My desert-island, all-time, top-five most

My desert-island, all-time, top-five most memorable breakups a la Nick Hornby, in chronological order:

  1. Kaia
  2. Emily Mohowald
  3. Megan Opp
  4. Kate Christensen
  5. Annie Baril

I don’t know whether Kaia or Emily Mohowald deserve to be on the list. I don’t really even know if that’s how you spell Kaia’s name. It’s pronounced like kayak but without the last k, and with an ‘a’ at the end. Anyway, she was the first person I’d ever slept with, and there’s a nice funny story to go along with it–one that I’ll spare you, for now. I spent months afterward hoping to see her downtown. Run into her at a show, or a coffee shop. When I finally did, she ignored me, and pretended she didn’t know who I was. Hell, maybe she didn’t know who I was. We were drunk and stoned. The lights were off…

Emily I broke up with. Actually, that goes for at least three, maybe four out of the five above. I don’t know, I guess I regret the most the relationships I know I could have held on to. With emily, it was a lot like Hornby’s second relationship. I just wanted to feel her breasts. Only, with her, I got to. We spent this totally memorable day at home, “sick” from school, at her house, and I remember taking a bath with her, then making out for hours on her futon. I told myself I was in love with this other girl, a girl I knew better from my school, and one who I considered more up to par in the intelligence department. Truth is, I didn’t know Emily at all. She could have been einstein for all I knew. I also talk about how she told me after our day home from school together that I was the first person she’d ever fucked around with. And I didn’t want to be her first. I was scared to death of taking her verginity, and I knew she wanted me to.

There are a couple of people who didn’t make the list who probably should have. Lia, and probably Heidi. Strangely, they’re both of them girls I now despise. OK, I don’t despise Heidi. I don’t want to talk about her, or to her, or around her. Maybe it’s too soon. She was only a year ago. Lia I don’t even want to think about, I still see her occasionally around town, and she always walks by with her nose pointed in the air like she’s obviously far too good to talk to me. Heh.

I’ve started reading High Fidelity to Laura. She’d never heard of it, never seen the movie. It’s so good, every other paragraph or so makes me tingle.

I’ve also been reading my old journal far too often recently. The document (which I’ve relatively recently converted to a largish 350k text file) is really fascinating. I wish I’d written in it more often at times, and yet there is so much! Every third or fourth entry reminds me of some forgotten moment, some element of my past so powerful, so crystal, that bringing it to mind causes all kinds of emotional knee jerks.