Mike’s million dollar smile, and my unpleasant revelation...
I think this photo was taken before we won. What a prophetic, wise smile. Just had to show off how adorable my co-author can be. No wonder John keeps him around.
Anyway, I’m here to ramble about something different altogether. For those of you who read the book, the introductory chapter features my story about how my first love in high school was a woman named Julia. I’d love to go into more detail about Julia, but given the potential legal ramifications, I’ll keep it short. She was my high school sweetheart and my first love, and it was no picnic (as anyone who read the book can tell you). At one point she threatened to kill herself if I ever left her and suffice to say Julia was pretty disturbed and with ample reason (which I also won’t get into).
A few years ago before the book was published, I had an IM chat with Julia in which she claimed she never was in love with me, but that she just loved me like a friend and was wildly experimental.
Only one problem: Julia wrote me 200 love letters, some of which were more than 30 pages long, so I had a hard time believing her—especially when she claimed during our IM session that I threatened to kill myself when she tried to leave me.
At that moment, I realized I wasn’t in The Twilight Zone. I was just listening to another one of Julia’s classic mindfucks. I argued with her, frantically typing, reminding her that she was the one dropping acid and threatening to kill herself. She denied everything, and I ended the conversation incredibly pissed off.
Straight people don’t have to deal with their first loves claiming their relationships didn’t happen. What a load of horseshit. But then my sister reminded me of something that Maya Angelou said: “Hurt people hurt people.” People who are incredibly damaged cannot help but hurt the people around them, often inadvertently. In some way, Julia had convinced herself that she was me in our relationship to make her past bearable.
Flash forward to two, maybe three years later. I’m bored at work and googling people. I google Julia’s married name and find her blog. In it, she writes another fiction that made me equally angry—that at our high school she had been the editor-in-chief of our school newspaper. The only problem: I was the editor-in-chief of our school newspaper.
I wrote several drafts of angry posts to her blog before realizing just how sad it was that Julia felt she had to lie about her high school writing credentials to verify that she had talent. There was nothing I could say to her that would be more depressing than that.
Sure, in her deluded head, the same head where she didn’t experience a relationship with me, she probably had convinced herself not only that she was me in our “friendship”—but that she was me in our entire high school experience.
And that made me want to cry. As pissed as I was, I wanted to write Julia and tell her that though I found it comforting that she had rewritten all of history and not just our relationship, she didn’t need to lie to prove she had talent. One of the things that made me fall in love with her were her incredible writing skills. No non-writers compose 30 page love letters. It just doesn’t happen.
But saying all that would require reconnecting with this person who is incredibly hurt, and hurt people hurt people. I wasn’t ready to be hurt again. To be told again that our relationship didn’t exist. That she wasn’t suicidal. That I was the screwed up one. No, some things are best left alone.
Or written about in a blog for someday when Julia gets bored and starts Internet stalking me.
What a handsome bloke
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
