A Story of Me
It's been a looong time since I posted. But this was stuck in my head and I feel like sharing.
There are a couple of themes in my life that I’ve noticed. One is regret over things that could have been, combined with an unrealistic “fear” of how many things I have in my life now that I would lose were they changed. Having regrets and yet being happy with (aspects of) your life is kind of weird. There are far too many of these to go about sharing willy-nilly. I don’t have the time to write all of these.
Another is this: there are women who have appeared in my life who have, in some way, become foundations of the person I am. Well, three women and one girl that I assume grew to be a woman one day. I might one day write about them all, but most likely only the two that people will never know about otherwise.
Of all of these, one combines both, and I suppose this becomes, truly, one of my greatest regrets. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life that have irrevocably changed the way the path of my life has gone, and some I regret. But very few have left a significant hole, one I actually still notice today. So today I’ll tell you about one of those.
For sake of having a name to throw out, we’ll call her Angela, since that was her name.
As a side note, I’ve noticed two names that recur in my life. I am drawn to Angelas for some reason, and generally attracted to Jills.
Anyway, Angela.
It was fall of 1987. It was my (first) freshman year in high school, and I’d finally found some friends. I had recently been dramatically uprooted from the life I had known for pretty much my entire school-going life. While V was able to visit her friends because, you know, cars and stuff, I pretty much lost all of mine. I was kinda floating and bereft.
Mercifully, our apartment was robbed. They stole some personal stuff that made my mom cry, our crappy TV and our computer, an uber Apple 2c. We replaced it with a somewhat better TV (which lives to this day, likely in V’s bedroom) and downgraded our processing power to a Commodore 64, with a modem. Modem! Fancy!
At this time, I pretty much had contact with one friend, and he had mentioned this awesome thing he’d recently discovered, BBS’s. Which is why I pushed for the modem. With modem in hand, I discovered the (now exceedingly lame) world of the BBS, and made my second friend of that time. That friend had a different kind of lifestyle, and a large and extended batch of friends. He decided to drag me into it.
Now, this particular friend was what we will call ubiquitous, socially. He’d been a con-goer for a bit, knew loads of people, and had, I guess, managed to have more friends vying for his time and attention than he actually had time and attention available. As such, he... outsourced, I suppose. When he had these aimless phone friends who were bored and wanted to chat with him and he was unavailable for such, he would forward them to someone else who like was. I guess. Whatever was in his mind I don’t really know. You’ll have to ask him yourself.
Anyway, on that fateful day, he handed Angela my phone number. Without warning me, I might add.
As more of a side note than anything, I will mention here that V and I were not friends at this point. We shared an apartment, because we had to, and it had one phone line. Before I discovered friends who were not local and the phone, this was never a problem. When the phone became an integral part of my life, she and I kinda became enemies. In my defense, I’ll say that she had it slightly easier, being physically able to go places without finding friends to come get her, but even then, I was a terror. We both were. This period of time is so not the foundation of my current relationship with my sister.
Anyway, Angela.
So, I get a random phone call out of freaking nowhere from someone I’ve never even heard of. She came with a decent recommendation (I guess) and so we chatted for a bit. Well, for a while. Okay, hours. I was not yet used to, you know, girls, but this venue worked well for me. I could make jokes and feel at ease and not worry about my abysmal self-image on the phone. And she was charming and smart and interesting. We hit it off really well. As that first week progressed, we talked more, and I also spoke to Ubiquitous Friend (henceforth to be referred to as UF, because ubiquitous is annoying to type) about it, and he made it clear that he kinda wanted us to date. Well, I’d never dated anyone ever (dude, I was 14) and was just put off by this. Also, made of pure hormone, so it was hard to think of otherwise.
After a week of fun talks and also awkward bits, we both levelled and accepted that we were not quite up for the whole dating. Well, at least I was up for the not dating if she was. That’s how my brain worked then. So instead we became Just Friends.
For a year, we talked on the phone nearly every day. She was my closest friend of that time, and I slowly gained a lot of friends, through the intrusive nature of UF and also just going places and doing things. But there was always Angela to fall back on. She was absolutely my best friend at that time, even if I didn’t ever say it.
The following year, I’d moved away from Stone Mountain and had begun my second fresman year in Sandy Springs, after an astounding showing in school the previous year. In fact, I can safely say that no one there napped quite like me. Hooray! That has very little to do with this story other than setting. I was still hanging with my newfound posse, and still talking to Angela all the time. V had moved out so I had the phone all to myself. Yay!
