X) Epilogue

Epilogue
(This is the final chapter of my personal accounts, "-Liking-: Refractions and Infractions" )


So here I am. More time has passed, more experiences had. Many of them not unlike those previously told. Patterns emerge, at once predictable and unpredictable. Life, just as one thinks it is finally making sense, continues to hold mysteries.

I'd learned a lot of individual lessons from past experiences, my misadventures with the women. But where was the real, cohesive lesson? The point where everything becomes clear?

What drives our desires? What does it mean? What's the point?
And will there ever be an answer that doesn't feel cheap?

Onward

After high school, it all became a blur. Daily life started passing by faster and faster, due to innumerable but perhaps unidentifiable causes. As if the rocket of my life had reached the escape velocity allowing it to leave its origins behind, but was still being ever accelerated by that mysterious power that drives our experiences toward an inevitable final convergence.

It didn't help that I had opted for the field of technological sciences, a decision that was guaranteed to slowly but surely smother whatever artistic aspirations I had once held dear. That, and forever plague my metaphors with allusions to physics and other mundane realities.

I'd been accepted into an engineering program at a University within walking distance of my home. So in some respects, daily life did not change much. I would still, every weekday, go to school for class and return home later. What did change was my association with people. While some people mostly enjoy the freedom associated with campus life, I was utterly unprepared for most of it. Left to my own devices, I preferred to spend my freetime by myself -reading books, doing homework, and occasionally napping. Then I would go home. It was rather easy, even natural, to deprive myself of the most important thing in life: other people. This I did not notice all at once, but rather I felt the weight of it accumulate over time.

Making friends was new for me. On a campus of great size, I had always assumed it was easy. But after a few weeks, I realized it would take some extra effort on my part, some entirely new strategy I had never used before.

I had become so used to working within structured environments. High school, as awful as I thought its social aspect was, was an indispensable opportunity for meeting interesting people. Being forced to share company with the same people day after day, grueling experience though it may be, is like a kind of -forgive me- mass spectrometer that separates particles not of like mass, but personalities better suited for each other.

I still had old friends from high school, but the bulk of them eventually drifted off. Even those that went to the same university I would see less and less often. It is as much my fault as theirs, for the simple fact that we were separated had a major effect. Inertia is a force to be reckoned with.

I fared no better at making new friends as I did at holding on to the older ones.

In class I could make acquaintances. To my surprise, I actually had the ability to make conversation with strangers. I could joke with classmates, I could develop rapport, and people even seemed to like me sometimes. But taking that vital step, actually making that crucial connection outside of the common environment? Completely beyond me. I didn't even have the vocabulary for it. I could only think back to grade school invitations: "wanna come over and play?" I couldn't very well say that. Neither could anybody else, I guess. So bonds tended not to form. And soon enough, semesters would come to an end, classes would dissolve, and those potential friends really would disappear forever. They go off to take other classes, and make semester-long acquaintances with others.

Where do you go to find friends? Is making friends even a conscious act? Can you go up to someone out of nowhere, have a conversation, and honestly make plans to develop a friendship? I couldn't imagine that happening.

Or do friends, like so many things in life, happen purely based on circumstance and coincidence, never consciously? Yes or no, there were certainly ways of increasing the odds. Things which I generally avoided doing, in favor of unfulfilling alternatives, and for reasons unexplainable.

Liking

I still liked the women. And I liked the very act of liking them, of admiring them. Of finding qualities in them to fall for. Of imagining what could be going through their heads. So much of the time, I spent admiring those around me, picking their souls apart, wondering what they were like, really. But I would never know most of them, because I didn't have the confidence or the guts. Just like making any friends, I had no idea how to form closer acquaintances with these girls. And around me, I saw them all falling victim to cooler, better-prepared guys who knew what they were doing.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time ruminating over the fact that I had not yet even dated a girl. In my mind, I had the most magical ideas of what I was looking for. But all around me, I could not seem to find anything. And even when I did find someone that looked promising, things never seemed to work out in even the most basic of ways.

Forever, I seemed to be stuck in that phase of admiration from afar. A familiar position. Even a comfortable position, despite my intense desire to break out of it. Yes, there was comfort in liking someone. Focusing infatuation on one individual was, to me, like coming home. Because, honestly, the feeling I got when wondering -wondering about the possibilities a perfect world could present, the possibilities of the girl thinking even remotely related things about me, and my construction of convoluted fictional futures together- that was the closest I'd ever been to a real romantic connection. As sad as that is, it was home. It was my love.

