EPTQuick background I suppose, I'm 18 and at university. Hell, that was quick.
Seriously though, my previous relationship history was completely unheard of for someone my age; I was in a relationship through high school for over 3 and a half years, and it was about as serious as a relationship can be when you're a teenager. I've always been a person who questions everything, and ended up being frequently depressed as I grew older. After a breakup like that in heart-wrenching circumstances, I was pretty close to suicide, I was changing universities, meaning I'd essentially wasted a year of my life. I was fighting with my family, I was moving out (and at the time I was scared shitless of independence). Rough times.
In the months leading up to uni starting again, the visual novel Katawa Shoujo was released, and aside from being an utterly intoxicating 3 days of my life, showed me that I can love again...and showed me that a spare box of tissues is useful for things other than a runny nose, but anyways.
So! Things are rolling along okay. I get invited to a special science program designed to give high-achieving students research opportunities as an undergrad, leading into honours and encouraging a career in research etc. So I applied, because why not? I went to orientation and met a bunch of absolutely incredible people, including a fabulously nerdy compsci major (like me), who introduced me to a 2nd year genetics major...who I successfully started dating after impressing her with my Linux knowledge (yes, girls like this exist...they're just rare...and I use too many ellipses).
All of a sudden, things turn around. We're a fucking horrible couple, I'm recovering from depression and I'm her first boyfriend, so she's shy as all hell and things are just generally awkward as fuck. About a month into things, I met her best friend...and ended up in her bed. Whoops. For about 24 hours, I did what I'd never done in my entire life; I lied, I wasn't myself, but I had fun. I hated myself for it, but the only time I was ever happy was when I wasn't myself.
I went into a very serious depression. Hating the world is one thing, hating yourself is something else. I didn't know what I was going to do with myself. How do I bounce out of this? How do I keep going? If that's the only way I can have fun, do I have to spend the rest of my life trying to live in the moment? Anyways, it was around this time I decided to see a doctor about some heart trouble I'd been having (just some abnormality), and the doctor was pretty blunt; she just said "if you don't see a cardiologist as soon as possible, you could have a heart attack".
WELP. Uni kept going, I was behind, sick as hell, heartbroken and hating life. Yet for whatever reason I kept going, and things turned out okay. My heart problem turned out just to be a nasty virus that attacks the heart and nothing too serious, the best exam preparation ever made up for a semester of average results, and I came to grips with things. Over the break between semester, I just relaxed and I was okay mentally.
Semester starts, and I have a camp on the weekend. The weekend of FXO in the GSTL finals...which I ended up being able to catch thanks to unexpected wifi. It was one of those weekends I tend to have here and there where I just question death. I did a lot of standing on the edge of cliffs and the like, thinking about things. I had an amazing epiphany on the way home; I had always wanted to be a stoic, but I just never had the willpower to actually embrace stoicism. Yet I realised that absolutely everything in this world; happiness, sadness, pain, pleasure etc, didn't matter. It's temporary. It doesn't change who you are. Nothing matters, so I'm content to keep trucking along until I find out what makes me happy.
Okay, crappy life story over. I felt it was necessary to give some background to how things happened and my mindset and stuff.
It's Tuesday. I'm in a logic tutorial at uni. For some reason tutors make everyone do an awkward introduction that no-one gets anything out of, and there's this cute girl who's majoring in math/philosophy. Jackpot! I end up saying what I'm studying, and that I'm doing the class because it seemed like an easy 7 (the highest mark in Aus universities, the equivalent of a 4 in the US I think?) after doing mathematical logic. I catch her smiling at me here and there and I was just about to get to talk to her at the end once the class was over but the tutor starts talking to me about an idea I had about solving a riddle using a conditional statement. Well, shit.
So there's a lecture later on, starting at 5pm and ending at 7. The subject is philosophical logic, which I took as an elective after loving mathematical logic the semester before. I ask the lecturer at some point if we can use alternative notation (in this case, a conjunction (essentially 'and') is represented by '&' yet from last semester I was used to using '^') and he said no (accompanied by a hilarious rant, he's good like that).
So I was walking home at the end and she comes up to me and says "so, it's only an easy 7 if you remember to use an ampersand instead of a circumflex?". It was a split second of pure disbelief. On one hand, that's a pretty intelligent and funny thing to say. On the other hand, it's kinda stalker-y how much she remembered about me having never actually talked to me before. So we start talking, I'm going home and she's on the way to some party or something, and we end up just standing around talking for a few hours. Being...nonconventional people, we kinda skipped the whole social smalltalk bullshit that you usually get when you meet people, and we were talking about love and death and sex and all of that crap.
After we discussed the psychology of friendzoning, I realise that getting friendzoned by someone this amazing would be the shittiest thing ever, so I asked her out. I guess I kinda freaked her out, she just responded "uh, can I just get your phone number first?", I asked why and she just said "I dunno, social convention". So I gave her my number, kissed her, and had to ask "so, I take that as a yes?". I guess she forgot, but obviously she said yes.
We were both walking the same direction to go home, so we start discussing things like how ridiculous the situation is, the whole idea of causality; what if I hadn't asked that question in the lecture? What if I didn't say anything interesting enough when we first met to distract her from the thing she was going to? I then realised the problem of the situation, I was happy. Legitimately happy, smiles all around. And my happiness was directly related to other people.
We talked about that a bit, she seemed to have similar thoughts to mine. Turns out I'm her first boyfriend (why does this always happen to me?) adding to the oddity of the situation. Anyways, kissed her goodnight and all that jazz, and went on home to contemplate my conundrum.
