A True Story

By someone else on September 1st, 1997

I feel obliged to bring up running into a girl named Kate during my quarter at the UW. I’d originally met her in high school through Thespians, she graduated a year ahead of me, and had dated B**** for most of her senior year. Despite all that, I’d never gotten to know her. I’d always wanted to, but never seemed to be able to get to know her that well.

So, Kate and I hung out a bit. I’d always had a mild attraction for her, and so I always tried to encourage any activities I could do with her. I’d introduced her to “the guys” at one of Juanune’s birthday functions (the end of that first school year), and some time after that she began hanging out with them a bit more regularly. I was a bit envious of that, because living in Kent, I wasn’t able to spend that much time with my friends up in the University District.

It was the summer break of 1994 when Nicole came back into town, and once again the old anguish returned. I came home one night, irrepairably depressed, and desperately needing someone to talk to about it.

I turned to Kate, and in that act all my troubles were conceived.

Kate became a crutch for me. I had any problem, I called Kate up. Eventually, I decided that I was in love with her. I don’t know that I was, but that’s what I decided. My suicidal tendencies, oddly enough, also returned. Great fucking combination. Especially when I confessed my feelings for her, and she turned me down.

I don’t know that I’ve ever truly been suicidal for more than maybe five minutes at a time. At least, not in the sense that I think of it. I’ve often wanted to die, sometimes very badly, but very rarely have I wanted to actually take my own life. I can think of only one real occasion off the top of my head, and it was absolutely unassociated with the events around Kate. But I did think I wanted to kill myself, and that became a weapon I used against Kate.

Kate had fairly replaced Nicole in my obsession department. If anything, I think this experience was much worse because Kate didn’t have the excuse of religion that Nicole had. She just simply wasn’t attracted to me. Something my mind, as I think I’ve said before, just could not wrap around at the time. I figured I had confessed my love, so she was obligated to at least give me the barest smidgen of a chance. No such luck.

In fact, she added insult to injury by having a purely physical relationship with a guy I fairly hated at the time. I was so upset when I heard the news I called in sick to work. This was followed by a relationship with another friend of mine right on the heels of breaking up with the friend that I hated at the time. It was nearly more than my neurotic little mind could handle. I’d been scorned, dejected, for what seemed at the time to be no reason whatsoever.

I rapidly grew to hate Kate. I suppose I’d begun to grow tired of a lot of things she did early on, but I genuinely grew to hate her for this imagined crime she had done against me. I’d cry in her arms, I’d threaten to kill myself, then I’d try and make her feel guilty for some part of it. At one point I promised that I wouldn’t kill myself so long as we were friends, and then spent several months begging, pleading, screaming for her to release me from my promise.

She’d become a whipping-boy for 19 years of anger and frustration. I must say that she put up with it admirably well, and she did her best to try and help a person who ultimately didn’t want to be helped. Really. I don’t know how to describe what kind of hell I put her through. It is, quite honestly, the absolute shittiest thing I can think of to do to someone, and I did it to her. And she put up with it for a very long time. Finally we grew to hate each other so much that we just stopped talking to each other… I think it was that summer of 1995. The subtle irony of it was that when I contributed the straw that broke the camel’s back, I had originally meant to help her… sort of. I’d gone off on her in email about how she’d totally lost her own identity with her current boyfriend, and she told me to fuck off. I harbored antipathy for her for a while… Recently I saw her at a party for the first time in over a year, and seeing her in the flesh made me realize what an absolute bastard I’d been. I didn’t think we’d ever be friends again, but I did make a point of apologizing. In email, that is, since I was pretty drunk when she showed up at the party, and I figured that an apology from a drunk would not be too meaningful. Why apologize? Because she deserved it, and I don’t like having enemies.