LUDIC LOG

My third year of college, this would have been. I was still seriously considering a teaching career, not yet having become scarred by the boredom and junior-high power plays of academia. I was young, loud and snotty, I'd recently been published for the first time, and punk wasn't yet something I was vaguely ashamed of. There was very little to keep me interested in school, particularly because I had recently developed a massive crush on a girl -- a peripheral member of my circle of student union layabouts. The hours of education I missed out on for her! To think of the worthless literary theory I might know now if it weren't for my stupid hormones.

It goes without saying that she was smart and funny and beautiful; aren't they all? She was also cool without being a hipster (in marked contrast to me), she was completely fearless, she spoke Russian (a trait I had not yet come to associate with evil), and she was a hell of a lot of fun. She was also far, far too attractive for a lumpenproletariat troll like myself to stand a whiff of a chance with; I was so intimidated by how much I liked her, my normally pyramid-sized self-loathing grew to roughly K2 size. Worst of all, she was dating a full-time football player and part-time asshole. I recall him now as being a lowest-common-denominator moron of the first order, but who knows how much of that perception is tainted by time and emotion? At any rate, they were pretty seriously involved.

Still, we saw each other a lot: he worked nights, so I'd take her to movies and concerts; he hated punk and indie music and she loved it, so she'd go with me to clubs and shows, or I'd take her dancing at places where he hated the music; and since she lived pretty close to me, I'd hang out with her and keep her company until he got home. Of course, the more time I spent with her, the more I fell in love with her. Love stories are more predictable than action movies, only the hero dies more often.

Sometimes, when we'd be out together in a group, her friends would whisper to her things I couldn't hear. Being the paranoid, self-hating creep that I was (and still am), I always assumed they were talking about me -- saying something bad about me, asking her why she spent time with such a jerk. Later, I found out from her roommate that they were really saying what I was thinking every second we were together: that she'd be better off with me than with her rude, dismissive, closed-minded Neanderthal of a boyfriend. I was right, and I didn't know it: that's worse than being wrong and knowing it, so it's good that it doesn't happen a lot.

After a few months, they had a very nasty breakup, and she was on her own for a while. We spent more time together than ever, and we had a lot of maddeningly oblique conversations, shuffling around the truth of what we both wanted -- asking each other about past relationships, what we wanted out of a partner, all the things you say to keep from kissing each other. And we didn't kiss each other a lot; we spent hours and hours not kissing each other. Then, finally, as the year was beginning to fold up, she threw a Christmas party at her apartment, and everything fell into lockstep like the denouement of the misguided romantic comedy we were playing out. We stopped not kissing, and started kissing. We held hands and each other all night, in front of Santa Claus and everybody. We beamed like two fucking Christmas lights. Her old boyfriend didn't even show up to the party, so there was nothing to spoil the perfect thing that was happening. Everyone else seemed happy, too, all our friends: there was that short-sighted, foolish, wonderful sense you sometimes get that all is right with the world and everything was just as it should be. It was like a tangible biological need had been dealt with, like a crooked picture was finally straightened.

For the next month and a half, I was hopeless. In love, in lust, giddy, boring, delirious, stupid, lost to romance and idiotically optimistic. The conversations were intriguing, the time was well-spent, the sex was great, and nothing was wrong at all. But still, I didn't trust it, for reasons other than my normal low-level self-hatred: I knew their relationship had been a heavy one, not just casual dating. I knew I was a rebound guy, and I knew the eyeblink shelf-life of rebound guys. I knew it couldn't last; I knew I was doomed. But what could I do? I was in love. And not in love accidentally, but intentionally: I didn't fall into love; I was loved. Someone I had loved from afar had accepted me. I had been requited, man. There was nothing I could do. You can't stop something like that, no matter how much you know it's going to end in horrendous, soul-crushing, heart-rending, brain-stabbing disaster.

And it did.

In the Arizona winter -- no cold, just a lot of days on the calendar -- she broke it off, right before we would have been going out for two months. To get back together with her ex, of course. She tried so goddamn hard to be kind to me, to soften the edge of the sharpest, heaviest axe you can bury in the head of a new relationship. She even tried to pretend, briefly, that she wasn't going back to him. She was kind, and I was cruel: I told her I knew where she was going. She cried to say it.

Barely six months later, in the middle of our fourth year of college, she married him. She invited me to the wedding, which was over a hundred miles away in Tucson. She said it wouldn't feel right without me; what could I say to that? I could have said no, is what. But I didn't. I came down with some friends whose band was doing a gig at Tiburon's that night; I went to the ceremony while they did the show. I knew absolutely no one at the wedding save the bride; his friends were all football players who glared at me, and both families cast disapproving eyes at my punk appearance, even disguised beneath the only suit I owned. It goes without saying she was heart-stoppingly beautiful in her wedding dress; aren't they all?

I didn't even stay for the reception; I came back to Phoenix with my friends and in the back of the van I got drunker than I'd ever been before. I was ruined for the next year or so. I didn't even go to weddings -- including those of my friends -- for five years, so hideous were the associations for me.

She didn't contact me for about a year and a half. As it turned out, there were no happy endings for anybody, as is often the case. She'd had a baby daughter, but it didn't help the marriage: before the kid was six months old, she left him. He'd cheated on her almost from the first moment she'd become pregnant, while at the same time becoming furiously jealous of her. He'd always had a bad temper, and it got worse; as I'd suspected he would on no evidence but my own cynicism and suspicious, hateful nature, he eventually started hitting her. She divorced him, got custody of the kid on the evidence of her blackened eyes, and moved away. She changed her name so he couldn't find her; he'd threatened her life after the divorce. When she called me, she was living in California, where everyone goes to forget what happened before. We talked on the phone forever, but it wasn't like the old days. I saw her not long after that; we had dinner together, and I still loved her, but something was different. I don't know what it was; it was just one of those moments that passes, and you can never get it back. I haven't seen her now in years.

It's not a happy story, or even a particularly good one. Probably everyone has a story just like it. It ends here, messy and confused and with a lot of mistakes along the way. In the final telling, I don't think I even learned anything from it. But man! Those two months. I don't know.