The Gamer's Quarter

[Harveyjames]

Your avatar looks sad, because he's thinking about my avatar.

[daphaknee]

I met my domme on a select button bdsm thread, which is the last place i thought i would fall for someone

she came out to california and we spent a week together, even though i feel like i didnt SHOW HER THE SIGHTS OF SUNNY SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA enough and we played a whole lot of old videogames.
She's terrible at bioshock, but charming nonetheless

my ass has bruises like black storm clouds all over it, they spread every day, im beginning to think they're not actually bruises and some weird lesbian std, and this is what i get for liking a girl.

God is punishing me

Long-distance relationships are pretty balls, but hopefully this is worth it. im glad its long distance sometimes because it wont give me a chance to get super sick of her

I haven't felt this mushy for someone since my first 'real' boyfriend, and like sometimes i sit in the room she was sleeping in and think about her being there with me, or think about the ropes on my wrists or her eyes getting all mad at me or me laying in her arms or her tickiling me or the way she says little slut and god damn i am totally head over heels for her.

shh dont say anything okay guys? i know my secret is safe with you

[daphaknee]

[Harveyjames]

I'm disappointed Dessgeega isn't using this as her theme tune to be played every time she enters a room http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jqp__vKtkw (fast forward to 1:10).

[dessgeega]

[daphaknee]

yeah i love going off on adventures and then coming back to tell you about it. im in need of some serious adventure though

[daphaknee]

[Harveyjames]

Or thinking more practically, you could use it on the next Gamer's Quarter podcast. Dess could have a button that plays the clip and she could use it every time she wants to interject.

[Swimmy]

I worked my way into another relationship following some drunken antics at a Halloween party. I ended it just a few days ago. I decided I was too depressed to really be with someone. It takes effort that I can't seem to muster--I have enough trouble trying to take a shower and brush my teeth every day.

Well. All right. But she's completely heartbroken. We lasted maybe a full month and she thinks she's in love with me. Maybe it's because she's a poet. She IMs me just as often and tries to come up with reasons to see me, all of which I turn down.

Maybe I just have a lot of hangups.

It makes me listen to The Mountain Goats.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Intentionally Wrong]

So, the girl I've been dating for about a month finally saw my apartment and met my roommates for the first time. It went better than expected.

[seryogin]

Why are you depressed, Swimmy?
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[Swimmy]

Near as I can tell it's just a chemical thing. My mom has chemical depression and is on medication, so it would make sense.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[parkbench]

This thread is amazing; it's affected me in a very good way, in a way I probably needed. it's strange that it's been bumped, but I'm glad it was. Hell, I avoided writing a paper to read it. Everyone's stories were insightful and interesting...antitype, your story tugged at my heart.

There are a few highschool stories that are archetypal and bittersweet/histrionic enough to make it to this post, but I will choose one of them. Her name was Marielle.

I sat next to her in my Speech and Theater class. Some random elective I decided to take because the teacher was my Philosophy teacher, and he was probably the one guy in the school who should have never taught there and instead should have been crowned king of the world. I think he saw something in me, probably himself. He put up with my bullshit, and my being incredibly doped up in class, and my coming into his room at random times during the day and lying down on his floor, being...high. He was an interesting guy, not the least because I would find out years later that he and this girl had had for a few weeks this weird kind of taboo online thing going where they talked as peers rather than as teacher-student which quickly led to some uncomfortable sexual tension or something like that. Never thought it of you, Mr. C! (though we always did joke that he was a pedophile)

Anyway so this girl. Marielle. She was skinny and flat as a washboard and had short brown hair and she was smart, and into good music and books and I loved her. I loved her so much, I wrote her long sappy tracts as often as I could. She was dangerous, and sexy, she would smoke cigarettes (gasp!) with me and drink with me and we'd be mischevious and faux-hipster (I was still a "hippy" in many ways, but I vacillated between identities as I saw fit...serial identity and all that) and I felt like we could conquer the world. What we did together...it's amazing how much of it I literally blocked out of my mind, and without even realizing it. It's not like a gaping hole, I just don't even think about it. But anyway. We went places, adventures, to music and shows and out in the world and it was something amazing I had never felt before, it was so intense, such an intense affection and attraction.

The first of the problems was the other boy. That other boy. Or the other two boys as it were. There was this group of kiddos who I thought were pretty cool that she hung out with and so I hung out with them too--one of them was her boyfriend. And one of them was this kid. This fucking kid.

That was the thing about it all: what gave it its salacious, mischevious quality, was that she had a boyfriend. And we would talk about it, for hours on end, even while we were lying on top of each other and drunk and what have you, and we'd go on and on and we'd talk about the nature of love and life as if we knew what it was, and still she had this boyfriend, and for so long it didn't bother me but eventually it really, really did, when we were meeting in the woods and she was kissing me and she would ignore me when i said "what are we going to do about Mark?"

And that's not to mention Billy, that fucking kid. What a fucking kid. Just a socially maladjusted little game and anime nerd like the rest of us who played guitar and thought he was the shit because he played guitar and instead everybody, including his bandmates, made fun of him. Mar would flirt with him too--even, well...I don't know. I don't know what they did together but I'm pretty sure they did the together thing. And I'd get so, supremely jealous, so furiously jealous and angry and write more romantic tracts, except this time they'd be apocalyptic and scary, but still full of love.

Except somewhere along the line that love had changed to lust, but I should clarify. It's not that I lost my attraction to her, my attraction to her became ever heightened. And I started labeling in my diatribes our love as "lust," something that transcended categorization, a pure, biological, unfathomable, unbreakable, unheard of lust that would persist forever and ever till the end of time. And she would bite, this whole time, we engaged in this absurd, sadomasochistic drama, and we did projects in our class about it, and wrote these plays about characters that were so obviously ourselves, and about us hitting each other and doing absurd and scandalous things. She rocked my world. Even as she was using me, every second that I didn't realize that she was playing all sides of the fence, I loved every second of it.

The next of the problems was the sex. Which isn't to say it was sex per se, but the sexual activity. She had some kind of anorgasmia, where she just couldn't...feel it, and if she did it wouldn't feel good. And most of the times she could deal with this, but also most of the time she couldn't. And we'd be on the phone, we'd have these long conversations and she'd burst into tears, or start drinking and be so drunk and pathetic and trying to pleasure herself and it wouldn't work and I'd just love her more. And this whole time I hadn't even touched her below the waist, and when i finally did, we stopped halfway through. I remember it perfectly--I started, and she made some kind of face, and I said, "can you feel it?" and she just stopped and looked at me, and pushed me away, and was silent. I was crushed and terrified.

The thing is: she was ridiculous. She saved all the notes boys wrote her in a little circular tin. I think the anorgasmia could in many ways explain her toying around with so many different boys. Oh, it was cruel and terrible and I hated her so much for it in the later years, so so much, but in many ways I sympathised with her. She couldn't feel anything, and so in this futility tried to feel everything.

And the boyfriend. He was the homebase. She had everyone in the palm of her hand; at the end of the day she could always cut me and Billy off and nestle in Mark's bosom. I don't even know what Mark thought. Mark was a really cool guy. Way cooler than I was. And nice, and funny, and all that, and he must've known, he had to have known, and he just took it all, he ate it all. Maybe he had side flings, too, who knows. From my end, I couldn't tell, but I did, at the time, hate him with a burning passion. He was where I should've been.

The thing about it was I didn't realize that in the end Mar was embarrassed to be seen with me. I was, by and large, a dirty hippy, long-haired looking loser in many ways. I wasn't unpopular, but I also wasn't quite as cool as she might've wanted. But she saw the good in me and toyed with me. I remember, though, when she "chose" Billy. In some weird dramatic moment she'd DECIDED to go with him and I was sent on another emotional rollercoaster, and oh god I was in my drug phase, and I was into the "cooler" drugs, so I did so much coke and acid and ugh.

Towards the end my apocalyptic rages were like a sinking ship. "Don't let this end like some Murakami novel," I wrote her far too many times (Murakami and Vonnegut were the two authors we were into at the time, so it was a constant reference point). And eventually she just stopped listening to me and I can't even remember what happened.

Oh wait, yes I do. She was an amazing artist, and she was into fashion and pictures of coked-up skinny melancholy French girls, and so I had a bunch of these plastered all over my room for so long, too long, so that they were so familiar and too familiar, and all that I knew. I remember one day in the summer I ripped them all down from my wall (except a few--they were too chic to rip down) and I actually felt that decisiveness, that in that act of tearing down I had brought my feelings down to some physicality and "ended" it in my mind.

