But, the point is to both enjoy and explore, and frankly I haven't been writing much otherwise, so I'll go for it. Although "painful" is relative, and two probably don't even count, here are my top four all time break-ups:
- Jennifer
Though of course this story has a happy ending (well, presumably... contact Katie in 2054 for final verification), I insist on including it based on a technicality — we did, for a time, break up — and for sheer drama.
We met in January 1994 in Hilo, and yada yada yada — there was much love and happiness. But Jen and I hit a "rough patch" toward the end of 1996. I had moved back to Honolulu from Hilo to run the student paper, a great adventure that nonetheless sucked the life out of me. Jen had also transferred to follow me, but uninspired by Manoa's offerings, she dropped out (triggering big student loan bills) and ended up entering the wacky world of low-wage retail sales.
So, my soul was held captive in Building 31-D (I'd get there before 7 a.m., and often not leave until nine or ten at night), and Jen — who had left all her college friends in addition to being 3,000 miles from home — was working crap jobs and was generally miserable.
I encouraged, urged, and nagged her to make friends at work. And wouldn't you know it, she did.
She confessed, early on, that she'd developed a "schoolgirl crush" on one of them, a dopey, greasy, pale, long-haired wannabe rock drummer. It was so cliché, it was hilarious — our mutual friends would go into the store just to get a peek at the "Long-Haired Freak" (or LHF, for short). Knowing Jen's lifelong appreciation for the "hair band" '80s aesthetic, and feeling overly secure in our then three-year cohabitative relationship, I humored her sighs and enjoyed the laughs.
Being the trusting, understanding modern guy I was, I even encouraged their friendship.
Yeah, I know.
Suffice it to say, soon after 1997 rolled around, they started going out. She came home late, and I was suspicious. She came home in his clothes, and I was... a little more than suspicious.
Here begins, even in my own mind, a rather blurry montage of cycling tears, shouts, hugs, reconciliation and further betrayal. We had never been more passionate, but our fights had never been so intense. (At one point, the neighbors had called the cops on us.) We seemed to somehow decide that we wanted to be together, but we didn't know how to make that happen.
Then Valentine's Day. I decided to take Jen out for a midnight snack. Instead we got into a horrible wreck, and the other driver was killed.
We were shaken to the core. And in fear, shock and grief, we clung desperately to each other for a while. But not surprisingly, things weren't very stable. A couple of weeks later, I threw Jen out of the apartment. Dumped her on the doorstep of a friend of ours, in fact... who understandibly is no longer a friend of mine.
At the encouragement of said friend, Jen saw the LHF as well as other assorted guys, while I just buried myself even deeper into "work" (failing to develop even decent crushes in the mean time). Of course, we still saw a lot of each other. She was broke and confused. I was out of my mind, and borrowing money from family to pay her student loan and maxed-out credit card bills.
Realizing that things were beyond whacked, we talked, I corresponded with her parents, and as summer rolled around, I put her on a plane back home. Standing at that gate at the Honolulu International Airport, I remember taking a deep breath, and thinking that I'd finally closed a major chapter in my life. Time for a new beginning.
I was right. Two months later Jen came back, pregnant...
A cliffhanger ending, perhaps, but the rest of the story is already in reruns. And in my humble opinion, for all the madness, things turned out pretty damn good.
It's incredible, but also wonderful, how time can eventually turn tragedy (or at least great melodrama) into a merely colorful anecdote. And now I'm cliché, for out of the ashes of my life's lowest point has grown my greatest happiness.
- Diane
Diane was a wonderful, warm-hearted, good-humored, yet appropriately and slightly wicked woman who — as both friends and enemies agree — absolutely did not deserve to be associated with a cur like me.
She was a regular on the Macintosh-based 14.4k dial-up Bulletin Board System (BBS) I ran out of my mother's house, and often helped organize and attended the regular user gatherings, from beach picnics to hotel parties. The BBS crew was an incredibly diverse and very eclectic group, and females who could tolerate the humidity were rare — everyone flirted with them, myself included.
We were affectionate online, and eventually offline, for months. And after I was sucked into, and spectacularly tossed out of, another love affair, we saw a lot of each other. It had its weird aspects, but it was also a refreshingly normal relationship of hanging out, seeing movies, going shopping. But she was so impossibly sweet, the thought of dating her drove most of our colleagues nuts. She would regularly proclaim that I was corrupting her.
I had, though, resolved to transfer to Hilo at around the same time (more on that next). And we all know what happened after that.
To her credit, Diane knew what was going on before I did, and she and I still kept in touch for some time. It's been a while, now, but I'm sure she's doing well. Last I heard she was in love and living on Kaua`i.
- Pamela
Perhaps not surprisingly, this relationship also started online. Also one of the rare women to brave cyberspace then — my BBS as well as others, like the statewide Hawaii FYI network (oh, the memories!) — there weren't many geeks who didn't know "Jacuzzi."