And I'd been in such love so many times. My history comprised so many such loves that I could now predict it coming and going. It was a familiar pattern of ups and downs, altered perceptions, and intense emotions. And with the end of them, always an overwhelming feeling of dread, the feeling of complete wrongness, of being completely mistaken, of having taken advantage of my own emotions.

There were two major factors that were the foundation for this tragic theater of the heart:

1) Like
The inevitable first glimpse of the 'like'. Usually, this was sparked not just by observing people. Rather, this was when someone took some kind of friendly action toward me. This could range from a rather nice compliment down to the tiniest smile. All it amounted to was evidence that someone didn't hate me. The greatest quality I liked in a given person, as selfish as that might be, was them liking me.

2) What If
Following the 'like', I would start to take an interest, with at least a portion of my mind wondering 'what if...?' What if I got to know her better? What if she liked me? Along with this pondering, I would make some investigation into circumstances, if at the very least to make sure there was even the slightest possibility. But in the end, imagining would prove more interesting to me than actual investigative work. My optimistic posturing would eventually distort the image of the entire situation.

After this, it all played out pretty much the same. I would get to know her a little better. But at the same time, my mind would use every piece of information possible to build a 'case', evidence to fuel my misguided thought that the girl was 'it'. I would like her more as more evidence accrued. This would leave me in a highly vulnerable state, and unable to cope when the truth hit me, the sobering reality that I had managed to avoid noticing for that long. Either that the girl didn't like me, or that I didn't actually like her.

This was the pattern that I'd followed so far. Not only that, but at this point I was able to recognize it, and expect it. Even with the benefit of knowledge from my past mistakes, I would still knowingly allow myself to fall victim to them again.

Why?
Because I liked it.

There were the ups, the stressed waves of emotion, fueled by fictional hopes -and they felt absolutely wonderful. There was nothing to compare to that moment, having convinced myself that a girl liked me, and wondering what I would do about it, making future plans, wondering how even THOSE would turn out. Even without the complicated thoughts, there was a simplistic relaxation that came with 'knowing' this happy 'reality' of someone feeling similar to how I feel, of finding someone. Relaxation -feeling alright. Utterly alright. As if there were nothing more in the world I needed.

There were the downs too. Days where I was convinced that I had been wrong from the start. But even these, no matter how bad, were only as bad as the real world that I had escaped so long ago. And the chances were, I would pull out of the dip once I collected more evidence. They made the ups feel even better, of course.

So I surfed the waves of emotion, and I enjoyed it. I was addicted to it even. For all I knew this was what real love amounted to -onesided though it was, it was so all-encompassing. So exhausting. So trying. So full of life.

Living in the very meaning of the word 'hope'. Hope was my hobby.

The Lineup

There were quite a few of the girls then, and they all fit my pattern. My poison.

Anne was cute. She was really cute, and that is what I first noticed about her. In my calculus class, and my physics class. She was what one would call 'the sweetest thing' when you heard her talk, and saw the way she looked around. And in class, sometimes she would do the cutest thing: she would hiccup. This little girlie hiccup, an idiosyncrasy that, over time, had me sighing with admiration from the back row.

I'd listen to Anne and her friend talk. I sat in the hallway, did my crossword, and eavesdropped on them before class started. I found out about her little worries about classes, about how she lived alone in a dorm room, all kinds of little things. Then after a couple of months, I actually got to talk to her in physics lab for a wee bit. She was cute; not terribly interesting, but cute. I adored it.

I listened more closely, over the semester. I smiled when she hiccuped, which seemed to happen pretty often in class. Then I heard her talking about drinking. Then I heard her talking to her friend about getting completely wasted. Then her hiccups sounded slightly less cute. Then she talked again about spending the whole weekend drunk. This was no longer cute. Then she hiccuped, and I smiled for different reasons. This girl was a complete and total lush. I felt silly for letting myself fall for that.

With that gradual realization, the semester long crush came to an end. I'd talked to her a grand total of a few times, at the very least. But she had been so dang cute at first.

The next girl, Julie, was really nice. Wholesome even. She was no lush, she wasn't mean, and she liked people. She talked to everyone who sat next to her, and easily made friends. She talked to me, and I loved that. It was spring semester, and she was in my Japanese class.

Eventually, I developed a rapport with her. Two days a week I would spend the hour or so before class preparing with her and her friends. I just sat there, maybe we said a few things, but I was mostly pretty quiet. I liked her company, and I thought about her more and more.

I found out where Julie worked. She worked right by me. She worked in an art gallery. How cool is that? So I showed up there, and she showed me the art, which was way cool. Then I would talk to her, about classes, plans, all that stuff. She was very nice, and smiled and talked back to me. The next week, after a lot of nervous deliberation, pacing, and pondering, I returned to the gallery to 'say hi' again.

