With each new week, my depression gets worse. It’s been headed towards “crippling” since two months ago when my former girlfriend decided that she didn’t want me in her life at all anymore. This is going to be a series of posts discussing, most likely in a non-linear fashion, my history with her. Given my current heart-broken state I may over-glamorize sometimes, but I’ll do my best to maintain some semblance of objectivity. What this will accomplish is a mystery to me, but I feel it needs to be done.

When my penultimate year of high school started, I decided I needed a job. I had no experience and I was a fairly shy guy, but somehow I got a job as a floor-person at a nearby Zellers. And so had she. During the first few shifts I was being trained I noticed her. I was 18 and she was 15 but even then I saw her and immediately thought “I want to get to know her.” I didn’t get a chance then; I was still being trained, so I was moving all over the store and only saw her that one time. I didn’t see her again until over a year later.

In my final year of high school — which was grade 13, or OAC, at the time — I started seeing her on the floor. We started off fairly innocently. Somehow, our shared love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer made it into one of our conversations. Along the way, I told her things I knew that she didn’t about the shows we both loved. I told her about TV shows she’d like, bands she’d love, and anything else I could think of. One of the more vivid memories from that time was of me buying School House Rock on DVD and her talking about how much she wanted to see it, but that wouldn’t happen until the summer.

As I neared the end of the school year I realized something: now that I was done school I would no longer have friends. I spent much of high school with friends having great conversations but I never really got to know them all too well outside of the context of the classroom. Because of this, once school was over I’d probably never hang out with them again. In retrospect, I don’t think this was as scary as I once thought; I would’ve made friends in university and the people I knew well enough would still be my friends. But it was that fear that made me take a giant leap in my life.

One day, while working with her, I attempted to deftly introduce a specific topic to our conversation. I talked about how much I really enjoy romantic comedies and yet I couldn’t go to them with my male friends because it wasn’t the kind of thing they were into. I had no idea if this was true, but I did enjoy romantic comedies and I did want someone to see them with. I talked about how you can’t reveal your more sensitive side to your guy friends because you had to be macho with them. That is, of course, complete and utter bullshit but she didn’t know that so I was free to inform her of the politics of male friendship however I saw fit. Luckily she decided it was a good idea to have a “non-date” with me and we went to see Alex and Emma.

I’ve been known to do something thinking it was for one reason when subconsciously my reasoning is later revealed to be completely different. So, at the time, maybe I was really fooling myself into thinking “this was a great way to get a new friend to go see movies with” or “she’ll be fun to see romantic comedies with” but to look back on my actions I’d have to be delusional to think that this wasn’t my very poor, very lame attempt at wooing a girl. Fortunately for me, she had a crush on me. I was known as “Cute Service Boy” or CSB to her friends and the idea of even a “non-date” with me excited her.

So we went to see the movie and we had a great time. By then, school was essentially over, summer was starting and she and I had been talking online fairly steadily. We were no longer tied to coincident shifts at work to associate and so I invited her to a Buffy/Movie marathon. This wasn’t a normal marathon though, because I had the house mostly to myself for a week straight because my parents were going back to Newfoundland. My sister was still there but she and I have an unspoken agreement to avoid each other unless absolutely necessary; we never really got past the childhood sibling antagonism stage of our relationship. So for five days straight, she would come over to my house somewhere between 10 and 12 in the morning and wouldn’t leave until sometime after 10 at night. We watched obscene amounts of television, watched all the movies we’d talked about that one of us hadn’t yet seen (and along the way added even more to that list), and eaten obscene amounts of pizza. Everything was innocent then. Well, not really innocent. Though we only sat on the same couch, already I wanted to kiss her and hold her. That week is such a fleeting memory but the emotions it stirred rock me to this day.

After that, she would come over and watch movies or we’d go to the theatre almost every second day. It didn’t take long for us to run out of romantic comedies to see together and branch out into other movies. One of the earliest examples was Terminator 3. A fairly drastic departure from our original target film but by then that premise had been essentially forgotten. As strange as it may seem, some of my earliest romantic thoughts — real romantic thoughts, not the kind you have when you’re staring at a girl across the cafeteria — come from that viewing of Terminator 3. The reason being that it was in that theatre that she and I held hands for the first time. It was tentative, it was hesitant, and neither of us acknowledged it when the movie was over but there it was.

Obviously, I’m an immature man-child because when I decided I wanted to kiss her I didn’t actually kiss her. No, I decided that the best way to invoke a kiss was to tease and tickle. If little children do it to show they like a girl, why couldn’t I? Of course, maybe it was because I loved knowing that I was making her laugh. It was a slow-going process. I would tickle her and she’d recede. I would pursue her until we were much closer than friends usually are. Eventually, after the tickling stop, with our faces mere centimetres away, I finished the pursuit and placed my lips on hers. It was tentative, it was hesitant, but this time when it was over we looked into each others eyes we smiled and kissed again.