And like I said I was bitter, and I felt in the right, and I think she felt in the wrong, because every once in awhile she'd try to talk to me again and then I'd call her a cold-hearted bitch and feel good about myself but secretly want to talk to her.

I think there's things I missed. But it's 4 am. I think the fact that it's 4 am, though, put me in the perfect mindset to recall all this and write it in such an absurd and stream of consciousness fashion.

On the next edition: how I almost became celibate.

ps: this describes me way, way, too accurately. i think this idea of some insurmountable obstacle also explains my situation with Marielle. Her whole appeal was how unattainable and enigmatic she was, in my eyes. I certainly wouldn't have had such a faux-epic experience with her if she just rolled over and liked me.

[seryogin]

How old are you now?

I'm glad I've been out of high school for like 7 years now.

Harvey James needs to get laid more.
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[parkbench]

That was about 2-3 years ago. I was a sophomore in highschool. I'm 18, now, in college.

[seryogin]

I thought I'd miss the melodrama of high school once I got older.
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[Harveyjames]

[seryogin]

I thought you had a girlfriend, James.
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[Harveyjames]

Nuh-uh

Eleanor isn't my girlfriend, we just lived in the same house. I loved her, but she didn't want her life to become any more complicated than it needed to be. She'd already come out of an intensely convoluted relationship where her partner ended up going off with her friend, and she remained friends with both, as much as it hurt her to. So being in a relationship with her best friend's little brother whilst living in the same house as both wasn't what she needed. She wanted things to be simple, and according to her I'm not simple :(

[Dracko]

That's nothing a well placed brick to the head can't solve!

Do it in the name of love!
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Harveyjames]

This isn't Krazy Kat.

[aderack]

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[daphaknee]

i want to post about all of my failed relationships in this thread but its a lot of work should i do it

[The Great Unwashed]

I'd read it.

I love this thread.
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[boojiboy7]

God, this is a really good thread. What follows is what this thread inspired me to write.


This is a story I need to tell, and it is a long story, and if you read it, maybe it will be worth it in the end. Maybe it will explain something of me. Maybe it won't. I don't think I can really capture it all here, but here it is anyways.

Seven Years/ Four sentences

I have only had three girlfriends in my entire life. I went to an all male Jesuit high school in Cleveland, so I never really talked to too many girls. What girls I did meet were through friends and such. My first girlfriend, Kate, I met through a friend. We went out for a few months in high school, it didn't work out, I did a few stupid regrettable things, and we ended up becoming kinda friends in college. She got me the best job ever, and I was pretty much the only person at that job that ever talked to her for any extended period of time. She currently is married to a guy in the Army, lives in Japan, and occasionally talks to me still.

-----

My second girlfriend, and the one that this is all going to end up being about, is bek. Yeah, the lowercase is on purpose, because in my mind, her name isn't capitalized. It was a nickname, since she had what might be the most boringly Jewish girl name in the world, Rebecca Cohen. So she was bek. I met her because a friend of mine online, Jen, filled out one of those stupid surveys that high school kids fill out and emailed it to everyone on her little friends list, and I filled it out in a fit of boredom and just hit reply all, since I knew most (but not definitely all) of the people on the list. Jen had, very briefly, dated one of my closest friends, Ryan, and though we had tried to hang out with each other a few times, things had never quite worked out. bek was Jen's friend from high school. So bek gets my stupid little survey, and for some reason decides to send me a “who are you?”. And as such, we began emailing each other back and forth.

This being near the end of my high school career, I was thinking about prom, and wanting to find some way to go to it with someone. bek, however, had no intention of going to her prom, but was planning on going to Cedar Point the day after with her friend, who was known as Muzzy. Muzzy was one of those people that used to be kinda nerdy (and was when her and bek started hanging out) but then at some point in high school became popular and cheerleader-y and such. Muzzy was bringing her boyfriend, Steve, to Cedar Point, and bek didn't feel like being a third wheel. Somehow, we came to the agreement that I would og to Cedar Point with bek, if she would go to prom with me.

