venturing backward: salvation (audio) (written December 22, 2014)

a post from my old blog “venturing backward”

In early October, Renee had a fall break. She came home to Rochester. And I did, too.

We wanted to have a final moment together. So we could say goodbye.

The night before, I listened to One More Night by Stars. Just like I had back in the autumn of 2005. I remembered how it had spooked me so long ago. I remembered how scared I felt that this day would come.

We spent a few hours together that evening in my basement. In some ways, we behaved just if we were dating. But the conversation was about letting each other go.

We said goodbye in the darkness of the driveway. On the same driveway where she’d delivered me a 12-pack of Fresca in the fall of 2005. Beside the same garage in which I’d kissed her goodbye before going to England with my dad in the summer of 2006. Next to the same house in which I told her we’d be fine despite Cambridge and Freiburg.

The Atlantic would never defeat us.

She kissed me for what seemed the last time.

“Please always remember me fondly,” she told me.

She got into her SUV. I watched her red taillights fade away.

So long ago, I had imagined this moment while listening to Death Cab’s Title and Registration. I couldn’t help but listen to it again tonight. She was off to find herself a better life.

I went back to Michigan State. The only way to deal with this was to forge ahead with my new social world.

I made a case for Valencia and Alexandria to come to Freiburg with me. I really hoped they would.

I had frequent lunches with Alexandria in the Shaw Hall cafeteria before heading to class together. I rode my bike up to West Circle almost every evening just to do homework with her. I went to more football games with her and her friends. I watched the musical Moulin Rouge with her because she liked that movie. I thought it was pretty good, too.

The new season of The Office started. So I’d come to her dorm for an Office night once a week.

She invited me to come roller-skating with her and her friends.

This place had nothing to do with Renee and Rochester. Moving on seemed easy at first.

Alexandria and I went on a walk in the night together.

In the glow of the streetlights, we walked all along the north end of campus. We walked down West Circle road and East Circle road until we reached the northeastern corner of campus.

We kept going until we were walking down the dark, empty paths of Benefactor’s Plaza. It was a place with a bunch of monuments dedicated to rich people who gave a bunch of money to Michigan State.

We sat down near the fountain there, on a bench in the shadow of a tree. No one was around.

We talked quietly. We held hands. Our noses touched. We kissed.

The next day, Alexandria told me it couldn’t happen again. Neither of us was over our former situation, especially me. I was still in love with Renee.

That kind of love couldn’t be replaced overnight.

It was the type of love that made me put off exploring Michigan State so I could spend more days with Renee. It was the type of love that defined every moment of my life by her presence or her absence for two years. It was the type of love that made me sure I would marry her.

Only a couple weeks had passed since I’d watched her taillights fade away in Rochester.

And Renee already had a new boyfriend named Kyle.

She wasn’t going to put off a minute of her college experience for me. She wasn’t going to have the kind of freshman year I did – clinging to someone far away, heading back to Rochester all the time.

I knew I could never feel for Alexandria what I felt for Renee. I knew it couldn’t be replaced. And I felt she was fooling herself by thinking she could replace what she had with me so quickly.

So I did whatever I could to make her dump Kyle and get back together with me.

I sent her e-mails about everything we’d shared together. I told her we couldn’t just throw it away. I called her on the phone and made as best of a case for myself as I could.

I told her we had such a great relationship. She told me that wasn’t true. She said it wasn’t a good relationship at all. “Maybe for like three months,” she said.

Those words left me paralyzed.

And she started ignoring my calls.

One of my friends came over one Friday night. He and Patrick were going out to a party and wanted me to come. I told them I was just going to relax in my dorm room. And as soon as they left, I started crying. I called Renee’s phone several times and she didn’t answer.

My friend and Patrick came back a couple hours later. They tried to have a casual conversation with me. I told them I had to talk on the phone with someone.

I left S Case 471. I went to the empty fourth floor study lounge just down the hall.

I prayed to God. I asked God to please give me one more chance with Renee. I asked God to please give me one more opportunity to talk to Renee on the phone.

I called her once more. She answered the phone.

I believed very strongly in God at that moment. He had answered my prayer.

But she was at a party. I could hear everyone in the background. So much laughter, so much screaming, so much excitement. She was having fun in her new city. Free from any obligation to me, she was having the kind of freshman year that I never had.

She was even farther away from me than I had ever been from her. And she wouldn’t need to come back every other weekend to see me. She wouldn’t need to miss out on anything for me.

I made another case for myself. She told me it was hopeless. She told me there was no point. She told me that I had to understand we were never getting back together. She told me it was the best decision for both of us, not just her. She told me that neither of us was totally happy together.

