Heavy Introduction

Living is hard. Can I give up on it? Let's take a vote - keep going or throw in the towel?

Does that sound bad? How about something different - should I keep trying to live in the world of people or just give up and isolate myself?

That's the question of the year. I'll need to have an answer before this time, 2013. If I don't, then I might as well give up altogether.

I have always been a lonely person. I had a lot of friends in school but few outside. All of my free time was spent by myself, and I always envied my brother, who was constantly hanging out with friends or talking to them on the phone. That didn't change after high school. It has never changed.

However, I've never really wanted "friends - those people you spend time with, who help you waste away the hours. No, what I wanted were true friends, the kind you share your innermost thoughts with, the kind that don't mind when you call them in the middle of the night crying, the kind that actually encourage that sort of thing. Does those people even exist? Or are they all idealistic images created by authors and screenwriters?

I've had two relationships in my life. Both involved girls, stretched across several years, and included several periods, each one lasting a few months, where the other person and I did not speak to one another. The first one started right before the summer of my senior year of high school. She was my first real love, and I struggle with my feelings for her even now. She made me be open, emotionally but most importantly, sexually. What's funny though is that we never touched one another. We communicated over the phone and saw each other a good couple of times, but things never progressed physically, mostly because I was an incredibly shy and naive person that actually thought she didn't want me to touch her unless we were officially "dating." I should have made a move on her, but I didn't. Mistakes of youth. Over the phone, we had a lot of fun with one another; there's an implication there, so I don't have to be too explicit. Read into it. We did eventually kiss, and that was my first kiss, but that happened about three years later, when I was around 19. It was random and very nice, but it wasn't an admission of her love for me or anything like that. We were with some two common friends, who were dating, and who liked me . . .

The second relationship I had started online. I had been a member of a small forum, and my first love joined the forum. She brought along some other friends of hers. (Aside: When I saw that three new people were all from Tennessee, the state from which we all hail, and asked First Love if she knew them, she said no. Which was a blatant lie. She may have been kidding, but I think she was trying to keep me from getting to know them, out of fear that a certain person would steal me from her. Which is exactly what happened.) I started talking to one of these friends, who was very friendly and spent a lot of time online, like I did. She had cerebral palsy and had to use a wheelchair to get around most of the time, but you wouldn't know it just by looking at her. She liked to call herself a cowgirl, so that's the name I'll use. (It sounds better than "Wheelchair," which was my first thought.) Anyways, Cowgirl and I got along swimmingly, and her boyfriend/fiance had this weird situation; they were in a sort of open relationship. There are a lot of details involved that I may get into in the future, but to be short about it, Cowgirl and I were attracted to one another, and her boyfriend gave the go-ahead for us to do whatever we wanted. (I think First Love hated this, and I can completely understand why. But it's hard to feel bad because it was one giant clusterfuck of a situation.)

Cowgirl and I started just talking online. Then we started talking on the phone. Then, because we didn't live too incredibly far from one another (about a forty-five minute drive), we decided that we could see each other in person every now and then. Her fiance actually lived a greater distance from her than I. The first time I met Cowgirl in person, and her fiance who I was sort-of friends with, she gave me a big hug, and we were all excited to see each other, but nothing much happened. We planned a trip to visit First Love, and that trip was what really started things.

The trip involved me and Cowgirl's fiance going to Cowgirl's house, then driving for an hour or so to where First Love lived, to surprise her and make her feel good, because her friends had come to visit. It was also to please us, because we wanted to see her, as the distance had kept us all apart from one another. Surprise her we did, at her workplace even, and though memories are hazy, I distinctly remember turning a dark shade of red when Cowgirl brought up how I had always loved First Love and wanted to be with her, though we were never really together. After she got off work, we went to a local park, where I suddenly got mopey for some reason, and that's when I got my first kiss from First Love. It was simple, just a peck on the lips, but it brightened me up and gave me so much energy I didn't know what to do. I think she did it out of pity, out of concern for me being sad, to cheer me up, but I don't discount the possibility that it was her acting on her true feelings, that a part of her always wanted to be with me. While I don't discount that possibility, I certainly do think it is very unlikely.

After we said goodbye to First Love, Cowgirl gave me my second first kiss, this one far more than a peck on the lips. That kind of kiss I've never gotten from First Love, and have only gotten from one other person, though that was a bad situation, too, and arose out of desperation. But that's not really worth telling and can be ignored, except for the fact that because of it, I have french-kissed two girls and not one.

Cowgirl's fiance planned to take me home, then go back to Cowgirl's house, but we got terrifically lost, due in large part to me not knowing anything about where anything is. However, I must admit that the situation could have been avoided had I only called my parents and explained where we were and asked for directions. The thought did occur to me, but I chose to ignore it. For good reason.

Cowgirl's fiance, because he lived so far away, often slept on the living room couch when he visited, then made the long drive home the next day, so they could spend more time with each other. I assumed that, if we got lost, the same could apply to me and I'd be allowed to spend the night. I assumed right because that's what happened. So, Cowgirl, her fiance, and I got to talk some more at her house, and when her mother went to bed, we got to lie on the living room floor and really enjoy each other's company. It wasn't a threesome, and I didn't get to relieve myself, and it was very strange, but it was the first sexual thing I had done with another person, and it was wonderful. I'll skip the torrid details (though I wouldn't mind sharing them if anybody wanted to hear them), but I got to see Cowgirl's face in ecstasy for the first time and was touched for the first time. It still remains a fond, and pretty funny, memory.