To be able to do this, we both lied to our parents and said we had met each other beforehand, even though we never had. This could have backfired on us, as bek's mom, in that strange way that suburban moms seem able to do without sounding totally racist, but with the full knowledge of the meaning behind what they are asking, asked if I was black. At this point, bek had no way of knowing, having never even thought to ask me in the first place, and just said that I wasn't. I'm not, so this little lie never got exposed.

So we went to Cedar Point, and a few weeks later we went to prom, and we dated all throughout that summer, and she was the first person I kissed that I actually enjoyed it, and at the end of the summer, we had to go our separate ways. I was headed to the University of Dayton, and bek was off to Ohio State. They were only about an hour and a half's drive apart, but neither of us had a car. I was initially supposed to be in the marching band at Dayton, but I called that off to spend the extra week with bek. Teary goodbyes and such soon followed.

For the first month I was in Dayton, bek was actually still in Strongsville, Ohio, as OSU started a lot later due to being a quarter school. I hated being in Dayton. The campus was boring, my classes were dull, I was surrounded by too many white suburban kids with too much money, and I just felt like I didn't belong. My roommate, a crazy kid I knew from high school named Bryan, had a penchant for drinking too much and repairing old electronics and watches. I was in my phase of near straight edge-dom, though I wasn't an ass about it. Well, no more an ass than the average college freshman.

After a month, bek moved into her dorm at OSU. I had been calling her somewhat regularly, emailing, IM-ing (I had AIM at this point set up to make that sheep baaaa sound when she signed on and I cannot hear that sound today without thinking about her), whatever with her the entire month. She got to OSU and loved it. She met a bunch of people, had nice roommates, and just loved the college experience. I ended up going to Columbus by Greyhound every weekend to see her. It seemed like college there was just a lot better than Dayton. This was most likely the goggles afforded by the relationship clouding my vision, but oh well. I started to work on transferring to OSU.

During this month of this traveling to Columbus, where we spent time just wandering the huge campus and city streets and getting lost and making out on the front lawns of random people who may or may not have been home at the time, we started talking about if we should have sex. Both of us were virgins, and this was the first time either of us got to this point in any sort of relationship. I can admit now, I was a wuss about it. I really wanted to. Of course I did! I was 18! But I left the decision up to her, and her parents had done just a wonderful job of drilling into her head all the terrors of teen pregnancy, and the inability of condoms to be 100 percent effective, and all that, and so she eventually came down on the negative. And so it went. I didn't protest at all, being a bit too nice and not really giving myself a chance to have my say, but oh well. I did that and I don't really regret it. Too much.

Eventually bek came and visited me in Dayton, and it was just not fun at all. Dayton suffered from having not a lot to do, and it showed. We wandered around a lot, went and hung out in the art building at 2 in the morning (I was, of all things, an art education major at the time, which quickly died when I realized I hated art classes and education classes both), and spent the whole time talking to each other. Bryan, being a really cool roommate, was nice enough to crash at someone else's place for the weekend.

The next weekend bek had something going on, and said she would be too busy to do anything. I stayed in Dayton that weekend and played videogames and did usual boring college crap. The next Tuesday, I was sitting in my tiny dorm room alone, messing around on the internet and bek called. We talked for a bit, but things seemed awkward. She hesitated a lot, and finally did the “I have something to tell you. I don't think we should see each other any more” to which my response was to fall into a ball on the floor and begin to cry. I asked her why. She wouldn't say. I kept asking. She told me she made out with some guy over the weekend and didn't feel it was fair to stay in a relationship with me after that.

I was a masochist about it all. I wanted to know it all. She wouldn't tell me. At some point in this conversation, Bryan walks into the room. He figures out what has happened pretty quick, but doesn't say a thing. He just lets me be, and there I am, on the phone, hurting, and she won't tell me what I want to know.

That next weekend I get on a bus to OSU. Pat, a good friend from high school (known to any of you as Predator Goose) actually lived in the same dorm as bek, just a floor below, and had hung out with me and her a few times. He agrees to let me spend the weekend at his place. She had agreed to see me one last time, to give me some stuff back of mine, at 7:00 that Saturday evening. 7:00 shows up, she isn't there. 8:00, 9:00, finally around 10:00 she is there, sitting on the floor of her room with a bunch of people, sitting right next to a guy, laughing and having a good time. I get her to come out and talk to me and we get into a small argument. I ask if he was the guy. She says no. I get upset and leave. I don't get any of my stuff back.