It became a weekly thing. My excuse was that I would stop by before work and see her. As always, she smiled, and responded to me, even when my conversation was wearing thin.

Then I did it. It was a warm spring day, near finals week. I all but guaranteed myself that she liked me. So I finally said to her 'do you think we could hang out sometime?' or something to that effect. The closest I could come asking her out, really. Then I got the answer of answers.

She was still smiling, but a kind of unreadable smile. "We'll see," she said, looking in the direction of my rapidly confused-looking face. Alright. I pondered the meaning of "we'll see" for weeks and weeks. I could reach no conclusion. Did it mean she will get back to me later? Did it mean, she wanted me to form a more specific request? Did it mean, literally, we will see how the wheel of fate spins? Or, my worst fear, did it just mean that I should lay off?

I tried talking to her more, but it seemed like "we'll see" was it. She remained nice as always, but she was indestructible. My drive fizzled out, baffled by "we'll see."

She was too nice for her own good. Too nice for me, maybe anyone. She only gave her time to everyone.

That was a whole year, gone in two girls. Mistakes, both of them. But at least different types of mistakes.

The next fall, I fell for a girl who sat next to me in math class. Rose. Her aura was bubblegum. A cute glasses-wearing girl with long blond hair and stylish jeans. I talked to her once or twice about her crazy family. But I didn't even have the guts to talk to her more than that. At least, by the time I did, class was over anyways. I think I might have tried to catch her after the final, but she took a different route out the door and out of my life.

I didn't even get the chance to make a terrible mistake with her.

There were others too, of course. Maybe they didn't make impressions that lasted as long. But they were certainly there for the moment, occupying my days. Giving reason, a vague hope to my everyday student life. But of course like their counterparts, these similarly faded out over time, became unfeasible.

There really is nothing quite like that moment. That point when you realize that the optimism you hold -the hope you have constructed, the emotional gamble you made- has all been for nothing. When it crumbles into unfeasibility, when the logical system set up to support my desires can no longer stand, and it crumbles.

It is an important moment. Many times, I liked to use it as a reminder. It was a time for me to recollect myself. Disaster notwithstanding, I took it as an opportunity to learn a lesson. Any lesson. I usually could think of something to tie everything together. And if only I could learn from the lesson, the mistake -theoretically- could be avoided.

But as the situations became more and more familiar, thinking of new lessons to learn became difficult. Especially when what I was learning became more and more contradictory to what I had already learned. The only pattern I could surmise, over time, was that I was destined for failure.

The Void

And then it stopped happening.
I stopped falling in love. I stopped constructing the fantasies on offhand encounters with friendly girls.
After I had completely analyzed my pattern, it stopped occurring.

I busied myself with school. I continued to make the dean's list. I went home and played videogames. I read books. I talked with my family. There was nothing out there that I wanted, really. Nobody piqued my interest.

With friends too, I generally stuck with the same familiar ones that I had become accustomed to hanging out with. My life assumed the nature of a rerun. It was a fun episode, but nothing really much happened to advance the plot, and over time it got less and less fun. It was static.

And the time went by awfully fast. Before I knew it, another year was over. Two years of college, done with! And nothing to say for it but a pile of credits.

Collision

I fell off my bike on finals week.

I was pedaling as fast as I could toward my Japanese Film presentation. My old backpack from high school slung over my shoulder, flopping in the wind. It was an old backpack, and one of the straps had torn off, leaving it dangling from the bottom a couple of feet below my shoulder. This was something I'd been used to for sometime, as the strap had broken a long time ago.

Travelling at a pretty high velocity, I was completely unprepared when the ground rose up to smash me and throw the bicycle behind me. All I knew, was that the wheels stopped turning -they were unable to turn, because the strap from my backpack had lodged in between the spokes. And while the back wheel did stop, the bicycle certainly could not. It dragged along the ground, and the mass that consisted of me and the bicycle started to roll forward in the wheel's stead.

I hit the ground on my shoulder, and the bike had fallen on my legs. I tried to get up, but could only crawl. Before long, I realized I had forgotten how to breathe. My arm couldn't move. I sat on the ground for a while, looking around.

How did I get here? What just happened? Why did I LET it happen?
I gotta get to my final.

For several weeks afterward, my arm didn't seem to work well, and could only do so under extreme pain.

That week, I also bumped into two old acquaintances.

On the way to another final, I bumped into a girl I hadn't seen since high school. The initial sense of familiarity was good. But we talked only briefly, the old 'catch up' routine. It turned out that she was graduating early, with a degree in journalism, no less. I was impressed. I asked about her future plans, and she said she was probably going to graduate school, in some other state. Somewhere important.