I was just one of many, many geeks who flirted with her (my BBS fostered its fair share of hormonal hook-ups, right Nate?), but — at least for a time — I had her attention.
It was 1993, my first year in college was coming to a close, and I was an irrepressible dork. She was leaving Honolulu, though, to attend UH-Hilo. In a panic, while we stared at the moon in her yard in Kailua, I told her I loved her. It was August 13 — eerily, Jen's birthday, and the very same day she left Florida for Hawaii.
Anyway, it was a scene. She left, and we did the long-distance thing like maniacs. Long phone calls, mix tapes, ten-page letters, reading Richard Bach books and thinking they suddenly made perfect sense. She (at the time) liked penguins, so I became Mr. Penguin, with penguin statuettes, stickers, pictures and plushies oozing from every orifice.
I flew out to visit her (a major expense at the time). Although I gallantly refused Wayne's gag gift of a box of condoms, she was prepared, and... well, my first time went about as well as I think we both expected. I met her friends — including a quiet guy named Ian — and we gallavanted around the sleepy town in Hilo. I fell in love with the place. I joked about moving to the Big Island myself.
Well, things slowed down real quick after that, but being the naivé kid I was, I chalked it up to midterm stress.
I eventually told her I was going to transfer. She told me she was coming back to Honolulu for Thansgiving. I told her I'd take her and her entire family to see "Phantom of the Opera" to celebrate. What's 90 bucks a ticket when you're in love, right?
Well, the show was great. (Again in a freaky coincidence, Jen and Jaimee were there that night too.) But Pam was really quiet, and didn't say a word during the drive home.
Somewhere between the front door and her room — where the deed was finally done — I realized what was going on. I realized that her whole family knew, and that was why I was asked to bring back some of the stuff of hers that I had. D'oh!
It got better. After getting my heart broken, I went outside and got in my car and... it wouldn't start.
I spent the next four hours trying to get the damn thing started — Pam's dad eventually had to come out to try and help — but it just wouldn't go. Ultimately, as the sun came up, her parents had to drive me all the way to Mililani. "We're sorry," they said as I stumbled out in a daze.
I didn't sleep. I called Wayne, who came over and was surprisingly understanding. Then I called Nate — I had to go back to Kailua to get my car. "Dude," I think he said. "That shit's fucked up."
So the very next day — the same day as far as I was concerned — it was back over the mountains, and once again I was standing in her yard. Although they were home, we ended up walking a couple of blocks to a pay phone to call a tow truck. Then we struggled to push my car down her narrow driveway, all the while wondering if we were being watched.
The tow truck driver wasn't happy when he heard we wanted my car towed back into town. And he nearly creamed us — screeching tires and all — when we hit a red light coming down the Pali. But, we survived. I survived.
And, against all advice and common sense, I decided I was still moving to Hilo.
I'll never forget the day I checked in to the dorms at Hale Kehau, and Pam turned the corner and saw me there with my bags. And things probably could have gone better, at first — there was the incident of the flying ceramic penguin. But, she had Ian, whom I actually liked, and soon enough, I made a number of friends, and of course, met and fell for Jen.
The four of us, in fact, ended up neighbors of sorts, Jen and I at the student newspaper, Pam and Ian at the literary magazine next door. Through mutual involvement in student activities, we crossed paths often, and really, it wasn't bad.
I hadn't heard from Pam in ages, though, until I made an offhand reference to a "psycho ex" in a recent entry. She and Ian eventually got married (their theme animal was the koala) in 1999, and I suspect they're doing well. I hope so.
- Erin
Erin was my very first love. She was tall, blonde, pretty, sweet and funny, and proudly double jointed. I'll never forget the way we first met, cracking our skulls together while crawling through a concrete pipe.
We were five, and we were fellow inmates at the First Chinese Church preschool.
But it was true love. We told each other so. We were trapped in a Christian facility, and all our peers were still in the cootie-phobic phase, so our romance was very forbidden. But we couldn't stand being apart, and would often sneak out of our classes and meet in back of the church, or under the stage in the cafeteria.
We named our kids. We planned our wedding (she'd seen magazines about how it's done). We kissed, constantly and... well, clumsily, and did all sorts of things that shocked the church ladies.
The next year we started kindergarten at Lunalilo Elementary, and our love continued to grow. One of my most vivid memories of that time is of Erin and I, holding each other's hands and spinning madly, then trying to climb onto the submarine-shaped jungle gym in the schoolyard. There were construction-paper hearts, and heaps of candy, and restless giggle-filled naps.
Alas, our happiness was short lived. The next year, she had to move — to Molokai, I think. And I don't even think we mustered a single letter after our separation (neither of us were very good writers, anyway). My heart was broken.
For a little while. But then I started chasing every other girl in school. And I was fortunate to have them all to myself, as my fellow boys would take another four years or so to figure out they were running in the wrong direction.
- —
I have no number five. But that's just fine with me — please see number one.
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· Created: 13 November 1997
· Last Modified: 14 January 2008