I told her that wasn’t true. I made appeals to the autumn of 2005.

“But what about since then?” she asked me. She told me it wasn’t the great relationship I said it was.

I spoke of meaningful moments from June 2006 and June 2007. I talked about surprising her with ice cream and buying her a necklace. I referenced kissing her in my garage before I went to England. I told her about nights by Lindsay’s pool party. I made her remember all the weekends I came home.

But she said that wasn’t the whole story. And so she eventually told me goodbye. She hung up the phone. So I was alone and disconnected from everyone in the fourth floor study lounge.

I stared at my phone for a while. I threw it on the ground. I stood up and kicked a chair over. I smashed my fist onto a table. And then I cried alone for several minutes.

I went back to the room and acted like everything was normal. I went to bed.

Still, I sent her another e-mail later on. I put every detail I could in my e-mail, painting as beautiful a picture as I could of what we shared. I appealed to every wonderful memory that had captivated me for so long. And she told me it was hopeless.

In the middle of October, I wrote in my LiveJournal – “I feel like the ideal thing to do would be to drop out of school and just sort of live.”

A week later, I was working on some homework one Saturday afternoon. Patrick asked if I wanted to hang out that night. I said yes.

“Awesome,” he said. “You can hang out with me and my other friend.”

Then he went to go get lunch with someone.

And as soon as he left, I broke down. I pounded my fists on the carpet. Tears poured from my eyes and soaked into the ground.

I called my mom and asked if I could come home. She drove right away to come pick me up.

I told Patrick I was going home. He looked disappointed.

I sat in my teenage bedroom. I listened to Bright Eyes. I was listening to a song called Make War.

I heard “our love is dead but without limit / like the surface of the moon.” And I thought of Renee.

I heard “once too often, I have retreated / into the depths of my despair.” And I thought of my own situation. I thought of how all I was to her now was just some pathetic, depressed little bitch.

I heard “and though you say you’ve found another / who will surely speed you on your way / don’t let the forest grow over the path you came there by / But you will, so….” And I broke down into depression over the romance she was creating with Kyle. I imagined that she’d forget about me – the path she came there by.

The song continued. “So hurry up and run to the one that you love / and tie him up in your likeness / and he’ll become, become the prisoner I was…. and he’ll make war, old war, on who you were before / and he’ll claim all that has spoiled in your heart.”

I thought of how I’d been ready to put off so many things to be her prisoner. I was willing to come home almost every weekend my whole first semester at Michigan State. I was ready to come home for two months in the middle of my year in Freiburg.

I felt like I hated her then. She would never have to put her college life on hold for me.

I had let her consume me – for what? Just to end up alone in this room with nothing.

And now she had someone new. Just as if she had no feelings whatsoever that remained. All while mine had been so strong.

I got Taco Bell with Graham that night. It helped me feel a little better. But it wasn’t enough.

“I have no motivation to do my homework,” I wrote at the beginning of November. “No will to learn anything, no will to succeed in anything. I am just, in general, going down. I talk to friends and will keep talking to friends, but the status of everything just stays the same.”

I was lucky I dropped my history class.

Alexandria had invited me to come roller-skating with them the next day.

“I want to go,” I wrote at 11:30 PM. “And now I don’t think I can, because I was too depressed tonight to focus on any of my homework.”

I didn’t tell Alexandria anything about my depression. I just told her I couldn’t come roller-skating. That annoyed her, because she liked spending time with me. Just like I did with her.

I spent that afternoon, November 4^th, once again writing in LiveJournal.

“I never knew,” I announced, “that I could feel so dreadfully trapped in constant emotional devastation. I never knew that I could feel so nearly convinced that it was going to last forever – till the day I die. People can never tell how much I am hurting, constantly, every minute, while they are hanging out with me, but I really am hurting. I feel as though I am dying. I feel as though I wouldn’t care if I were to die.”

That’s when I thought it would be a good idea to kill myself.

Alone in my room, I stared at my bottle of vicodin. I tried to get myself to swallow the whole bottle. In the end, I just took two pills instead of one. I went to class feeling a little light.

I left my dorm room and started walking down Shaw. I tried to get myself to run out in front of a speeding car. In the end, I ran into an acquaintance who unknowingly snapped me out of it.

I thought it could make sense to cut my throat open with a knife. But I was too scared of the pain.

Sometimes, I’d log into Michigan State’s online platform and contemplate just dropping every class. I’d place the cursor over the “drop” button and try working up the willpower.

It seemed that everything I felt for Renee was never reciprocated. How easily she had moved on. How simple it was for her to find someone knew. How long it would take me to ever love again.

I thought that so many things I believed about us were just a lie. Just a hopeless romantic’s delusion.