I go back to Dayton at the end of that weekend and I feel broken, numb. I go to my classes and I do my assignments and I don't remember any of them. I spend my weekends sleeping, playing Gran Turismo, occasionally seeing the few friends I have on campus, and working at my job in the cafeteria. I don't give up on talking to bek. I still call her occasionally, we trade short emails, all that, but I am stuck in Dayton.

Thanksgiving rolls around, and I call her. I was in my room at my mother's house. My room was pretty much the entire attic of the bungalow she lived in, though it was divided into three rooms, two of which were finished and painted and mine. I want to see her. She tells me she can't. As it turns out, the guy sitting next to her that night was named Spencer, and though she swears that when I saw him they were just friends, he is now spending thanksgiving weekend at her parents' house and they are going out. This was a bit of a double sting. First, I never felt like bek's parents had approved of me in the slightest, and I knew never would have had me spend the weekend there. Secondly, thanksgiving was, I knew, bek's favorite holiday and one that I had looked forward to spending with her, it having long before become a painful holiday for my family (an entirely separate story).

She also tells me Spencer is driving her a bit crazy.

Two weeks after Thanksgiving, I head back over to OSU. I think I was finalizing my transfer, but I was also hanging out with Pat, and hoping to see bek. Well, I end up seeing bek, and we start talking. And talking. And enjoying each other's company. We both just felt good being there with each other. We spend Friday evening with each other, acting just as friends, nothing more, but enjoying that. At the end of the night, I start leaving her room, and she asks me to stay. And I spend the night.

The next morning, after we get up and shower and I get my clothes from Pat's room, we are sitting at her desk, playing Tetris Attack on her computer, and the phone rings. Spencer. He has no idea I am here. He knows who I am, of course, but he doesn't know I am here. He wants to get together with bek. She makes up some excuse about needing to study. He calls back a few more times, each separated by little over an hour, and wants to see her. She keeps putting him off. Finally, he just shows up.

There is this wonderful moment there, like something out of an awkward comedy, where I am standing there, Spencer is directly across from me, and bek is right between us. There is a little conversation that happens. I wish I could remember it, but I know Spencer says something really stupid about World War II. How WWII came into the conversation, I haven't the slightest, but it did. I think he realized what was happening. I hope he did. I wanted to blurt out the whole time 'GUESS WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT?!?!?' but I don't. bek would have killed me.

I am not there for it, but bek and Spencer break up. At some point bek gives into my masochistic questioning and tells me who she made out with and what happened. I get silently pissed off because this random guy (who later turns out to be a total ass) got just as far in one night with her as I had. But whatever. I move into a dorm not too far from bek's and the rest of freshman year happens.

The rest of freshman year includes a lot of bek sleeping over and me having to deal with Bill. Bill is my roommate who doesn't wash laundry, participates in judo tournaments which give him concussions that leave him unconscious for 24 hours, attempts to kill himself over spring break using my kitchen knife in our room (my RA, in telling me where Bill is, tells me “the cops have your knife, they will give it back if you want it.” No, thanks.), is best friends with a guy who looks exactly like Beavis, and on the night before finals gets roaringly drunk which causes him and Beavis to beat the hell out of each other in our room at 3 in the morning much to both bek's and my surprise and which causes Bill to vomit all over the floor repeatedly and refuse to clean it up until we get an RA to make him. This is really a sidenote to the story, but for some reason I feel like it has to be there.

That summer, bek and I both lived with our respective families. I worked at an oil change place for some money, and bek worked at the vets she had worked at in high school. We saw each other at least once a week, and it was pretty nice. Things were settled between us.

Sophomore year we lived in the same dorm and it was largely like the year before, except that her grades were better since she was enrolled in classes that weren't disgustingly advanced, and I made sure I actually hung out more often with Pat and other friends, as they had all gotten pissed at me the year before for not seeing them enough while seeing bek all the time (a valid complaint).

At some point in the year, bek and I decide to take the next year off and join City Year, which is an Americorps program and meant working full time in the Columbus Public schools helping kids learn to read and such. We are obviously not going to be able to live at OSU while doing this, and eventually, though she resists the idea at first, bek agrees to live with me. We frantically hunt for a place, wanting something close enough to OSU that when we go back to school, we can still live there. We eventually find 381 East Maynard. It is the west half of a duplex, and the guy who owns the house, Mr. Faber, lives in the other side. He is a nice old former hippie guy, who used to be a plumber but now lives off the rent from the half of the house and his retirement money. The place has three bedrooms, and I take one, bek takes the other, and we figure we will have a third roommate. It is a bit strange, I guess, that we have separate rooms, but I go with it.

