It was our second time dating, but it was really just a continuation of the first. Version 1.5.2 or something. We'd gotten past the bizarre chain of events of our last time dating, we believed that we were different people, grown up a little bit from ourselves the year before. We weren't really, but we still thought it was worth a shot.
She came to visit me for the weekend at school, she took a Greyhound in February. It was right after Saratoga Springs was hit by a blizzard, and the snow drifts were three-and-a-half feet high on either side of the road.
I asked Jess if she'd pick J up for me. She was the only person I knew with a car at the time, we weren't housemates yet, and it might have been an odd request. She also might have been taken aback because a little more than a month ago I had been with K.
J got off of the bus, stepping into the snow. I think she was wearing a nice jacket with a leopard print lining in the hood. Her hair looked darker than I remembered it. But she seemed happy to see me. Looking back on her being so happy to see me is odd, but that's just how it is looking back on past relationships in general.
I don't remember doing too much at all that weekend. My goal was to keep her entertained, but I can't imagine I had anywhere to take her.
We went to dinner downtown, went to get coffee afterwards. Waiting for our drinks, an older man with a journal looked over at us. He smiled and said "You two are a couple aren't you? You should be." We smiled and said we were, and he told us that we looked really good together. We said thanks, bashfully, and most likely strolled around in the cold before heading back to campus.
(It was an odd compliment, considering J.Noonz' recent comment upon her seeing a picture of J: "She looks like the kind of girl I'd imagine you with.")
The next night we ate at the dining hall with some my school friends, Katie, Sarah, and Alicia. They acted like Jess had, polite, friendly, but somewhat weary of the fact that J was this unknown.
I left her in my room when I went to rehearsal. I was nervous to do it, thinking she'd go through my diary. I talked to her about it, she assured me she wouldn't. I don't think I trusted her as much as I just realized that it didn't matter if she did. Either way, there was no way I was going to be angry.
Rehearsal would have been the one place she would have run into K, which would have been bad. I'm glad that didn't happen.
We had a massive fight on Sunday evening...and I'd forgotten why until right this second. It was because she asked me if I'd said "I love you" to K. I had, because that's what you do in a relationship sometimes, even the not-serious ones.
J was upset because of how this reflected on the little less than three years we'd spent together. The entire argument was being communicated to her best friend via her text messages. In the midst of our yelling in the middle of the student union building I called her K by accident. K was the only person I'd argued with in the past year, it was just habit. It's something I did with with K, calling her J because I was fresh off the arguing with J Train. Obviously there's really no recovering from a move like that.
Somehow we patched things up.
We must have both been looking forward to sleeping together. She remembered that I had a thing for nighties, and had bought a few before her visit. It struck me as a really adult-like thing to transpire. But maybe I was still stuck in a teenage relationship while she was trying to bring us to the next level.
Sharing my room with someone else, having a visitor that you're planning on sleeping with. It's been a little while since then, and I've gotten better at it, but back then it seemed so foreign. Like when I saw Mir naked by accident senior year. I felt like I'd been missing out on some element of college by not being promiscuous, fooling around more instead of settling into long term relationships.
The first night she was there things progressed like they used to. After it was over, there were tears in her eyes and she said she couldn't move. She said it was pure joy, she was laughing. Like it was where we were meant to be. That's all I remember about it, besides the whole soft skin cliche.
The next morning I called her a super early cab to take her back to the bus station. I walked her out and we said goodbye.
That was our weekend of closure. We didn't know it, but it was. There were phone calls in the following weeks, but mostly stress-induced fights and my unwillingness to give the relationship the attention it needed.
It might have been the sanest way to end a relationship, because I don't remember it hurting too much when she pulled the trigger a month later.
During one of my weekends at home, Chck and I picked her and a friend up at a party in Salem. I thought I'd be spending the night with her, but when we got back to her place she told me it wasn't working. I begged her to not do it, and for some reason she said okay and didn't. By the next night I'd grown up about it a bit, and agreed that it should be done with.
During that weekend she visited, though, while I was rehearsal, she'd left me a note that talked about all the time we'd spent together. She mentioned the man at the coffee shop, that he was right, that we did look good together, that we were on the right track again. The note's still buried in my shoe box.
Just a memory that was floating around. This gem might have sparked it. Brilliant.