowdy in class, resulted in me being perpetually behind. This is pretty much how Sach knew me.

We started talking online, back when we had the old dial-up. He was more comfortable that way, and it fit into my life where I was always on the run. Slowly our relationship…developed…and I just knew. There was this ache inside of me that I knew wouldn’t stop unless we could be together. Shit, everyone knew (especially RJ, who had a ball with it in Spanish class. Of course he was full of shit cause he was going through his Grace era and…whatever). Anyways, we ended up being at the junior prom at the same time, me in a beautiful red princess dress and him in a suit and short hair cut that made him look bald. Also, he was kind of a crap dancer. I went up to request “Pony” and he followed me, holding my hand all the way. I stared at him as he let it go. I gave Valerie a ride home, then went home to sign online, where he asked me out (in an embarrassing display of online emotion. Oh shit. I’m such a fucking nerd).

We started this horrible consuming relationship that lasted until half way through my freshman year of college, when I broke it off. We managed to hold it together in high school, even with his neediness, gayness, and overall wussiness and my propensity to be moody and yell. Of course I alienated most of my friends and don’t remember much of senior year other than working, worrying about becoming pregnant, and realizing that there was a rift between my friends that I could not mend. Our first kiss was a saga in and of itself. We went to see some play (Fiddler?) at school and I drove him home in our new maroon Geo Prism (which I later totalled on the way to the community college pre-calc class I was taking to make up for the one I was purposely failing in high school). We pulled into a court around the corner from his house, just talking, and then talking about kissing, and then actually kissing, and by then it was close to 2:00AM and I had all kinds of excuses in my head to give my parents. Miraculously, they’d gone to sleep. I drifted upstairs in a dream.

We never had sex, though came pretty close many a time. I think that if he had wanted it more, I would have done it, and visa versa. As it was, the very first time we fooled around he cried on the way to drop me off and I felt like shit. When we left for college I spent a lot of time in my room (a single, as request by myself because Sach would have wanted one, and my parents because I’d get more studying done) watching movies, eating ramen, and listening to Sach cry on the phone. Let’s just say that he didn’t transition to college very well. He was at Purdue, sharing a room, all desolate, blah blah blah, and liked to cry about it. And I liked to taunt him.

I’m not good at knowing what I feel. I just kind of act, then figure it out later. Back then, there were so many hints of what I wanted, which was to finally be free of him. But I didn’t realize it until one night when he was driving back home to visit and, according to him, I broke up with him on the phone while he was en route. I don’t think it was a purposeful cruel choice at all…the break up had been coming for months, and that day on the phone was just the end of it. We of course continued to hook up after that, with me enjoying the physical pleasure and him thinking we were going to get back together. Finally he took a year and told me that we were through. Paradoxically he transferred to my college and spent the next year just not talking to me. When we did finally start to talk again it was awkward and it’s taken us years to get to the level of friendship that we enjoy now.

In retrospect, when I think about the relationship, I get…angry. So ANGRY. That I lost myself, that the sheer emotion made me miss out on college (not true, I know it, but still), that so many things about him were so WRONG and how could I not see? I mean, this guy was unbelievable. He yelled if I touched his face for fear of acne. He drove a big, ugly Buick. To this day he’s so obsessed with success and money that it makes me want to grab his skinny ass body, fold it into a knot and throw it off a bridge.

But he was there for me when I was dying, and he was there for me through the recovery. It was him who stayed with me in the ER that night my senior year of college , who talked me through the tears when I started to gain weight again and who to this day tells me I’m not fat though he hasn’t seen me in over a year and certainly never seen me this big in his life. For that, I’ll always owe him. For the other stuff though…I have to get over it.

While I was going through the badness with Sach I got closer to a kid from my class, Alan. We had a lot of the same classes together and the same interests and over time we became friends. Then good friends. Then what I would consider best friends. He knew things about me…that he just knew. Without me saying anything. And I still felt like I could tell him anything. We took ninjitsu classes together and watched anime and went out to each. He took me to my first football game and I spent the entire time thoroughlyconfused. Afterwards we walked back, both surprised that the other was also OCD enough to not step on cracks. We got root beer at Red Hawk, looked at old maps at Bivouac and by that time it was late, late, late and we both went home. It was the start of something wonderful. He told me about his worries about his brother, his father, his sister. I told him about my fears that I wouldn’t be able to achieve my dreams. Unlike Sach, our relationship in person. One night we stayed up to see a meteor shower and entertained ourselves while watching Blue Lagoon and The Dot and the Line. The meteors never showed and in spite of his most persistent requests to just stay the night, I booted him out. I did however spend the night at his place once, since me and his roommate were working out some of our engineering homework together.