That summer we move in. bek had a job while a student at OSU that she could keep (working in a plasma donation place) whereas I did not (I formerly worked for the OSU botany department, counting sunflower seeds from genetically modified plants for ten hours a week while usually listening to NPR) and so I spend most of the summer trying to find a job, eventually working at the same plasma place as bek, though in a different section. I accrued a lot of debt to her at this time, which I did pay off in the years to come, but I think she got very angry at me over this, and it was the kind of anger that lasted a bit.

Note that during all this time, though we are quite physically intimate with each other, we never have sex.

So City Year comes. bek keeps working at the plasma place, though I quit, and the year in CY is rough. It is hard to explain why it is rough, but it is really hard. We are dirt poor. We go through three roomates, the first leaves after a few weeks. The second, Jose, is another of those legendary figures of my past that I could write a lot about, eventually ends up moving into a different place with a bunch of guys in this weird roommate swap where Jen (remember her, from way back in the beginning) ends up living with us. Jen was still a close friend of bek's and her and I start out getting along, but eventually end up hating each other. The fighting between us takes its eventual toll on things between me and bek. At the end of the summer, I move up to Cleveland to help my dad open his hobby shop, and bek and I are on shaky ground.

Before I get to move to Medina (one county south of Cleveland) to help my dad, I help my mom move out of her house, a house she thought she would live in forever, but that her failing physical health prevents her from maintaining. I grew up in this house, and it is hard leaving it. But we do. I them move in with my dad and feel fairly stranded in just-barely-not-rural Medina. My only release is getting together with friends, and my closest friend is Ryan, who lives over in Akron, not to far from Medina. He is getting married that December, and large chunks of this summer are spent over in his apartment, with his fiance, and meeting various people who will be in the wedding, where I am the best man.

One of these people was my third girlfriend, Mandy.

Mandy and I spent that summer dating. Mandy fell full throttle in love with me (though later on, I think it might just have been in lust). Mandy would help me move back into the house in Columbus, where I was now glad bek and I had separate rooms which would allow us to be just roommates. Mandy was unsure about this, but decides to trust me.

Her trust was horribly misguided.

I realize that up to now, I have not explained what attracted me so much to bek. I can't explain it. I know part of it was intellectual, that we could keep up with each other and challenge each other, but that was most certainly not all of it. There was something about her, physically, that just drove me insane. I can't explain it.

But when I got back to Columbus, there it was. I wanted her. I wanted to be with her. We would talk sometimes about our relationship, and where it had gone wrong, and what had happened. bek tells me at one point, in one of the meanest things I think anyone has said to me, that if I had just pushed a little more, way back in freshman year, she would have slept with me. No more, she says, but then, yeah.

Mandy is smart enough. She picks up on this. Despite being insanely head-over-blah over me, she breaks up with me. A smart move on her part, and I don't blame her for it. She comes down to Columbus one Friday, barely talks to me before realizing it, and takes off to go back home. I call Ryan's fiance, tell her what happened, tell her to make sure Mandy is ok, and hang up the phone.

bek and I spend the rest of that Friday in bed, only taking a break to get dinner. But still, no sex.

And bek and I are back in a relationship. Things are the same as they were before. Old fights are still there, and still happen. Old mistakes persist. But I am happy to be with her. We both finish school, and decide to take a year off to just work and figure out what to do. She applies to med schools, I apply to grad school. In my ideal world, we end up living together while both of us go to school. She only gets accepted at OSU. I only get accepted at Cleveland State. I am moving back to Cleveland.

