jennifer

When I met Jen I was in a bad place. Santa Cruz.

Okay, I’ll start again.

The first time I met Jen I didn’t notice her. (This may not strictly be true — I have hazy memories of being introduced to her by Mark at some point in the Jungle days, but I may have constructed those inadvertently. In any case, I probably didn’t notice her then either.) This is my traditional reaction to girls that express interest in me, which itself is an aggravating topic worthy of separate discussion. It was Halloween of 2003. We were on Pacific Avenue. I was a cowboy samurai. She was Sid Vicious.

She happened to catch me, for whatever reason, at a staggeringly healthy moment in my life, when for a few weeks I felt happy and together and like I did not need a girl to justify my existence. I think I had just come back from Hawaii. Naturally I was busily engaged in trying to get with a different girl; but even through this haze of hopeless pursuit, I couldn’t help but be aware of this malnourished little punk girl who was smiling at me every time I looked at her. I just didn’t notice her.

A few days later the Jungle had a Halloween party. I headed on down there and did my socially incompetent best to hook up with that girl. It didn’t go well. In best crazy Liam style, I stormed down the staircase in high dudgeon and walked up to the first person who seemed like they were interested in listening to an arrogantly pontificating Filipino boy. Guess who that was.

Jen was drunk off her ass, of course, as she was for most of that first month and indeed much of the previous two years, and James was upstairs vomiting into the toilet. Instead of holding his hair back, she stood there for an hour and listened to me talk about how I wanted to make movies and what movies I wanted to make and why I wanted to make them. I’m not sure she said a word. I like to call this our second date. I still didn’t quite notice her, but behind my carefully constructed wall of inevitable failure, something was stirring. We just had something in common. (It turned out to be hatred. More on this later.)

We saw each other again the Monday after my 21st birthday. (I have to dig up a calendar to identify this exact date, so I generally don’t bother.) I was finally old enough to get into the Blue Lagoon and party with the goths, so I did. Little did I know that somebody else had the same idea. I sat with Jen and Tim and Tom and we talked about nothing I remember and I looked at her and I thought, I feel something. Something that is not, at this point and to my knowledge, inherently self-destructive. This is a big step forward for me.

Then they put on Tainted Love. I yelled at her through the noise, “I have to dance to this!” And I grabbed her hand and led her to the floor and we danced. It was the eight-minute version, of course. Somewhere around minute six I kissed her. (She says she kissed me. Why worry about whose idea it was?)

When we stepped off the dance floor, she turned to me and said, haltingly, “I have a boyfriend.” I said, “Oh.” I don’t remember what else we said. I went home and cursed myself for always ending up in these situations. I thought she meant “I can’t get with you because I’m with someone.” I didn’t know she meant “I want to get with you even though I’m with someone.”

I went back next week, and so did she. She asked me (She! asked me!) if she could kiss me again. She asked if there was any place we could go. (She’d seen my apartment on Halloween and knew I lived two blocks away. Jen reports that at this point she thought as hard as she could at me, “TAKE ME TO YOUR APARTMENT NOW!”) I got the message.

I still remember what I thought back then when I looked at her. It wasn’t love at first sight, as I used to use the term, and that’s probably for the best. Mostly it was bewilderment — that this little girl, with her ready smile, with her intelligently sparkling sad eyes, with that fragile irresistible quality of any girl who hates her father, would be so interested in me that she would pursue me, that she would look at me with such adoration, that she would come back to my squalor-filled apartment with me and kiss me and let me kiss her and eventually, after I elided all the exciting bits for lack of appropriate vocabulary, roll over with this look of satisfaction like she’d for once gotten exactly what she wanted out of life. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it until a month or so ago, well after she was gone.

Part of the reason Jen and I clicked so loudly was that we had the same philosophy on life when we met, which went as follows:

1. I am a failure.
2. I am a failure because my friends let me down when I really needed them…
3. …because to be a good friend, you have to be willing to give up anything and everything, up to and past the point of personal well-being, and trust that your friends will do the same for you; and if you can’t or won’t do this, then you are a backstabbing scumbag.
3a. Which all my friends are.

So if you were my friend, or maybe Jen’s friend, during this period, and you felt maybe a little snubbed or left out of things, that’s probably because you were, because our love was based on hating you. Sorry about that. I’m not defending my attitude here, and I feel bad about it now, but at the time, I didn’t want anybody but Jen. She was the only person I could trust, because she’s the only person who, like me, had no sense of self-preservation when it came to love.

Jen and I first — uh, got together? — on the second Monday after the 13th of November, 2003. (Our anniversary is a moveable feast.) She moved into my apartment near the end of January, 2004. She left for Cameroon in early June, 2006. We’d been together, in some sense, for two and a half years. We went through a lot of shit, a significant portion of which was internally created by our lies, our insecurity, our desire to have the perfect relationship coupled with our incapability to relate properly to other human beings. We saw thousands and thousands of beautiful things and shared some of the best moments of my life. We were crazy, and we accused each other of being crazy, but we gave each other everything we had. This was not always a good idea.

I don’t generally use the word love nowadays to mean more than the heartfelt admiration and connection you get with a friend you’d like to stay friends with for the rest of your life, but I love Jen in a way that’s different (if not necessarily more) than that. I don’t see how I couldn’t — for two years I lived in the same apartment as her and slept in the same bed. We have shared so much that I feel, at this moment, as if I could never know someone so completely as I know her. Beyond this I can’t articulate my feelings, even though that was kind of the point of writing this document. Hopefully the totality of it will communicate something I can’t express in individual pieces.

As we stayed together, and supported each other, and offered each other the unconditional love we were convinced we needed, we got better — we really did, bit by bit! As we did, though, and started reconstructing ourselves and our boundaries and our desires, the codependent relationship that had helped us deal with our inexpressible loneliness began to get in our way and constrict us like, well, a codependent relationship. More and more we began to realize, although we powerfully denied it to each other and ourselves, that our relationship could not continue the way it was. Jen knew this better than I did. I think that’s why she left. I am glad that she had the strength to do so. I think, and hope, that when she gets back we will be able to construct a new relationship of whatever kind, based on the mutual admiration and love of equals, responsible for themselves but capable of sharing and joining together.

We had a good relationship. Maybe it wasn’t good in the moral sense, or in the sense that it was healthy, or well-constructed on sensible principles, but it was good for us. My life today is immeasurably better than it was two and a half years ago, and and to a very great degree this is due to Jen. I am indebted to her for her love, and for rescuing me from a very dark place in my life.

Santa Cruz.

originally written august 30, 2006.