and so much stays the same. I've realised that I need to use this space as a place for me... to vent, to unload, to be free. This last year has seen some massive changes, both for me personally, and for my family. It was thinking about an old friend, however, that made me feel the need to write.
I say old friend, and I find that I actually mean those words now. It's taken me a long time to reach this place. Perhaps I should start from the beginning, yes? Right. I "met" Chris online during the summer of '96. A friend of mine had just introduced me to using computers and the World Wide Web. She also taught me about BBS's, or Bulletin Board Systems, and using Telnet. If there is anyone younger than me reading this, you prolly don't know what these antiquated programs are/were, but they were fabulous ways to pass the time and make new friends. On a now-defunct BBS called Brinta, I spent much time chatting with people in Holland and the UK. It was in this way I met Chris. It was a quiet Sunday morning, as I remember, and I was the only person online. The next person to log on used the name "Henchman". I thought, "why not, I use the silly handle "Pooh Power". So I started chatting him up. Come to find out, he had a dreadful hangover, had swollen knuckles from a fight he had been in, and a bit of road rash from wrecking his bike! I couldn't have met someone so very different from myself!
Time passed. We chatted on a daily basis. The more I found out about Chris, the more I liked him, and I was pretty sure he felt the same way about me. I found myself waking at 2 or 3 in the morning so we could talk. After about 6 weeks, he called me one Sunday morning. I was so tired, but so thrilled to actually talk to him, to hear his voice. Before I knew it, 6 hours had passed! It was then that I thought maybe there could be more between us. He started working weekends so he could use the internet, and I always hated having to say goodbye. It was also during this time that I started looking to transfer to uni in London. We both decided that we more than "liked" each other, and as I was so homesick for England, I got a passport and started saving to go for a visit. Chris, being older and wiser (HA!), decided that he should come to visit me. So we planned, and I fell more in love with the man with the lovely, deep, Scottish accent.
When the day finally came for him to arrive, I was so very nervous. My sister went with me to Memphis to pick him up from the airport. I knew him, the moment I saw him come into the terminal. And then things changed. I went over to him, to hug him, but there was none of the familiarity that we had shared before. So I put it down to him being tired from all the travelling. But as the days wore on, I knew there was something not right. I was young, and stupid, and should have addressed these issues while he was still here, to be able to talk to him face to face. Instead, I worried about it the entire time he was here. The day of his departure, I was a wreck. I was weepy at the airport, and he didn't seem to understand why. We hugged goodbye, said we would talk soon, and that was that. He boarded the plane for Chicago, and I cried the entire way home.
It was a few days before I was able to talk to Chris after he returned home. At first, he said he was busy with work, which I could understand, as he'd been away for a week. But later, it seemed like he didn't want to talk to me, although he had no problems talking to my friends. Finally, I remember just blurting out in one of the moments I caught him online, "you just don't like me that way, do you?" His answer broke my heart, but if I'm honest with myself, I had known the answer since that first day at the airport.
I was devastated. I cried a lot. I believed the worst about myself. I thought that if I were prettier, if I were thinner, if I were less American, if I were smarter, he would have loved me. I quit going online, which only worried other friends of mine in far away countries, so much so that they would call me. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't study. It was only after talking with two very dear friends that I started to heal. One of these friends, a former lover of mine, told me that if Chris didn't love me, he was a fool. The other was a friend who was in love with me, who told me Chris didn't deserve to be on the receiving end of my love. After the sadness came the anger, at which point I said some horrible things to Chris, I think to make him feel as horrible as I did.
Days passed, seasons changed. I started going online again, talking to some of my old friends. I moved on with my life, met someone new, fell in love, got married. The only time I would think of Chris was when I looked at the sky and saw unusual cloud formations. It wasn't until the birth of our second child that I realised that C had made such an impact on my life. I named my second son Christopher, and it wasn't until I was looking at the clouds one day that I remembered I had given my first son the middle name of Alexander, which is also C's middle name. I still cloud watch. Star Trek: First Contact is, to this day, one of my favorite movies. Watching Monty Python no longer hurts. I have moved on.
Fast forward to the present. This lovely little social networking site called Facebook had allowed me to catch up with many people that I hadn't seen in many years. One day, I just typed in his name, and there he was. So I sent a request to be his friend, and he accepted. Funny how the world works like that. We have both moved on, our lives completely different, yet very much the same. It is nice to see his name, and sometimes exchange messages. Karma is an evil mistress. I have loved two very different men, both of who have ended up with MS, who are wonderful fathers. Just one of them is IN my life, and the other once was.
