I've had my iP0d since last Christmas, and yet it's just occured to me to listen to the thing on my 1/2 mile treck from the parking garage to the office. I tend to gorge myself on a single artist for days or even weeks and right now I'm on a serious Moby kick. The hypnotic nature of his music takes me back to my college days, 1990, 19 years old, living in a house with a bunch of friends on campus. They weren't very happy days overall, mostly because of my boyfriend. I moved into that house to live with him, and while my grades improved greatly since I living there and no longer cutting class to hang out there, he was all wrong, wrong, wrong for me. I knew that from the beginning, really, but he had decided he had to go out with me and pursued me relentlessly and finally I got tired of saying "no" and gave in. What followed was a 2-year relationship that at its end had me completely wrung out with no sense of self remaining, and it took another year to learn how to be me again.
My two main escapes were drinking and dancing. Drinking was an every night occurance, and dancing was on the menu at least 4 nights a week. We'd walk to High St. and downstairs into my second home, where it was easy as pie for an underaged girl to get a drink and the alternative music played non-stop. I'd lose myself in the Cult, or Sisters of Mercy, or New Order and dance. Alone. Almost always alone. Some flirting might occur since bad boyfriend was usually at home or at a preppy bar drinking with his buddies, but mostly it was my time to escape my unhappiness for a few hours. I remember one night another guy and I gravitated toward each other, caught in the same movement and mood. I often wonder what would have happened if bad boyfriend hadn't showed up, right at the moment when this other boy grabbed my hand. I turned away from him, to the jerk I professed to be in love with, and in that movement I imagine I made a choice, one that occasionally still haunts me.
Bad boyfriend eventually broke up with me, decided to move away from Columbus, and then farted around for a couple of months before actually moving out of the house. Many of my high school friends decided they like him better than me, but fortunately for my sanity one girlfriend - who I met through bad boyfriend, oh the irony - stuck with me. She stayed with me most nights, especially the ones when he brought home a girl or two just to fuck with me. We slept in my twin bed together and she'd go get me water in the middle of the night so I wouldn't have to leave my bedroom and walk past his closed door. We had a falling out a few years later over another mutual friend and she is no longer in my life but I do think of her occasionally and wish her well.
I remember the day bad boyfriend moved out. By that time we had regained some measure of civility and I was home while he and his friends moved his few possesions into someone's truck. My heart broke again and again that day and I remembered how my high school religion teacher had told us that while engaging between premarital sex was between us and god, we had to think of the emotional ramifications of doing so. And that living together created an investment in the relationship akin to marriage, and breaking up under such circumstances was not unlike going through a divorce. She was right. After bad boyfriend was all moved out, I went to my dad's house, crawled onto his lap, and cried.
After that summer, I still can't drink gin. Or tequila. Actually, it's only vodka for me these days.