"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." - Anne Dudley Bradstreet
They
weren't even my normal brand. I'm a gray box kind of guy -- Trojan Ultra
Thin Lubricated. Yet, because the store I stopped in had a limited selection,
I ended up with the blue box.
I like to think that I was just being prepared -- as opposed to being
presumptuous -- when I bought them during my visit to
Oakdale
last week. If things heated up between
Alex
& I while I was there, I wanted a bit of protection on hand. Of course,
I didn't need them. That's a good thing, too. Shortly after buying them,
I thought I'd lost them.
Jessie came up to visit me the first
couple of days of 2004. In a moment of boredom, perhaps, she started tidying
up my apartment. She often does that when she's here. I'm sort of torn about
it. Do I mind having a cleaner apartment? Of course not. But I don't want
to take advantage of her and I certainly don't want her trying to earn favor
with me. But I digress.
There was a sack from Sears or some other place in the
Oakdale
Mall on the bench in my living room. It mostly had some papers and junk that
I'd cleaned out of my truck. She dumped it out to sort. Of course, my missing
Trojan three-pack fell out, too.
"What are these
for?"
How do you answer a question like that? I went with a simple, "I just wanted
to be prepared." She countered with a nice, "bullshit."
We'd really been having a good time
that night. Actually, every time
Jessie
and I have been together in the past few weeks, things have been great. I
took that as a positive sign. I'm obviously an idiot.
The condoms brought a dark cloud over the night and we ended up having "the
talk." I'm used to having "the talk" with people I date. It's inevitable.
It's supposed to happen in those situations. And because of that,
I'm often prepared for it. I was certainly not prepared for anything last
week.
In early December,
Jessie
told me that she wanted us to date. She wanted it to be official... she and
I... committed and monogamous... to see how things panned out. She later
told me that she didn't think her request was out of the blue, but it was
very out of the blue for me. Of course, it was complicated by the fact that
whatever
Alex
& I are in the middle of came out of nowhere, too.
It didn't take long after
Jessie
& I started talking about "us" for things to turn south. She said the
same things she'd said in December. I told her that I wasn't sure that I
wanted to day anybody. She was upset. There was quite a bit of crying.
It felt very much like December 1999.
In late summer or early fall of 1999,
Jessie
& I had talked about a dating relationship. What made that different
from now was that it was a mutual feeling. It was something that we both
thought we wanted to do. However, fall 1999 was also my first semester of
being without
Jessie
in
Oakdale.
Without her around to spend my free time with, I developed new friendships
and, most importantly, a romance.
Jessie
was literally devastated when she found out about Lindsay. She was depressed
at a level I'd never seen before. She didn't eat right. She shed quite a
few pounds. She had a Christmas tree that year, but said that she was too
depressed to plug in the lights. Nearly every conversation we had in December
1999 involved her crying. Four years later, it still makes me sad to think
about it all.
When the pieces were finally put back together, I never dreamed that we could
come close to that sort of low again. I don't think what's happening between
Jessie
& I now is close... but it certainly feels as low as we've been since
then. And what bothers me is that I knew she'd be upset in December 1999.
I understood the reasons why. Now, I feel as though this has all been dumped
on me without warning and it's left me more confused that
before.
Copyright © 2004, Thomas Fletcher. All Rights Reserved.