Please note, before I get into this part. Hormones. Teenagers.
One night, while chatting with Angela about the various Important Things in our lives, she gets all serious. She’s been thinking and stuff, blah blah, and she thinks she might be in love with me. Okay.
Now, she was, at this point, an important part of my life. I loved her dearly. But, after that first week, a romantic connection had never occurred to me. Also, we had never actually met. I mean, we’d been talking on the phone nearly every day but had never actually been in each other’s presence yet. I knew, because UF had both shown me a photo and expounded upon it, that she was very pretty. I knew, being filled with perhaps more than my share of self-doubt, that I was not. This was an issue. I had plenty of confidence on the phone and almost none in person, unless I was really, really comfortable with the person. One would think she qualified, but with this new paradigm for our relationship, it all changed.
Also, I’s a dummy. We were so close, and I was so young, that my brain made the “obvious” leap, and this turned out to be the biggest problem. Specifically, she was “in love” with me, therefore I became “in love” with her. Only natural, right? I say, shaking my head.
So our conversations changed. We still talked, but there was a tension there that had not been previously. We no longer knew exactly what to say to each other. And we still had not actually met. It was really weird. And then, because life requires complication, especially when there already is some, there entered The Other Guy.
So, Angela lived, we will say, far away. This was one of the driving factors of us having not met. She went to a school that I most certainly did not. Also, pretty. So she had her share of potential suitors. Enter “Ricky.” Turns out there was this guy at her school who she found attractive and had started pursuing her. And there was me, distant, known and unknown simultaneously. I went, within a few weeks, from having a best friend to competing with someone I’d never even heard of to win her. I’m sure it could have been made more awkward, but one would have to work at it.
It was agreed upon that we should meet. She was coming up to visit some family in my general area and we decided to meet at the Roswell Mill and hang out that day. It was an unspoken truth that both of us knew that this meeting would decide how our relationship would progress. No pressure.
I handled it like the champ I was. I was shy, I was reticent, I was the opposite of confident. We walked around and talked, and I wanted to make a move but was terrified of how she would react. Do I hold her hand? What if she pulls away? What if what if what if. The day was a nightmare. She even tried to engage me in the whole thing. She really did. She took my hand to lead me to someplace she wanted to see and I panicked. I let go the moment we got there. I was an utter disappointment to both of us.
This was, effectively, the end of our relationship. She started dating Ricky and I was unable to let go. I was whiny and pushy and all those things that make me want to punch someone in the face. Because of my clear failure and my inability to let go of what I now see was a clearly manufactured emotion, I made us Not Friends Anymore. She even said it precisely like that on the phone. It was horrible.
Several years later, she’d come back to Georgia after college. In the intervening time I had dated another Angela, continued my abysmal scholastic career, but was overall happy. I would periodically call her house and talk to her parents to see how she was doing. (I still, to this day, remember her phone number.) When she was coming back, her parents told me and so I called her and we talked. I convinced her to come up and visit and meet some of my friends. Hang out and such. She did and it was wonderful. Not quite old times, but it was good. We were, at least, friends again.
She started dating one of my friends, much to my dismay. I still had feelings for her, which I suppose would imply my original feelings were more genuine than I might let on. But I was scared to lose her again, and also just a coward in the romantic regard anyway. Nice to see some things haven’t changed all that much.
This friend was good to her until he wasn’t anymore. He became pushy about, well, sex. She didn’t wanna. She talked about it with me. And I got snarky, perhaps even spiteful. What came over me I’ll never know, but in one conversation I managed to say All The Wrong Things. I was just a dick. I didn’t help her at all, and managed to make her mad at me all over again. I didn’t even have the Teenager excuse anymore. It was sad.
After that, we never spoke again. I would call and get dodged and eventually she went back to school, moved on and was gone. In recent years I’ve been looking for her again. I found her a while back, but she was in the process of a divorce and likely moved on. I’ve never been able to find her since. I still look.
In my life I’ve met a lot of women. I’ve fallen for them, I’ve just been interested, I’ve just been friends. But, unlike all those others, the loss of Angela left a hole I still feel. It’s why I keep looking for her. Not for some romantic Win Her thing, just because she somehow became so vital to my life that I will always feel like I need her back in it. And I want to tell her I’m sorry.