Oh the things I remember about him…his hands are perfectly shaped and his skin tone is like marble anyway, so looking at his hands is like looking at a big fat veinycarving. When I think about him my mind fills witha deep color blue, the color of the sky as the sun is setting and the stars are just coming out. That’s how he made me feel..peaceful. I could go on and on about the things he did for me, like the Oasis gift certificate because he thought I “deserved a break”. In the end, we worked because he gave me permission to give myself a break. For as fast as I was moving, he held me back and forced me to go slower. It was the best gift I could have gotten.

With him I knew I’d found someone who would always be there for me, unconditionally. All the memories I have of him: my birthday at the Naked Mile, the time I out ate him when I got Colliders, the time he carried my home on his back from ninjitsu…all of them are stores up some place deep and personal for artillery against darker days.

But in the end, friends is all we really were. Or so I wanted to think. This was the guy who said of COURSE I was going to be the best woman at his wedding!…which is why I was shocked, a bit flattered and a bit hurt that on Valentines Day of Sophomore year he decided to come over and bare his feelings. It was late when he started and I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember contorting my face into one of its classic expressions and slowly crawling towards my open window. In the end I suppose we talked, something along the lines of “It’ll never work out…but…we’re friends, right?” I promised him a hug, one of the few good hugs I’d had in awhile, and he was on his way. The clock read almost 4AM. The next day I went out with my mom and grandma and bought myself a new pair of jeans and a sweater from AE as some kind of consolation for losing my best friend.

We tried talking online, but it wasn’t the same. A few weeks after that I left on an ASBtrip and when I came back…nothing was the same. It was gone. It had all unraveled and after his initial attempts to brush me off I got scared and just didn’t try anymore. So I lost him, and though I stayed in touch with Michael and we eventually became good friends, I never spoke more than a few words to Alan after that. He saw me, he must have, when I looked like a skeleton with skin on it, but still not a word. I have these fantasies of writing him a letter at the end of med school, telling him how much he meant to me and that I’m so sorry. He saved me after Sach and taught me all the good things about myself.  Once he said that he admired how I looked out at the world with “clear eyes” and was a bit envious. I’ve never felt better about myself. In the darker days, which is about every day now, I think back to then and how positive Alan made me feel. I can’t for the life of me get it back and, oh god, just to hear one sentenceof it again would be worth gold.

After Alan was Nathan. We met on the ASB trip, though we’d known each other for a few months since we were all in the same group. I was sorting out what had just happened with my then best friend and had no thought about other guys, but Nathan was persistent. He and I danced like loons at some live music bar in Mexico and had some kind of flirtatious vibe going all week. He was pretty touchy-feely, and I remember sitting on his lap for part of the trip when his friend and driver Chris got us stuck in traffic withme having to piss worse than I ever have in my life. When we finally made it to a gas station Nathan laughed the entire time it took for me to waddle to the bathroom and back. In a way, he could keep up withme. I had gotten a pint of ice cream to share withthe girls on the trip home and he passed our van where I was quietly stuffing spoons of ice cream into my mouth in the back seat. He honked and made eating motions while puffing out his cheeks in his best fat impression. I gave him the finger. He laugned and fell back behind us.

Nathan was not like any guy I would have chosen for myself. He was on the rugby team and had a self-professed 2% body fat (a fact I can attest to, having felt his body). He wanted to be a vet or a doctor, and came from a small town in Michigan. Basically, he was the whitest, most midwesternguy I’d ever met. And for some reason, he kept showing me attention. When we got back from the trip, I was talking with him online about some wilderness crew that was coming to his dorm to showcase rare birds. I told him about how badly I wanted to go to the zoo (this is a constant desire of mine), and he took the opportunity to ask me out on a date. My first real, official date. He said it was a surprise, but better than the zoo. Hm.

At the time I had another one of those crazy guy crushes on a smart asshole in my engineering classes, but hey, I’d go on a date. On the day I came home, wore my red shirt with the slits, did my hair, and watched from the dorm bathroom as Nathan waited for my by the poster pole. It’s always a good idea to be a little late.

As it turned out, he took me to the very near by Natural History Museum. It was amazing and much more than I deserved given my lack of romantic interest in him. We walked around looking at dinosaur bones and geodes and I was in heaven. When we got to the wolf, his favorite animal, he put his arm around my shoulder and stood there “out of respect.” Later we went to the Union to ’study’, where I met my friend Jo and, out of nerves, started talking to her about seeing the Crazy Guy Asshole in class. Within complete hearing rage of Nathan. Geez, I felt like shit, but I didn’t know what to do. This dating thing was freaking me out. Nathan left and…well, that was date #1.

