The Romantic Disaster Trilogy: Part 3
This relationship was my first, and it lasted almost three years. It happened about a decade ago, and my memory of the matter has already largely faded, but perusing some notes I took of it turned up a few entertaining bits. (The notes themselves were already retrospective - I decided in 2003 to try to write down as much as I could remember of her, for reasons that will become obvious later on.)
This story is fairly serious near the end though. Perhaps it's good that the trilogy ends on a didactic note.
* ~ * ~ *
GumDrop [not her real name] was two years older than me, but about half a foot shorter, and roughly half my mass. She looked very young, dressed very young, and acted very young. Understandably, when we walked around in public, people would wonder if she was my kid sister. In actuality, she really
was the youngest sister in her family, and you could tell it from her behavior. Despite being 20 when I first met her and 23 when we parted ways, she constantly skipped around making Pikachu noises. What sort of college-age student is so immature that they still obsessively play a video game, I ask you?
In retrospect, I guess she would have been Humbert Humbert's dream come true. She was very slender and small, and had very skinny limbs. Both of these would become unexpectedly significant later on, but for now people who knew we were dating thought I was either very lucky, or some sort of pervert. Her favorite activity with me was riding on my shoulders, because it gave her the line-of-sight of somebody who was over six feet tall.
Perhaps surprisingly, for somebody so childlike, she was the one who started the relationship, and she did this in a fairly unusual way. She found out which classes I attended, then signed on as an auditing student with them. She found out which coffee shops were near my dorms, and set up her study books there. She enlisted her friends to get to know me and mention her name. Basically, she did all the work, which was pretty much necessary because at that time I had virtually no interests outside of
Goldeneye007, the Nintendo game, which was awesome back in 1999 and still is pretty kick-ass today.
This was immensely flattering (not to mention a little disquieting) but it had a bad effect for me. Being my first girlfriend ever, it basically spoiled me into thinking a) I was striking enough so that girls would do all the legwork leaving me to play
Goldeneye007, and b) my looks were going to last forever.
In retrospect, these axioms have both aged poorly.
Our first date was a nice evening walk along the river Wear, or possibly the Tyne, amid the gloriously late sunset that occurs in the north of England (on the two consecutive days of sunny weather they call summer over there). I think I talked about religion before she steered the conversation to music and more diplomatic topics. We parted ways with a chaste kiss outside her dorm room.
Our second date involved a birthday cake (mine) and champagne (hers). After we were done she took off all her clothes and sat down on the bed next to me. Things could theoretically have gone very well from that point onwards, but I had just sat a 3-hour finals exam in Old Norse skaldic poetry immediately after completing the Nintendo game
Goldeneye007 with all 23 cheats unlocked over about 10 hours' straight playing, and I don't remember much because I passed out from the champagne. Her memories were allegedly pretty good, which makes me wonder if we're even remembering the same night.
I do recall writing a kick-ass dissection of the crippled blacksmith symbolism in
Völundarkviða and getting an "A" in that course, but this is not particularly important to the story.
GumDrop came from a conservative family living in a conservative culture, and she planned to go back to her home country after finishing school in Britain. So there were certain delicate borders we had to respect in our relationship. She was just barely hidebound enough, and I was just barely inexperienced enough, to actually observe the limits and think it could actually work. It drove us both insane, but I suppose to people who don't know better, it was the best we ever knew.
Three years passed, during which there were numerous clashes and reconciliations. A wiser person would have moved on, but for whatever reason we stuck together - her out of a growing panic that we would have to part ways, and I out of a general sense that nothing apart from
Goldeneye007 merited any actual concern.
We both graduated, we exchanged gifts (she gave me a fancy fountain pen), we met each others' parents. Things went amicably. In June 2001, she went back home to her country. To paraphrase
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, she did not give me anything that I couldn't return to them.
* ~ * ~ *
Already I had learned several bad habits from her, mostly involving chastity, courtly love, and other quaint niceties of a bygone age. I set about trying to unlearn them, but the process is a slow one and it's usually best if the former lover doesn't interfere. We even attempted a long-distance relationship for a few months before finally calling it quits. Funnily enough, we broke up on October 1, when I was in China.
The conversation is noteworthy so I reproduce it here.
Me: Hey, I know I just got off the line with you, but did you know what day it is?
Her: No. What day is it?
Me: It's Chinese National Liberation Day! On this day fifty two years ago, the Chinese Communists declared the nation free from the slavery and oppression of the past.
Her: ... so ...?
Me: Well we broke up on this day too, freeing us from the slavery and oppression of the past.
Her: [Very many very bad words. Hangs up.]
Me: ...what did I say? I swear I will never understand women. Geez.
There was radio silence for a while from GumDrop. I tried to sidle in with a few Korean girls at my college in Beijing, but the ones I wanted weren't interested and the ones who wanted me I didn't particularly like. The bad habits tripped me up on a few occasions, but I was making good progress on recovering from them. Eventually I started being more open, being more proactive. Doing some of the legwork of starting a relationship. In short, being a vaguely normal human adult male.