Angela is one of the Foundations of my life, and I lost her. Next time, the one I never really had: Wendy.
There are a couple of themes in my life that I’ve noticed. One is regret over things that could have been, combined with an unrealistic “fear” of how many things I have in my life now that I would lose were they changed. Having regrets and yet being happy with (aspects of) your life is kind of weird. There are far too many of these to go about sharing willy-nilly. I don’t have the time to write all of these.
Another is this: there are women who have appeared in my life who have, in some way, become foundations of the person I am. Well, three women and one girl that I assume grew to be a woman one day. I might one day write about them all, but most likely only the two that people will never know about otherwise.
Of all of these, one combines both, and I suppose this becomes, truly, one of my greatest regrets. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life that have irrevocably changed the way the path of my life has gone, and some I regret. But very few have left a significant hole, one I actually still notice today. So today I’ll tell you about one of those.
For sake of having a name to throw out, we’ll call her Angela, since that was her name.
As a side note, I’ve noticed two names that recur in my life. I am drawn to Angelas for some reason, and generally attracted to Jills.
Anyway, Angela.
It was fall of 1987. It was my (first) freshman year in high school, and I’d finally found some friends. I had recently been dramatically uprooted from the life I had known for pretty much my entire school-going life. While V was able to visit her friends because, you know, cars and stuff, I pretty much lost all of mine. I was kinda floating and bereft.
Mercifully, our apartment was robbed. They stole some personal stuff that made my mom cry, our crappy TV and our computer, an uber Apple 2c. We replaced it with a somewhat better TV (which lives to this day, likely in V’s bedroom) and downgraded our processing power to a Commodore 64, with a modem. Modem! Fancy!
At this time, I pretty much had contact with one friend, and he had mentioned this awesome thing he’d recently discovered, BBS’s. Which is why I pushed for the modem. With modem in hand, I discovered the (now exceedingly lame) world of the BBS, and made my second friend of that time. That friend had a different kind of lifestyle, and a large and extended batch of friends. He decided to drag me into it.
Now, this particular friend was what we will call ubiquitous, socially. He’d been a con-goer for a bit, knew loads of people, and had, I guess, managed to have more friends vying for his time and attention than he actually had time and attention available. As such, he... outsourced, I suppose. When he had these aimless phone friends who were bored and wanted to chat with him and he was unavailable for such, he would forward them to someone else who like was. I guess. Whatever was in his mind I don’t really know. You’ll have to ask him yourself.
Anyway, on that fateful day, he handed Angela my phone number. Without warning me, I might add.
As more of a side note than anything, I will mention here that V and I were not friends at this point. We shared an apartment, because we had to, and it had one phone line. Before I discovered friends who were not local and the phone, this was never a problem. When the phone became an integral part of my life, she and I kinda became enemies. In my defense, I’ll say that she had it slightly easier, being physically able to go places without finding friends to come get her, but even then, I was a terror. We both were. This period of time is so not the foundation of my current relationship with my sister.
Anyway, Angela.
So, I get a random phone call out of freaking nowhere from someone I’ve never even heard of. She came with a decent recommendation (I guess) and so we chatted for a bit. Well, for a while. Okay, hours. I was not yet used to, you know, girls, but this venue worked well for me. I could make jokes and feel at ease and not worry about my abysmal self-image on the phone. And she was charming and smart and interesting. We hit it off really well. As that first week progressed, we talked more, and I also spoke to Ubiquitous Friend (henceforth to be referred to as UF, because ubiquitous is annoying to type) about it, and he made it clear that he kinda wanted us to date. Well, I’d never dated anyone ever (dude, I was 14) and was just put off by this. Also, made of pure hormone, so it was hard to think of otherwise.
After a week of fun talks and also awkward bits, we both levelled and accepted that we were not quite up for the whole dating. Well, at least I was up for the not dating if she was. That’s how my brain worked then. So instead we became Just Friends.
For a year, we talked on the phone nearly every day. She was my closest friend of that time, and I slowly gained a lot of friends, through the intrusive nature of UF and also just going places and doing things. But there was always Angela to fall back on. She was absolutely my best friend at that time, even if I didn’t ever say it.
The following year, I’d moved away from Stone Mountain and had begun my second fresman year in Sandy Springs, after an astounding showing in school the previous year. In fact, I can safely say that no one there napped quite like me. Hooray! That has very little to do with this story other than setting. I was still hanging with my newfound posse, and still talking to Angela all the time. V had moved out so I had the phone all to myself. Yay!