She was leaving. I looked at her for a bit while we were talking, and I couldn't shake the fact that she looked amazing. She looked like a moviestar. Like a journalist star, I guess. She was intelligent, she was pretty, and I knew her. And she was leaving.

I didn't make very good conversation. I probably told her how boring my school prospects were. And I don't think I made as much of an effort as I wanted to keep in touch.
Then we said goodbye.

I would usually want to kick myself after such an encounter, but there was something notable about it, and I let myself go.

Later that very day, I bumped into another girl from the past: Vorn herself. As usual, she was very friendly. Though we had only seen each other a few times since high school, she always greeted me like we were close friends, which I liked to think we were. With her, too, we played catch up. "What have you been up to?" and "What are you doing this summer?"

She asked me if there were any girls I liked. I felt pretty bad. Usually, I would have been able to come up with one in zero seconds. But coming from nearly a year of no crushes, I didn't have anything.

"There haven't really been any recently," I said, "I just can't find any anymore."

Vorn continued, rather persistently: "Why's that?"

"Well, there's no one really in my classes anymore, what with it being technology. Plus, whenever I look around, I can't really find anyone."

She became agitated: "Where are you looking?"

I was frozen. I thought about it for a bit. Then realized I was going to have to lie.
"I guess... ummm. Around campus."

She was clearly angry at me: "You mean to say, that in a University with tens of thousands of students, and countless clubs and places in which to meet people, that you haven't looked at all?"

She was being really mean to me. But she was right: I had stopped trying. Maybe I had never really tried.


Waiting for girls to sit next to me, waiting for my emotions to grow on them, waiting for the cycle to continue itself, for its tires to keep rotating.
And I had been the first to complain that when things DID seem to happen, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. But those, really, were only the ones that seemed to fall into place, with little to no effort on my part. I would obsess over anyone who came close, and then I would be let down. Effortless.

Why wasn't I out there? Why wasn't I searching every day of my life? If it was such an important thing for me -which it was- why wasn't I out looking for it?

I apologized to Vorn. And then I thanked her.

In the span of my week, my world had been rocked in no less than three separate ways. Hauling my senseless left arm to my last final, there was something forming in my mind.


The world was passing me by. My old habits were dragging me down. Old friends and opportunities were disappearing. And I was just watching it happen.

Then my thoughts formed:

'My history may have been plagued with colorful failures, to say the least. But that certainly doesn't mean that I'm doomed to carry on repeating the same mistakes.

'So what if it always seems to go wrong? If there's hope in even the smallest of things, there is hope IN that hope. Even if things won't ever go as 'right' as I can plan them out in my head, that doesn't mean there won't be wonders.

'When I look at everyone around me, I see people finding each other. Stories of love and romance coming true. I used to see this as an affront to my own existence. As life's meanspirited joke on me. But it's not mean. And it has nothing to do with me. It is, in fact, WONDERFUL. People out there are finding each other all of the time. Romance is alive! Magic is out there! These people that find it, they are fortunate.

'Fortunate people are out there. And as long as that's true, it means that there is a possibility for me. It doesn't happen all the time. Maybe not even very often, maybe not to many people. But it Happens. It really does. That means It Can happen.

'But let's face it: It can use all of the help that It can get.

'I may be a shy person. But I do have a manner of relating to people. I do. I can. And my disposition does NOT preclude me from making real friends, as easy as it is to say so.

"I'm the main character in this story. I drive events. I can MAKE things happen. At the very least, I can Help them, in the best way I can.

So here: Here's to making things happen.

With girls
With friends
With life

Finale?

Is that it? Is it really that simple?

No. Probably not.

But real life doesn't have easy answers. And the easier the answers, the less complete they are. Life is too complicated to whittle down to a few tidy lines of wisdom.
And even following simple advice is more complex than it should be. People are imperfect, even when they try their hardest to do what they know is right.

For the sake of a story, though?

It's a start. There's always a start.

Dream

It ends more or less how it begins.

From the time I was old enough to have conscious thoughts, it was thus.

I dreamt of a someone. It was anyone, really. It was a feeling of being with that someone. Togetherness, a sort of completeness I'd never felt before.

It is this dream that I still hold onto. The details have changed. Complications have been added, some of which have in the end obscured what it is the dream was really about. At its core though, the dream stays the same.

A simple desire.

Infinite possibilities for it to come true.


*****














(Thus concludes my sordid personal girly-related affairs, "-Liking-: Refractions and Infractions" )