But I never overdosed on the vicodin. I never walked in front of a car. I never held a knife anywhere near my neck.

I still rode my bike up to hang out with Alexandria. I still went to football games with her. We still went to German literature together.

And one afternoon in October, I had gone to one of Graham’s rugby games with Lindsay. And then, that night, I went to a haunted forest near Rochester with Graham, Lindsay, Kevin, and Rachel. Weekends like that brought me out of my head; they reconnected me with people who loved me.

Every time I posted anything depressing on LiveJournal, Valencia would call me. She would meet me for lunch, or come to my dorm room, or take a walk with me. She would patiently listen to me tell her how I felt about Renee. She would hear me out about why I was hurt.

I told her I thought everyone really hated me. I told her I thought I just wasn’t good enough – not only for Renee, but for anybody. I told her I wanted to drop out of school.

But Valencia was honest with me. She told me I might need help. She told me that everything I said about my worthlessness just violated reality. It contradicted the reality of all my friends, of my experience in Cambridge, of the good grades I was getting in all my classes.

Valencia decided she was coming to Freiburg, too. That was really exciting for me. It gave me something else to look forward to. She told me I should think about the future, not Renee.

Then there was Jess. We talked on the phone more that semester than we ever had before. Jess did a good job just telling me I was straight-up full of shit.

“Never gonna love again,” I wrote as a Facebook status one day.

“Remove tool status immediatelyyyyy,” Jess wrote on my Facebook wall.

She would turn the conversations to other topics. To remind me of things I had besides Renee.

We’d talk about my evolving political views.

I was reading a lot of Noam Chomsky that fall. I was growing disgusted with American foreign policy. I was questioning whether I could ever be a diplomat. I was learning about distant countries like Uzbekistan – and about what the U.S. government had done to support the oppression of people there.

I liked to tell Jess all of this stuff I was learning. I liked feeling like I was in her league.

She was about to transfer to Harvard. We talked about how fun it would be more me to visit.

And we talked about how wonderful Christmas break would be, just hanging out in her basement.

One night, Jess told me she realized I was one of the best friends she’d ever had. I wish I had told her how much that meant to me in those dark days. She filled my world with value.

I never talked with Patrick about my depression. But he was helping me without even trying.

All the simple moments I shared with Patrick gave me such a strong sense of meaning beyond Renee. We would go get midnight pizza at Wilson Hall. And we’d just sit at a cafeteria table until one in the morning. We’d chat and eat our pizza and drink soft drinks for an hour.

We’d spend entire days together in our dorm room. We’d both just read interesting articles online and talk about them. We were practically running our own seminar on public affairs.

We’d spend weekend afternoons reading books on the futon. He liked to read various sections of Post War, a history of Europe since 1945. I liked to read Noam Chomsky’s diatribes.

We’d read silently for ten minutes. Then one of us would break the silence to announce an interesting thought they had in reaction to some sentence. We’d read the sentence aloud. We’d debate its truth and implications. Then we’d return to reading, only to repeat the cycle again.

I loved it. The way he would laugh a little at something he had read. The way we’d make eye contact at the sound of the laughter. The way he’d close the book slightly and tell me his thoughts. The way that could blossom into a conversation that left me feeling so much better off.

Patrick always did a good job keeping me levelheaded. I’d make some wild left-wing declaration based on something I’d read in Noam Chomsky. I’d demand some new policy in America based on something I’d learned in Cambridge about socialism. And then Patrick would question me until I arrived at a more careful way of thinking on the subject.

I will always remember Patrick as someone who helped guide me through my intellectual infancy. He is the kind of person about whom I can be certain of this: I’d be significantly worse off without having enjoyed his friendship.

We went to Meijer together to buy candles for the room. We agreed that lavender was the best.

We would spend a whole Saturday morning cleaning our dorm room to make it as nice and pleasant as possible. Then we’d sit down on the futon – listening to music, smelling our candle, drinking Fresca, listening to some Modest Mouse, nodding at each other with perfect happiness. Appreciating the cleanliness of it all.

We invented “solid work days.” We would schedule these time periods. Say, on Thursday from noon to four. When the time came, we’d both sit on the futon. No one was allowed to get up off the futon or utter a word the entire time. You couldn’t answer the door. The Internet and cell phones were absolutely forbidden. We were only allowed to do solid work.

No matter what you were thinking, you couldn’t start a conversation with the other. Solid work.

When the time ended, we’d get into his car and drive to Snyder Philips for dinner.

We both shared an ideal that we called “living romantically.” This meant pursuing self-education, self-projection, and self-directed work. We wanted to do things like teach ourselves Icelandic. We wanted to do things like read Post War by candlelight and know all about the fall of Communism.

