thoughts on bluedragon

I mentioned in my kissing post the other day that there was a post somewhere in the wind about BlueDragon, but I just had to pin it down... it looks like this weekend is going to be all about big posts, so here goes...

The scary thing is that at this point in my relationship with him I still don't really quite know what category we fits into... we've been a little bit of everything to each other... friends, soulbrothers, long distance partners, ex-partners, lovers very briefly... and I guess I'm having trouble classifying what the current status of my relationship with him is, because we're not really one thing or another at this point.

We'll go with "friend" for the time being I guess, its not completely accurate, but it will do.

The other scary thing is that because I've kept all of his emails in the eight years we've been friends, I can actually give completely accurate dates about a lot of things... which is just too disturbing for words.

Anyway... BD and I "met" on 10 March 1998 (see, told you), when he sent me an email through a website I had just started, a fan site for a graphic novel series we both enjoyed... His original message was quite generic, just one of those "hi, how you doing" type things, so I sent him back an equally generic reply. Then we started with those "where are you, what do you do" type questions. Turned out he lived in Random Town, New Jersey, USA, but it wasn't the first time I'd chatted back and forth with someone half a world away, so we started this email friendship, even though, as far as I knew at that point, he was straight (he was certainly dating a woman at the time) and all it was going to be was an email buddy.

Then the flirting started... actually it started fairly early on, but I'm a huge flirt via email, way more so than I am in real life, and if someone flirts with me, I flirt back.

Eventually the truth came out, and after some gentle persuasion from me, so did he... or, at least, more out. And he and I just got, well, complicated... To be completely honest though, I think things would still have been complicated even if he had lived across the street... granted, it would have been a whole different set of problems than the "he lives halfway around the planet" set we were (and for better or worse, still are) dealing with, but still complicated.

It took about three months of chatting before BD told me he was in love with me... at which point I did what has become an unfortunately repeating pattern in our ongoing relationship and ran for the hills. One thing I will say about him, he doesn't give up, and while I technically wasn't talking to him, he still sent me a few emails. Eventually (four months later) I caved in and replied, but on the stipulation that we were just going to be friends.

We were mostly doing okay at that point, he finally stopped dating the woman, and I was assisting him to get in touch with his inner faygola... it was weird, because at that stage I was well past all that "everyone must know I'm a homosexual" stage, and he was just entering it, so I got to, once again, be all mentory...

Around the beginning of 1999 he decided that he was going to spend his vacation (and a huge chunk of change) that year by coming to visit me. I think at one point the original plan might have been for me to go to the US, but since he was living at home and had way more disposable income than I did, the plan got switched around.

By the time his visit was getting closer, we both knew that when he did make it here, there was no way that we weren't going to end up sleeping together (both literally in in the euphamistic sense). In the couple of months preceding his visit not only had our emailing back and forth increased to just about daily, but the flirting had too.

Then the fateful day arrived... Thursday, 19 May 1999 (yep, seven years ago next Friday, which I only just realised)... His visit was for ten days and we were both a bundle of nerves in the week leading up to the day. On the day itself, Ma was going to do the honours of picking him up from the airport and dropping him off at my place since I had to work, but at the last minute (and possibly because I was a big ball of nervous energy that morning) my boss at the time told me to take a couple of hours off, go pick him up and deposit him home, then come back into work.

Which I did... and that's where the first kiss came about. It was interesting actually, for reasons that I still don't understand I wasn't ready to rush into going "all the way" with him, and we actually decided put it off until the Wednesday after he arrived (we'd planned a whole date night, going out to dinner and all, and I had thought about stopping on the way home to get him some flowers, but he met me at work that night and walked home with me, so I had no chance, but when I walked in the door there was a vase with 6 red and 6 white roses sitting on my kitchen counter... all together now... awwwww), but on the Tuesday night we'd been to Marion with Ma (possibly to see a movie, I don't remember), and we were sitting in the back seat together on the way home and I just whispered in his ear that I wanted to take that extra step (although I think I described it a little more graphically at the time).

Even before that though, I couldn't keep my hands off him... we went out to lunch with some girls I used to work with and I held his hand in the cafe because I couldn't NOT touch him. Yeah, he annoyed me a little (complaining he was cold and running the heater while wandering around shirtless... grrr, put some clothes on dammit), and by the end of the ten days we really did need a break from each other (my apartment is just too damn small for two people on a regular basis), but having him here was great, and there are a bunch of memories (both G rated and X rated) that I hold onto fondly from his trip.