Then, months later, without any warning, I learned that GumDrop had died.
* ~ * ~ *
In late 2002, early 2003, I got an email that actually routed into my Spam folder. I wouldn't even have noticed it, except this was back in the day that you had to manually empty Spam folders. By some stroke of fortune, I did my Spam sweep just a few hours after receiving the email (otherwise it would have been buried under the spam and I would have deleted it with all the rest). Before clicking the Empty button, I noticed GumDrop's name in the subject line, even though the sender address was an unfamiliar male.
The unfamiliar male was her boyfriend - my successor - and he had the unenviable job of going through her email address and emailing all her address book contacts with the news. Apparently, her short stature and the slender build and the extremely thin limbs had not been a coincidence. GumDrop had had a congenital disorder in her gall bladder, which had finally turned cancerous and killed her in the space of months after they first diagnosed it. Even to the end, she had retained some slight control over her fate: GumDrop grimly held on through the weeks of jaundice and chemotherapy until the day of her 25th birthday, before dying in her sleep that afternoon.
According to her culture's tradition, they held the body in rest for 100 days and then conducted a funeral. Already a penniless master's degree student in America by that time, I booked a flight back to the Old World and attended, rubbing shoulders with the senior clerics and the retired colonels who knew her father. I shook hands and embraced her new boyfriend in commiseration, a man newly stricken by a loss that could not even be described as widowhood. She was cremated over an evening and her ashes were taken in a packed-earthenware jug to the shores where she had played as a child, and then she was laid to the seabed there - to disperse at last. One of her brothers also bought a commemorative place for her name on a NASA vessel. It gives me a strange sense of poetic balance to know that her last earthly memorials are both at the bottom of the ocean and high above the clouds.
* ~ * ~ *
Death brings several recollective dilemmas for the survivors. As you can tell from my sentimental prose above, it's hard to think ill of the departed. Their flaws and imperfections fade against the knowledge that memories are all you have left - so let them be
good memories. But it complicates matters when you extend the same positive spin on other elements surrounding them.
An architect might have been a good person, well worth remembering fondly after parting ways. But if he designed a rickety house, common sense suggests putting his design away and trying something else. Sadly for me, GumDrop's death suddenly undid my gradual recovery and reversed my mindset entirely. Now, it felt, every last concession and limitation and restriction I had observed, was suddenly vindicated by the fact that she was gone.
Yes, it had been a struggle. Yes, it had been a terrible exercise in self-denial. Yes, it had twisted my heart and mind in knots with the impossibility of reconciling the desires of the body against the ideals of her faraway culture. Yes, to all these things... but she was gone, and in the end, her departure somehow justified all this while she was alive.
There is a logical fallacy that follows from this. The justification above is retrospective - it is essentially a post-hoc rationalization. (Perhaps a fairly harmless one, as it helps a grieving survivor deal with the death of a loved one, but a rationalization nonetheless.) My error was to extrapolate that philosophy going forwards.
If these painful values happened to be vindicated in the past - then it stands to reason they must be vindicated after all future scenarios too.
This axiom has not aged well either. Unfortunately, it took me seven years to see it.
The details are long and boring and so I must compress. Suffice it to say that after a few more personal stumblings (some of which you see elsewhere in this thread), I finally turned it around. Oddly enough, not through any lesson of my own, but through somebody else. I witnessed the self-destruction of a close friend who embraced a position of dependence, and who completely abdicated control over his future. This was the point of realization: the transfixed moment when an addict stands on the street corner with his last check in his hand and he suddenly understands fully that it's his last check and it's time to go into rehab.
Only, for me it was different. I went into law school.
* ~ * ~ *
Today, things could go either way. I became a lawyer. In the latest housemoving, I found the fountain pen she gave me. It still writes, serviceably well, with a replaced nib.
I'm at the end of my third decade, I've lived on three different continents, and I've got three academic degrees to my name. I've had three significant others who have really mattered to me (including GumDrop) - so perhaps I have some catching up to do: maybe, maybe not.
But a decade on from the heady inexperience of GumDrop, there's some lessons learned. I'm hardly old enough to pretend to any wisdom compared to my peers on these message boards, but there's still a lot of stuff I really wish I'd known earlier...
* Do what your heart is telling you to - live life to the fullest. You never know when it's closing time, and all the things you put off for when "the time is right" are impossible to finish in the time you have left.
* Don't be afraid to define what's truly important to you. Once you do, resist people who want to convince you that self-denial is a virtue. If the people around you disapprove of what you want, find new people. You can lose friends and make new ones. Lost ideals are harder to replace.
* If you followed a rule in the past, and it yielded good results through a major quirk of chance or fate - maybe it's not a good rule for the future. You never know when a major quirk of chance will fail to materialize when you really, really need it.
* Learn from past missteps, but don't waste time on anger. Small mementos and retrospection help ease the pain, but don't spend so long on it that you're still living in the past.
* It's a cliché but it's a cliché for a reason: Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and in the end, it's only against yourself.
* ~ * ~ *
No hard feelings, GumDrop. It really was good while it lasted.