Moving out is painful. Pat is there (as he was there for a lot of this, being my closest friend in Columbus) and another friend from Cleveland. We load the truck. I make one last sweep, look for my stuff, and my friends go get in the car. bek and I are both crying. This feels so final. Such like the end of things. I hug her, I kiss her, I really never want to let go, but I do, and I ride up to Cleveland with my friend driving the truck and I miss her so much on that ride up I-71 that I almost tell him to turn the truck back around. When we get to Cleveland, I pass out on the floor of my mom's apartment (which is in the building next to my own) before unpacking anything. The truck gets emptied the next day.

bek comes and visits me in Cleveland a few times, and I visit her in Columbus. We agreed to kind of just not take it too seriously, and that if either of us met someone, just say something and it was done. Things didn't stay that way, though, and soon we were talking every day, and such, though we didn't get to see each other a lot, mostly due just to how busy our academic lives were. But it felt like it was working. We were talking a ton, and we both still loved each other a lot and we were doing what we could to be together.

The next summer was rough. Not with bek, actually, but otherwise. My mother, who has a lot of health issues, many of which I am worried I will inherit, ended up having quintuple bypass surgery. I had to take care of her through most of it, and also had to take care of my grandmother, whose response to the whole situation was to have a nervous breakdown. I did work bek into this though, even getting to drive down to Columbus to see an outdoor concert with her on the weekend my grandmother got moved into an assisted living home (thankfully, my mother understood I needed to get the hell away from this all for a bit and lent me her car to go). In addition to this, when school started back up, I was working in the Writing Center at CSU, which paid for my tuition, but was also not an easy job. OK, it wasn't hard labor or anything, but there was a certain amount of stress that came out of it, combined with school work.

When I can get away from it all, I go hang out at Pat's. He is living with his parents, who live in a pretty large, but pretty full house. One afternoon, we take the canoe they own down to the river that is close by and feeds into Lake Erie. Neither of us is very good at this, and eventually we capsize. I lose my glasses to Lake Erie. This doesn't make me completely blind, but limits me a bit. In addition, replacing them is rough because I have a giant freaking head.

A few weeks into the semester, on a Friday, I walked to downtown Cleveland to get some lunch. I wanted a Reuben, and found a place in the old Arcade that wasn't too busy and fit the bill nicely. Their fries had some odd spices on them, but I enjoyed them and my sandwich, and started to walk back to CSU. I remember getting to the Greyhound station, a few blocks away from CSU.

I fell into a nightmare. That is the easiest way I can describe it. I was walking and all of a sudden the world changed drastically and I am in the back of an ambulance and I am fighting with an EMT who is trying to put an oxygen mask on me but it feels like the mask is suffocating me and my body hurts in ways I cannot explain and no one seems to understand what I am saying and then I am in a hospital bed.

I had a seizure. No one knows why. They also manage to not get my insurance information, and mark me as not having insurance, and get my address wrong, which is still, over a year later, causing massive problems and expenses. While I am in the hospital, they also figure out I have diabetes. They let me go the next day, but schedule me to see an internist a week from that Monday.

That weekend, bek comes to visit. Things are kinda a mess. I still don't have glasses. I am doubting things in a way I didn't think possible before the seizure, questioning each moment and wondering if the next one will eventually arrive without me falling out of it. In spite of this, we have a good weekend. I enjoy the time with her, and she enjoys the time with me.

Monday, after bek goes home, I go to the doctor and the diabetes diagnosis is confirmed, I am put on the usual meds, and I go home. I am horrendously depressed. Diabetes was the beginning of my mom's health issues, so I know what it means for me.

I talk to bek that night over google chat. I am depressed, and when I share this, bek gets mad at me. She gets mad because she is busy with school stuff and thinks I want her to solve it. She logs off.

I don't hear from her for days. On Saturday, I send her one line of email:

"Are we ok? "

Her answer:

"we're not ok...and you can't change that. you need more than i have to give and i'm sick of feeling guilty & angry about it. "

Me:

"look, i was in a shit mood when we talked, and i just wanted an ear to listen, that was it. I know you were busy, and had a lot to do, and i'm sorry i got angry about it.

If you want me to disappear, i'm gone. "

bek:

"i love you and i am going to miss you a lot, but i just don't have the energy to deal with your problems and with mine at the same time. i am sorry and i hope that you will be happy in the future.

love, bek"

And that is that. Seven years we have known each other, and been together for most of that, and four sentences of email from her is all the ending I get. I have made a ton of mistakes, and she has as well, but somehow we stayed with it. I thought we were fine; obviously we weren't.

I had no idea where to go from there.

-----

Six months later, we chatted briefly over google. I had done a ton of thinking about the whole thing, and told her I felt like shit about it, but that we shouldn't ever be together. She agreed. She barely said anything to me. It felt cold, impersonal, distant.