My relationship with Cowgirl lasted for several years, and most of that time, she was engaged to her fiance. Once, for a few weeks, they broke up, and I got to be her official boyfriend for a short time, before they made up and I became the "other man" again. But even though we weren't dating most of the time, it was like we were. We shared our thoughts with one another, had a hell of a lot of "fun" together, and loved one another, to some degree. We had our ups and downs, and our odd relationship finally ended for good when I started acting like a supreme asshole; I was upset, though I didn't realize it at the time, that she had found another fiance, after she and her previous one had broken up for good. I wanted her for myself, something she had never been. I had never minded sharing her, but I wanted her to come to me in the end, and it never happened. It was all for the better though, because I couldn't take care of her the way she needed, give her the support she had to have, and she couldn't do that for me either.

My relationship with First Love was more rocky. Ever since high school, we'd had periods where we knew each other and periods where we didn't, but we always found our way back. Or I made my way back to her; I don't remember too much. (The same thing happened with me and Cowgirl, though with less frequency. That's how I am - I'll want to be close then pull away, scared and trying to ditch them before they ditch me.) What finally made us stop talking altogether was when I tried to tell her about a dream I had where she died. This was when we happened to both be going to the same community college, and I was actually talking to her in person. She didn't want to hear it, being stressed out over her own life, and I walked away. I was angry, because it seemed like she never cared, it seemed like no one ever cared, so I decided to stop bothering. With her and with everyone else. That happened after Cowgirl kicked me out of her apartment (true story; I might elaborate on that later), and in the years since then, I've been wasting my life, forming no real bonds with anybody and actively trying to avoid being close to other people. "I don't need them," I told myself. "Life's more fun when I just watch anime, play video games, and do my own thing. If I try to spend time with people or get close to them, I'll just end up being rejected, even if they seem to like me at first." And I did have fun; I did enjoy myself, and those years were hassle-free and filled with joy.

Then, my computer broke. I could suddenly no longer watch anime or browse the internet. We didn't have the money to fix it, of course. It was winter, and times were tough. We lost cable, too, and soon I couldn't watch TV either. We had one converter box, to allow us to watch local channels, but that went in the living room, and it only worked with an antenna, which we were lucky to be able to afford. (We even had to take it back once, to get the $40 for gas.) With no computer and no TV, and games I had played to death, I found that my life was empty, devoid of anything that mattered. I had no friends, nobody to think about me, and nobody to even think about. I hated First Love and Cowgirl, for abandoning me, for not loving me; I hated the world, for all of the troubles and all of the hardships. I hated everything.

Thanks to the local library, I passed the time by reading books. That rekindled a love I had ignored for the better part of a decade. I had always loved to read when I was a kid, but I had stopped during high school, due in part to having to read so much for my classes and in part to owning a computer with the internet. I have since embraced reading again, and writing as well, which I loved to do when I was young.

The library also, thankfully, had manga, the Japanese comics that commonly feature stories of love and friendship instead of just superheroes in tights. (There are plenty of manga series all about action, however.) One series they had in its entirety was Fruits Basket, about people that don't belong. I had seen the anime (Japanese animation) adaptation of the first eight volumes of the series, which has a total of twenty-three volumes, and coincidentally (or not), it was a series that First Love and I had both seen and talked about during a certain period of our relationship. In the series, there is a large, extended family that is cursed; thirteen members transform into thirteen different animals when hugged by the opposite sex (and when incredibly stressed out or sick); the animals they turn into are based on the twelve zodiac animals, plus the cat that was omitted from God's banquet. First Love compared me to the character of Yuki, who turns into a rat but is very kind and gentle. Yuki is beautiful and often referred to as Prince Yuki by his classmates, due to his beauty and extremely polite manners. She said that I was like a prince. But that is neither here nor there.

Fruits Basket, being about loneliness and isolation and friendship, struck a chord with me, and I often ending up crying while reading it. It made me realize that I needed to fit in somewhere, that I needed to be cared about by someone - that I needed to care about someone else. Since then, I've tried to open my heart up, bit by bit, and now here I am, open to other people but still very much afraid and sure that no one will like me. And though I don't get angry with people, I still assume that they don't care and that I'm just bothering them. And I don't want to be a bother.

So a lot has changed, and I have greatly improved and taken a lot of necessary steps, but I am nowhere close to finding what I want, that special person that will love me for who I am and who I can be with forever. There are people who care about me, and for that I am so incredibly thankful, and I understand myself and who I am more than I ever have before, but lying in bed in the dark, when I want to put my arms around someone, no one is there. And all I can do is either imagine a girl that doesn't exist or think of a girl that isn't available and might never be. I feel like all I do is cause problems for people. And for myself, of course. So do I try to find a new girl to fill the void in my heart? Do I keep wishing my First Love would be my eternal love? Do I realize that loving someone doesn't mean wanting to be with them in a romantic relationship? Or do I give up and go back to how I used to be, enjoying hobbies and shunning society? That would be so much easier, and it might be the better choice. There's no guarantee I'll ever find love, after all. There's no guarantee I'll ever truly be happy. Why not settle for a psuedo-happiness and save myself this trouble?

If only I could easily do that.