I kept talking to him, and he was there for me when during the midst of an icy outdoor all night fundraiser I needed a place to crash. I usually don’t let people see my just-woken-up self, as I act like I’ve just had a 6 pack, but it was unavoidable in that circumstance and needless to say, Nathan was worried about my well being. That summer while I was studying for MCATs we were going to have an ASB reunion at one of the participant’s houses but everyone ended up cancelling except for me and Nathan. He picked me up in a 70s powder blue Olds witha matching fuzzy interior. The seat was as big as my sofa. We had a good dinner, then he dropped me back home, where I asked him to come inside knowing full well that my roommates would all be home and nothing awkward could happen. The last time we officially hung out together, Date #3 I guess, was when he came over and made bread with my in my apartment junior year. He loved the loaf and I loved making it. To this day I’m puzzled about his interest in me. He’s an attractive guy and could do a lot better, and it wasn’t like I was putting out any welcoming signals…but he kept coming back. My conclusion is that he just wanted to see this thing till it’s end, or that his strategy is to just date EVERYONE and hope that somewhere his arrow finds a target. Who knows. He’s a reminder that things aren’t always as they seem and that even when I have no idea, someone could be wanting the pleasure of my company.

Jason was next, and the last, during my Junior year. He was my lab partner in biology and he was fucking hilarious. The first day I met him I tried to impress him with my I’m-an-important-engineer-so-let’s-get-this-show-on-the-road routine, but he just stared at me and grinned. We rarely talked outside of class but in class we were hilarious. I called him My Lab Partner to my roommates, who were nowhere near as in the dark as I was about my feelings for him. I was looking at old journal entries, the ones I could salvage after diary-x went under, and I described him as “the kind of guy where when you see something funny you want to be able to turn around and tell him about it.” At the end of the class I gave him my di. He was studying for MCATs and was pretty nervous about it, so I thought it would help. After that was summer vacation and in the fall he was in my endo class. On the first day he grabbed me on the way out and, grinning, said “Hey! I still have that thing you gave me!” I laughed. “Well, did it help you?”. Apparently it didn’t, and he was going to take a year off. I found a journal entry about this exchange, and I said something about how he was so lucky. He asked why??, and I said, at least you have a plan! At least you’re free to do what you want. Jason is the one who literally got away. I enjoyed his company so much, and yet was never compelled to act on it. Our passing acquaintance was good enough, apparently.

So that’s it. That’s my history of guys and relationships. After Jason I got sick, and after that I got better, and now I just hate my pathetic self and my gross body and would not be good company for anyone, assuming that anyone would see even a third of what those guys brought out in me. Whatever fire they stoked has dwindled to a flicker, still alive but struggling against walls of flesh and memories.

All of this, for some reason, was important for me to write down. I’ve been thinking about it for months, trying to sort it out so I could make some sense of it and have a record of the girl I used to be. It’s something I’ve been trying to do with all of my journal entries, but the relationships thing is important because it makes me feel like I was once valued as a girl, not just as a daughter, a sister, a friend (though those are far between now a days). This eating disorder…it took away everything. It took away all of that. And as much as I convince myself that maybe it was for the better, look at how much I learned, on and on and on…I can’t accept it. I’m fucking PISSED that it was taken away, and I get ANGRY at people because of it. I get angry at Alan for not sticking around and saving me, I get angry at Jason for not making a move. And even Sach, I get angry at him for assuming that I’m going to be okay because I’m ’so strong’. I displace it all because I don’t want to get angry at myself, and a disease is no substantial entity to waste my anger on.

It’s hate myself or hate them, and most days it errs towards hating myself. I see Alan in 7 days when we start our ER rotation and I do not feel ready. I feel like a fat failure. I feel like I’ve been in a cave. I feel like I’m opening my eyes frmo a three year nap and look at everyone! Look at them all so bright and mobile in their velocity! I am deadweight nowadays, and that’s not how I would want any of these guys to see me.

Oh, these are the darker hours, the times past midnight when my stomach is bloated and I can’t sleep because my bed isn’t welcoming. The times when I realize witha quiet certainty that whether it’s now, tomorrow, in a decade or in a century, death will come to me and it’s going to be as unimpressive as a summer breeze. And in these hours I think that even if it came now, I feel like I’m half way there anyway, so at least I’ve made the job easy. Very few attachments to hold me here, and very few people who would be seriously hurt. Maybe I’ll look back at this when I’m 80 and think “Well, geez, what was the point of waiting until now? Now I have people around me, I have so many things to take care of…back then it would have been much easier.”

I can become a doctor some other time. I can become a surgeon in another life. I can be a better daughter, friend, etc. the next time around. Maybe I don’t want to do it all anymore. Maybe I’m just tired. Waiting. Tired of waiting to get back to my life, to get my fire lit again, to fill that void where I’m half gone.

Oooooh these thoughts are not the happy ones. They’re the ones that make people worry.

Anne of Green Gables. I’ll read.