Day 627
I'm going to be oddly personal here today. I generally don't like to use this as a forum to give all that much away on a low-key, insightful manner. I much prefer to make this a soapbox or a bully pulpit or just be a sensationalist asshat.
But today, I'm feeling the urge to just use this space to ramble on a personal level.
The spring is never a good time of year for me. I don't exactly know why. It used to be one of my favorite times of the year. Granted, Halloween & the dead of winter have always been my favorite, but I used to like the spring. Until about 10 years ago.
I can't point at anything in particular that changed that for me. But I think it was a slow evolution that is still making me hate the spring even more.
Maybe it's growing up and having the additional responsibilities that come with the spring. Spring cleaning at home to clear out all the accumulated crap from the winter. Yard work that becomes far too cumbersome & daunting every day that passes and it doesn't get done fast enough. The return of insects, and we all know that I fucking hate bugs.
But it seems like its also the time that things just kinda fall apart. Hockey ends. Football has been over for a while. Tv shows end. And well... No more summer vacation. Getting stuck inside an office while looking at the sunlight you're missing, though it's ironic to notice that on a day when it's grey and humid and rainy.
Actually, I might be able to point to a time when I started to realize that the spring is when things always start to go wrong.
I lost my best friend about 10 years back. No, she didn't die or anything tragic like that, but our friendship imploded. It was... Extremely close. Somewhere between siblings and significant others without ever dating. We would both blow off significant others (her, more-so than I) to spend time with each other. Hell, half her boyfriends though she was cheating on them with me. It wasn't John Hughes teen movie level funny/sad or anything. More... Bad romantic comedy type deal. But without any sort of happy ending.
I think I was about 20. She was 18 or 19. A year behind me. And oddly enough, after leaving (read: partying way too fucking hard) after my freshman year at OSU and taking some summer classes & a little time to figure out where I wanted to REALLY be, I was transferring and she was attending the same school.
Serendipitous, right? Yeah.... Sure.
I was a much bigger romantic back at that age. Less jaded & cynical and all that. Yeah, I know... There was a time that I wasn't the lovingly egotistical & assholish ScienceJesus that you know and... Well... Know... Today. Shocking, right? And maybe this particular thing with someone that close added to the beginnings of the cynicism that I still carry with me today.
I also hadn't entirely realized my kinky side at this point yet. Formative years and all that, I guess.
But so, we had both had attraction to one another but we were kids. We were dumb. We were rarely single at the same times, but we always were inches away from jumping into something serious. And now, with things as they were, both of us single, both of us closer than ever, both of us showing the signs of interest without voicing it... Well, things seemed... Right.
I told you I was a romantic at that age, right?
Well, I decided that it was time to finally talk about the elephant that had been in the room for the previous 3 years or so.
That was a mistake.
I don't know if I ever entirely got over how this ended up. Us sitting in the same booth at the same diner we always spent hours at, talking to each other, figuring out our lives and all that other pointless shit that 19/20 year olds think are important and are otherwise utterly pointless in the grand scheme of life. sitting there, I opened my mouth.
I don't remember exactly what I said, and 11 or so years later, it's not really all that important. But her reply was.
Silence. Staring at me with the most blank stare I've ever seen, a short glance down to the table and a look at me again that said a lot and nothing at the same time... And then something that I could have never expected.
She simply stood up, took her purse, looked at me for another 2 or 3 seconds... And she walked out the door.
We never spoke again. I never got a call, a text, a letter, an e-mail... Nothing. My best friend just walked out without a word and never spoke to me again.
I only saw her once in the following years at school. And that was across about 20 people in the student union out of the corner of my eye. And once a few years after that as I was leaving a pharmacy where we both grew up when visiting my mother for mothers day and picking up a card on the way.
But while I eventually got over her... I think that it still stuck with me. The experience, that is. I never got over that.
That's not the only thing that colored my opinion of the spring. A lot of bad shit has happened in the spring. I just end up down as a result. Between my birthday and the spring, they're the 2 times of year you can almost guarantee that I'll be in a really fucked up headspace.
Nothing funny really here today. Just something I felt compelled to talk about publicly for the first time.
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