-----

At the beginning of last October, Boris was playing a show in Columbus. This was going to be the first time I had done anything more than drive through the city since the break up. I was meeting the Kentucky crew there, getting dinner, going to the show, and driving home. I got to Columbus early. I had gotten in a car accident on the way down. I was shaken up a bit by this, and worried that my lack of insurance would cost me my license (which it hasn't so far, since I got insurance about 30 minutes after the accident). I drove around Columbus.

I drove by 381 East Maynard. As far as I know, she still lives there, though her car was nowhere to be seen. I had no idea what I would do if I did see it, but I didn't. I went to dinner and the show.

After the show, my ears are ringing. I have a low level headache and a two hour drive ahead of me. I drive by again. Her car isn't there. I drive back to Cleveland.

[Harveyjames]

This thread needs more floridly descriptive depictions of the sex act. As a style guide, you should always refer to your genitals as your 'sex', like in Anais Nin novels. Also, you should only refer to yourself in the third person, like Bernie Mac.

AMENDMENT #1: Every male genital must be referred to as a 'Japanese Cyclops'

AMENDMENT #2: The third-person self referral is optional. Stories can alternate between first, third and fifth person

[seryogin]

[dhex]

nothing should be like an anais nin novel.

not even punctuation.
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[Harveyjames]

[seryogin]

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[Dracko]

And this is why jeans are bad on men.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Harveyjames]

I'm sorry it wasn't more floridly descriptive

It's someone else's turn now. Don't forget the style guide.

[seryogin]

I don't know much about sex, James Harvey. But I demand more from you! And with more description, don't be afraid to breakout the theasaurus either!
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[Dracko]

ITT we post cybersex chat logs.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Harveyjames]

[daphaknee]

you guys really shouldnt tempt me by egging me to talk about actual sex acts

i think thats the reason half the people on SB hate me

[Harveyjames]

do it

we're an open minded bunch. I don't think you can tell us anything worse than the time you accidentally fired period up your boyfriend's jap's eye.

[daphaknee]

yeah yeah yeah

last night i told dess and christopher about the time i accidentally shit on my ex

[Harveyjames]

I accidentally shit on the floor once when I was a kid because I decided there was a hairy fanged octopus in the toilet, and so had to sit really far forward. I hard a hard time explaining that one to my folks.

How did you shit on your ex?? Be sure to write using the style guide outlined earlier.

[dhex]

for the senior citizens among us (i.e. me) what the fuck is a "jap's eye?"
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[Swimmy]

Booj, your story made me rather happy that I've never been in a longlasting relationship.

Also that my few short relationships have involved sex.
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Scratchmonkey]

[boojiboy7]

You know what is odd? I only regret the length of it in that I feel like I missed a bunch of stuff because of it. I don't regret being with her, but I regret that I didn't do more stupid relationship crap in college.

[Harveyjames]

[daphaknee]

christophers urethra is more cyclopean i think

anyway

daphny had a big party the nights previous, at this party she served chocolate laxatives hidden in the candy dish, mango and chili pepper lollipops, and 911 chicken
911 chicken was SOOOO spicy that daphny had to sign a waiver before purchasing it

so the next day, gregory was being sat upon by his loud obnoxious girlfriend daphny. she was wearing a skirt with no underwear (which actually wasnt normal at the time). she couldnt be bothered to get dressed that morning, what with the hangover and all

so her bare ass was on his lap because she just read story of O and liked to not sit on her skirt.

and she was laughing and giggiling and threatening to fart on greg
daphny farted on greg

HAHA I FARTED ON YOU MY BARE ASS uggg ummm ew its really squishy
daphny quickly jumped to her feet and noticed a big mess of spicy chicken wing shit on gregs pants and some more running down her leg.
daphny started screaming! oh god! its poop!

but really it was funny to both of them, greg made daphny wash his pants and herself off, but laughs were had all around

alcohol plus spicy chicken plus flatuence equals disaster said daphny
disaster? MORE LIKE A BONANZA exclaimed greg

making out commenced

[dhex]

[Harveyjames]

[dhex]

japanese cyclops would just have another dick coming out of its eye.
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[daphaknee]

[dessgeega]

i like the style guide. i think you should follow it.

tell them a story about us.
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