i promised to tell you the story of how cy and i got together, and i'm making good on it.
when i was a sophomore in high school (claremore hs) my friend *melissa* introduced me to a guy she went to church with that she thought i'd get along with well (he went to sequoyah hs). by introduced i mean gave him my phone number. :) he called, and we chatted. a while after we'd started talking, he expressed an interest in meeting me in person. since mel and i had a choir event going on that week, we agreed to meet up with him afterwards and all go have dinner with a group of our friends from school.
dinner that evening was one of those magnificently awkward events from which i only remember all the crazy things that happened, and none of the normal ones.
did i mention i thought the guy was a creeper at first? seriously. earlier that day at our choir event (caroling for dickens on the boulevard in downtown claremore) i spotted a guy watching us and pointed him out to mel as a possible predator (the kind that chris hansen introduces people to over the television). oops.
anyway, the guy, who turned out not to be a predator but was in fact very nice, and i started dating. well, as much as anyone can be dating at 15/16. we went out to movies and such, talked on the phone some more. i took him to my winter ball. i had the flu a lot while we were dating, so he would come over to my house and hang at a safe distance, usually dragging his best friend along for support. he brought me flowers a lot. it was so sweet. but the problem was that the guy was literally incapable of making a decision. totally spineless. i prefer someone with a bit more spark, a little fight. so... it didn't work out. i dumped him in an email. boo hoo.
after i dumped him we went out on a few more dates, which were all very fun and good, except for the me having dumped him through an email part that he couldn't quite get over. whatever.
i saw him randomly throughout high school a few times after we stopped dating, but usually he was dating losers so i didn't really feel bad for not being nice. i was a phenomenal bitch to him back then. i still have some problems understanding why my behavior then was not appropriate, but i'm working on it.
fast forward to senior year at the university of tulsa, where by some random chance i sign on to AOL and he's signed in, too. i didn't even realize i still had him on my buddy list from six years previous. so we start chatting it up again. making phone calls. tells me about his life, how things are doing, that he's in the Navy, etc. that thanksgiving he flew to visit me from connecticut (don't ask him how much he spent on the plane ticket, it was obscene) and we caught up. it was great. so we're doing this kinda awkward phone-dating thing (thank goodness for facebook; we were "complicated" for what seemed like an eternity) and having a good time. a few months later, some things went really bad for me. started with me getting hurt and ended with me being in the hospital. i got scared of people knowing what was going on, so i stopped talking to everyone and got really paranoid. add to that a constant supply of morphine, and i couldn't deal with my own life anymore. between everything that was going on, i freaked, and cut him out. snip snip.
i tried to put the pieces of what i had left together the best i could. unfortunately, he wasn't part of what i had left.
so i concentrated on getting things done one day at a time. moved back in with my mom to sort out my life. started going to school again, this time for communications, something that i really had room to grow into. got back into the clubs and organizations that mattered to me. started talking to him again.
he had a girlfriend, but it was cool, because i only wanted to be friends. after everything else, i couldn't handle more. so we were friends, and it was great. until his girlfriend decided it wasn't and demanded that he stopped talking to me... so i told him to do it. i owed it to him; i had ditched him last, and it was his turn to ditch me.
it was unfair, but it didn't last long. later that fall i was at a conference and courtney called me, concerned, because he expressed on his status that he was clearly unhappy. she asked if i was going to call him, but i knew i couldn't. so i sent him a little text letting him know that he could continue pretending i didn't exist, or he could tell me what was wrong and i would try to help any way i could, but that i would respect his choice either way. not even a minute later, he called.
he told me everything. i listened. i encouraged him to try to work things out the way they were, but some things were broken beyond repair. things between the two of us, however, only got better.
we started the whole "complicated" thing again (along with a matching migraine). back and forth. we made the effort to talk, to communicate, to visit when we could. except for a few small hiccups, things kept getting better.
one of the reasons we were only ever "complicated" for a long time was because he worried that the physical distance between where we both lived (him in new england, me in OK) would only strain our relationship, and that we wouldn't be able to handle it if he were to be deployed for any extended period of time. but it was never a real problem. sure, it was hard, but it wasn't anything we couldn't handle.
so to ring in the new year, we decided to give it a go. full tilt.
it keeps getting better.