During his last couple of days here we started talking about the future... our future... and if we were going to spend it together, and what we were going to have to do to make that happen. In the end we decided to investigate the possibilities of him moving out here permanently, although I think we were both fairly nervous about the idea. And at the same time I made a commitment to start saving for a trip to the US to visit him. I started a separate savings account and everything so that I wouldn't spend the money I was supposed to be saving.

And then the bottom fell out of my world...

I got fired from the job I'd been in since the beginning of that year. I still don't like going into details, but while I didn't do anything illegal, it was still completely my own fault. Unfortunately though, because I was fairly ashamed of myself at the time, I closed up, not only about that, but a little in general, and started shutting BD out of my life...

So much so that he got involved with someone else online (which in itself was a comedy of errors, since as I discovered much later the person in question had lied to him all along, not only about their age, but also their gender and the whole relationship was just doomed even before it began). When he finally confessed to me about this other person in January 2000, predictably, I was less than pleased... and basically "broke up with him". I did give him one parting shot though, an uber-crafted email designed to hit every single one of his emotional buttons/sore spots... I figured if he was going to choose someone else over me, then there was no way I was going to make that easy for him to go.

At that point I was officially through with him... he sent me a few message on and off (to confess about "The Other Woman" and her deception amongst other things), but I didn't reply to any of them, I was completely and utterly done with the whole situation.

Then around August 2000, he sent me a message that read halfway between a goodbye message and a suicide note. And even with all the other crap that had gone on between us I couldn't sit idly by if he was thinking of killing himself, even if I was on the other side of the planet and couldn't physically do anything. So after a rather panicked phone call to Lownee to discuss what she thought about his message and whether I was overreacting or not, I emailed him back, taking a pretty hard line... in fact the first line of my email was "Don't you dare, you selfish little shit, don't you DARE kill yourself!"...

Whether he had actually intended to kill himself or not I'm still not sure, I think it had crossed his mind, but he hadn't attempted anything, and while I can't say that my letter stopped him I think his email was a cry for help, whether he recognises it or not. That was the point that we started emailing again though. Kind of slowly and tentatively at first, it was over a month before either of us started using opening salutations in the emails... I don't even remember why now, but it just seemed appropriate at the time.

We got back into a fairly regular emailing groove for a while, for two years actually... but then we started rehashing old traumas and drama and having the same discussions and arguments over and over again... and we both said some hurtful things and there was a lot of anger there, so in the end, I just stopped writing.

But as we know, everything happens for a reason (and the Universe likes to mess with me), and on Lownee's birthday that year (which would make it 19 December 2003, which was after she and Ludo had disappeared out of my life) my brain exploded...

I'd set my mobile phone to give me reminders on people's birthdays, and when my phone went off at work that morning, telling me it was Lownee's birthday, I just sat there for a couple of minutes looking at it. I thought about her a couple of times on and off through the day, and when I got home, I opened my mailbox and found a card from BlueDragon's mother... which had a little letter in it, the last line of which said something along the lines of "BD is still alone".

That was enough to make me lose it, but what made it about a million times worse is that the one person I wanted to call and discuss it with was Lownee. Who else would get it, who else had I run to for every other major mindfuck about BD... Lownee... and I couldn't.... which of course, made it worse. And that was about the time my brain exploded and I just dissolved into a puddle.

I ended up calling Ma and bitching, crying and talking to her for a good long while, when, because it was December and stinking hot I threw myself in the shower to cool off before sitting down at the computer and checking my email.

And guess who the first email was from? Yep, that's right... BlueDragon...

The final act in my own personal three act Greek tragedy....

But, since the universe was obviously trying to tell me something, I both read it, and then replied.

And since then we've been pretty good for the most part. One or other of us gets really slack (okay, its mostly me) and doesn't write for a couple of months, but we haven't had a major falling out (at least that I can remember or find in my emails) since then.

I still love him (although I'm not in love with him) and he still bugs the crap out of me on occasion... and I do sometimes wonder that if I was actually supposed to be with ANYONE on this turn of the wheel, whether it was meant to be him... but then I figure if that had been the case then it would have happened already... right? At the same time I actually wonder whether it's him, or the idea of him that I'm still so attached to... and that's one I still can't answer.

Current Mood: