Almost 21

When I was 21, or around that age, I was a volatile young man. I was emotionally reckless. Verbally abusive. Selfish in ways I couldn't even begin to understand at the time. I wasn't socially awkward, I don't think, but I was a creep. At that time, I don't think I ever turned a girl down if she was down sexually. The thing of it was, I was very good at keeping it all under wraps. It was only after someone I felt crossed me did I really let out all my fucking crazy.

TL;DR: I was a creep but I didn't realize it at the time.

I bet if you asked any of my friends from that period, they probably thought I was a mostly normal, funny, overly confident, sometimes arrogant, goofy sort of person. I was self-deprecating. I had a sarcastic comment for everything. I felt like I could get along with anybody and everybody. I wasn't the type to seek out to be the center of attention, that's never been me, but I enjoyed partying and being around lots of people basically every night. I was partying all the time. I had a lot of close guy and girl friends.

But just before I turned 21, I had a short-lived fling with a girl that I won't name because I still know her and even though both of our lives have moved on and then some, yeah, I'd just rather not say her name.

I met her on LiveJournal. She was in a Virginia Tech group. That's where I went to college for the uninformed. And in this VT group, it was intended for incoming freshmen and they would join this group and they'd be like "oh hey, we're all going to VT, we can get to know the campus together and make friends."

Well I stalked this shit like the sexual predator that I was or thought myself to be. I went out with this one girl. I brought her to an apartment party at my friends' place. She promptly ditched me immediately to go meet new people at this party which occupied a few floors of a single building. No harm, no foul really. I didn't think there was any potential there after having met her.

And since I was attempting to holler at every female with a pulse from this LiveJournal VT group, and been ditched by this one girl and presumably bad-mouthed by her, it seemed like any potential prospects from this VT group were DOA.

Then I met the aforementioned girl that I had the fling with. And maybe I'm looking back at it with rose-colored glasses, but for the first 48 hours, like I was swooning. We clicked. We laughed. We made out. We spent basically two days together non-stop. And me being the emotional co-dependent that I was at the time, like I was IN. All-in. She wasn't at all. But I was.

Long story short, as you might have predicted, it didn't work out. She did a similar thing like that other girl where we went to a party. She met a guy there and promptly ditched me. These details don't really matter. Really, this whole story doesn't matter. We were kids doing what kids do. We hopped from bed to bed. We broke hearts. Shit happens. The story just leads to another thing, yeah, you'll see.

But after being ditched and I remember I called her and called her and called her. Over and over. I reacted and responded in a really, really juvenile, ugly way. I got home that night and wrote this epic LiveJournal entry (I know, I was emotionally transparent and just had no shame about putting my entire life online. Not much has changed as you can see.)

And it was brutal. Way over the top. Totally unnecessary. We didn't speak for years. But y'know you get older. I was at Tech for a million years. I think we ended up having a class together maybe 3 or 4 years later. Or we ran into each other and she had a class down the hall. College is such a blur. But we buried the hatchet so to speak. I probably unblocked her on AOL Instant Messenger afterward. And we added each other on Facebook so water's under the bridge in the world of social interactions of 20somethings in the mid-2000s. I think she's married now and has a kid. We've probably spoken twice in the past decade. She is barely a footnote in the novel of my life, no offense to her of course because that's true in both directions.

But I mention all of this because of a song.

There is one song, for whatever reason, that reminds me of her. It is a song by a band (The Snake, The Cross, The Crown) that I had really gotten into at the time and it was a song I listened to over and over and over again during our brief 48-hour tryst and afterward. The song came on randomly tonight on my Google Music so I thought I'd share it and you can imagine yourself as emo me at just about 21 years of age... Fires raging in my heart and burning up my soul. Truthfully, he's still in there somewhere and makes an appearance from to time, but thankfully he's a little more mellow... a little wiser and little older. And apparently he speaks in the third person.

The song probably won't be anything special to you, but it's a part of me.