I told him I was planning on getting a keyboard for my birthday that Christmas. I told him I was going to teach myself how to play the piano.

“Dude,” he said, nodding with some excitement. “That’s romantic as hell.”

I will always love those moments with Patrick. I will always wish I had just told him how much those days meant to me. How much I would give to go back to 471 – to sit on the futon with him and talk about Eastern Europe, to see him look up and tell me about something he was reading, to crack open a Fresca and enjoy the scent of our lavender candles.

By November’s end, I was writing in my LiveJournal about how I was happy again.

And, without Renee, I was free to change as I saw fit.

I finished my application to study in Freiburg on December 4^th. And I realized I didn’t have to think about my relationship with her when making decisions like this now. I didn’t have to worry about “overcoming the Atlantic” – I just had to cross it and be done with it.

I changed my political views on Facebook to “Very Liberal.” I posted statuses supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. I was really hoping she’d win the primary.

Renee messaged me on Facebook in the middle of December.

“I hope you can try being friends again soon,” she said.

I was still in love with her, though. And I was still mad at her for being able to move on so fast. So I told her she had caused me too much sadness. And I turned my focus to everything I had beyond Renee.

At the dawn of Christmas Break, I bought The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Just like Jean had recommended to me back in Cambridge. While I was with Renee, I was too afraid of it.

But now I read it all – in the final sweet days of being a teenager. And I decided I was an atheist.

Richard Dawkins made me feel silly for ever being afraid of a make-believe place called Hell. The way he mocked passages in the Bible made me feel stupid for having thought it was divinely inspired. And the way he explained evolution made me wonder why I ever believed that nature needed a creator.

I listened to those Modest Mouse songs again – Cowboy Dan, Bukowski, 3^rd Planet. And I stopped feeling hesitant about their emotional appeal. I thought about Captain Ahab with admiration.

But outright atheism was just a sideshow to that Christmas Break’s real meaning.

I wrote in my LiveJournal that “Rochester is back for a while.”

I went to the Rochester Road Taco Bell with Graham. As always, we just sat for hours while chatting about life and refilling our drinks.

I drove around aimlessly with Kevin – hopping from elementary schools to bookstores.

Amy, Kevin, and I went out one night and bought cookies, M&M’s, and little chocolate Christmas people. We brought it all back to my basement and made a ginger bread house together. Then we busted out a random board game from the closet and played it on the floor.

I hung out with Amy and Kevin really late on Christmas Eve, too. After all of us had finished all our family time. We chilled in my basement, with some Christmas decorations up around us.

I also hung out with Amy on Christmas night. We sat in my car in the CVS parking lot. We talked while listening to music. I ate some Twizzlers and drank some Mountain Dew. Midnight came and she wished me a happy birthday.

My dad bought me a keyboard for my 20^thbirthday on December 26^th. I started working through a book about teaching yourself piano. I bought a bunch of sheet music.

I tried to teach myself Something Corporatesongs. I was able to play some of them pretty well once I got the hang of it. A few parts of the song Hurricane were my favorites to practice. I thought maybe I could write some epic song about Renee.

Maybe, I imagined, I could even become a musician one day. I could write lyrics and music. I could give artistic meaning to crucial moments in my life. I’d always wanted to be able to do that.

I drove around Rochester with Kate and Amy on several evenings. We played Sufjan Stevens music in my car. We talked about saving some dogs like we had in the summer of 2006.

I went to Jess’s annual New Year’s party in her basement.

We were all dressed up nice. Chockley even wore a suit and a tie. Julia directed us through a few teen party games. We put on New Year’s hats and blew into party kazoos. We ate a gigantic rice crispy treat. We played the year’s first match of Mario Kart at midnight.

“Moo Moo Fucking Farm (Don’t Hate ’08)” was the name Jess gave the Facebook album.

It snowed really hard that night. We got several solid inches on the ground.

I drove Amy home. My car got stuck in front of her house. I tried for a while to force it out of the snow, but it was hopeless. The snow was still falling and the stuff on the ground was frozen.

Her sister wasn’t around, so I slept in her sister’s room.

The next morning, I trudged outside and dug my car out of the fresh snow. Pulling away, I felt thankful that I was starting the new year with the friends I had.

I was happy I had a hometown like this for Christmas.

At the same time, I missed Alexandria. I missed Patrick. I missed Valencia. The three of them, I hoped, would be my friends for life.

I was excited to go back to East Lansing. I was looking forward to spending more time with those three. I didn’t need to come back to Rochester anymore to be happy.

My teenage years were over. I had arrived on the shores of a new decade.