Please note, before I get into this part. Hormones. Teenagers.
One night, while chatting with Angela about the various Important Things in our lives, she gets all serious. She’s been thinking and stuff, blah blah, and she thinks she might be in love with me. Okay.
Now, she was, at this point, an important part of my life. I loved her dearly. But, after that first week, a romantic connection had never occurred to me. Also, we had never actually met. I mean, we’d been talking on the phone nearly every day but had never actually been in each other’s presence yet. I knew, because UF had both shown me a photo and expounded upon it, that she was very pretty. I knew, being filled with perhaps more than my share of self-doubt, that I was not. This was an issue. I had plenty of confidence on the phone and almost none in person, unless I was really, really comfortable with the person. One would think she qualified, but with this new paradigm for our relationship, it all changed.
Also, I’s a dummy. We were so close, and I was so young, that my brain made the “obvious” leap, and this turned out to be the biggest problem. Specifically, she was “in love” with me, therefore I became “in love” with her. Only natural, right? I say, shaking my head.
So our conversations changed. We still talked, but there was a tension there that had not been previously. We no longer knew exactly what to say to each other. And we still had not actually met. It was really weird. And then, because life requires complication, especially when there already is some, there entered The Other Guy.
So, Angela lived, we will say, far away. This was one of the driving factors of us having not met. She went to a school that I most certainly did not. Also, pretty. So she had her share of potential suitors. Enter “Ricky.” Turns out there was this guy at her school who she found attractive and had started pursuing her. And there was me, distant, known and unknown simultaneously. I went, within a few weeks, from having a best friend to competing with someone I’d never even heard of to win her. I’m sure it could have been made more awkward, but one would have to work at it.
It was agreed upon that we should meet. She was coming up to visit some family in my general area and we decided to meet at the Roswell Mill and hang out that day. It was an unspoken truth that both of us knew that this meeting would decide how our relationship would progress. No pressure.
I handled it like the champ I was. I was shy, I was reticent, I was the opposite of confident. We walked around and talked, and I wanted to make a move but was terrified of how she would react. Do I hold her hand? What if she pulls away? What if what if what if. The day was a nightmare. She even tried to engage me in the whole thing. She really did. She took my hand to lead me to someplace she wanted to see and I panicked. I let go the moment we got there. I was an utter disappointment to both of us.
This was, effectively, the end of our relationship. She started dating Ricky and I was unable to let go. I was whiny and pushy and all those things that make me want to punch someone in the face. Because of my clear failure and my inability to let go of what I now see was a clearly manufactured emotion, I made us Not Friends Anymore. She even said it precisely like that on the phone. It was horrible.
Several years later, she’d come back to Georgia after college. In the intervening time I had dated another Angela, continued my abysmal scholastic career, but was overall happy. I would periodically call her house and talk to her parents to see how she was doing. (I still, to this day, remember her phone number.) When she was coming back, her parents told me and so I called her and we talked. I convinced her to come up and visit and meet some of my friends. Hang out and such. She did and it was wonderful. Not quite old times, but it was good. We were, at least, friends again.
She started dating one of my friends, much to my dismay. I still had feelings for her, which I suppose would imply my original feelings were more genuine than I might let on. But I was scared to lose her again, and also just a coward in the romantic regard anyway. Nice to see some things haven’t changed all that much.
This friend was good to her until he wasn’t anymore. He became pushy about, well, sex. She didn’t wanna. She talked about it with me. And I got snarky, perhaps even spiteful. What came over me I’ll never know, but in one conversation I managed to say All The Wrong Things. I was just a dick. I didn’t help her at all, and managed to make her mad at me all over again. I didn’t even have the Teenager excuse anymore. It was sad.
After that, we never spoke again. I would call and get dodged and eventually she went back to school, moved on and was gone. In recent years I’ve been looking for her again. I found her a while back, but she was in the process of a divorce and likely moved on. I’ve never been able to find her since. I still look.
In my life I’ve met a lot of women. I’ve fallen for them, I’ve just been interested, I’ve just been friends. But, unlike all those others, the loss of Angela left a hole I still feel. It’s why I keep looking for her. Not for some romantic Win Her thing, just because she somehow became so vital to my life that I will always feel like I need her back in it. And I want to tell her I’m sorry.
Angela is one of the Foundations of my life, and I lost her. Next time, the one I never really had: Wendy.