As the week went on, things went well, we saw each other here and there, and I'm still bubbly as all hell when she's around. So we met on the Tuesday, and the next major thing in this story was the Thursday 9 days later. It was the end of the 'honeymoon phase', we had a day apart and reality seemed to set in...or had it? I had a horrifying thought, what if she's imaginary?
Things seemed way, way too perfect. We enjoyed the same things. We'd say the same thing at the same time multiple times in a row. I was lonely, I was down on myself, and my senses had deceived me before; I'd think dreams were real, I'd think I'd see things that everyone else swore wasn't there, etc. When she met my friends, no-one seemed to say anything specific, it was only brief, but one of the guys didn't say much, one of them was super busy working and the girl I hang around with didn't say a word. Sure, it was possible that the first guy was bitter because I always get girls and he doesn't, it's possible that the other guy was super busy trying to get his code to compile, and it's possible that the girl was bitter because she likes me and now I'm with someone else, but it's possible. It's possible that I'm completely and utterly insane.
On top of that, I had one of my periodic moments of depression. It doesn't change what I do, I'm still gonna keep on truckin', but everything feels hopeless, I feel like I'm incapable of happiness or anything. I didn't see my gf until my lecture from 4-6, I rocked up late and didn't get to sit with her, she was sitting with a bunch of guys and I was sitting by myself being sour about life. In the mid-lecture smoko break she comes up to me, bubbly as hell, while I'm working on a program. I told her how I was feeling and it was as if she understood when no-one else did. I had an epiphany about how to fix my program and my face lit up and she joked that programming was the cure to my depression. Anyways, I told her to meet me at the end of the lecture.
I knew I wouldn't have that long with her, she had to go buy furniture because she just bought a house and having furniture in a house is typically a good idea. I took her towards the lakes which has a nice grassy area where no-one would be at night. I was about to tell her completely how I was feeling and she proceeded to tell me all about how it happens to her...and it's the exact same thing.
I blurted out how fucked up everything seemed, how it all seemed like a figment of my imagination, how there was no way of knowing if she was real or not (which is kinda relevant seeming as the lecture was on Cartesian dualism), and I said, clearly without thinking, "and the reason I'm so scared of you not being real, even though I've barely known you for a week, is because...I love you."
Fuck.
What the actual fuck just came out of my mouth?
Let me get this straight. I'm in a random-as-hell relationship with the girl of my dreams, worried about fucking it up, and I say that?! Not exactly my brightest moment, and I've had some doozies.
I guess I forgot that figments of my imagination are pretty damn perfect, so she just gets teary-eyed, smiles and says "I love you too".
So after half an hour of being too happy to feel shame about making out in public (at least it was night time), I went on home thinking harder and faster than ever. Did I mean that? Did she mean that? It's been 9 fucking days. What happened to stoicism? How did I let myself be this vulnerable?
Why do I feel more alive than I ever have in my entire life?
Skip forward to Monday night. It's her housewarming party and I'm supposed to go and meet all her friends and stuff, which I successfully dodge because I got invited to the Steve Irwin memorial lecture. Everyone in the advanced science program thingo got invited, so we all went in the same bus and had a blast of a time. I got talking with this girl in my class, and I'm a naturally flirty guy, and that was great. It made me realise that this isn't a crush (or obsession or anything worse), everything's the same as normal...except I'm in love. I'm actually in love. It doesn't make sense, and I have absolutely no idea what's gonna happen in the future, but I'm in love.
So last night (Tuesday night) it's another late night lecture. My gf having a periodic burst of depression like I'm so used to, and she has a bit of a breakdown when something reminded her of something particularly dark in her past (which she told me about, not worth mentioning though). We had plans for me to stay at her place but I didn't want to bother her when she was like this if she didn't want to, but she seemed willing, so that's what we did.
Finally, we were alone. Finally, she wasn't a figment of my imagination out of place in reality. We weren't in reality any more. I didn't have to think about that, I didn't have to think about all the math I had to do, or paying rent, or the WCS Korea I was missing, I was in another world. We kinda bounced between making out and talking about philosophy, interrupted by epiphanies relating to my program I'm working on, or math homework, or about some philosophic concept. Hours flew by as we did whatever things an 18yo guy and 17yo girl do when they're alone (and in case anyone says something, yes that's legal), and all of a sudden it was midnight.
I absolutely loathe sleeping with people (not in the sexual sense, y'know, sharing a bed with someone). It's uncomfortable as shit, I just want my own space. Also, it takes me forever and a half to get comfortable, rolling around violently and doing whatever, and I'm gonna need 70% of the blankets in order to perform sufficient experimentation. After half an hour of super romantic cuddling and shit, I realise I'm too tired to fuck around so I just roll over on the side of the bed I claimed, snuggle up by myself and drift off.
I open my eyes. It's morning and I have no idea where I am, but there's someone's lips on the back of my neck, someone's body holding mine. I sit up and look around, she just kisses my chest, looks at me and says "I told you I was real".
That's the single most perfect moment of my life...so far.
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Thus concluding my incredibly long, probably error-ridden and shittily written girl blog. It's been 2 weeks. Nothing makes sense, there isn't a shred of rational thought anywhere, and I'm doubting as hard as Descartes. And even if this bliss I feel is temporary and reality catches up to me, I hope I'll always remember this as the happiest 2 weeks of my life.
Thanks to anyone who took the time to read all of this. I just realised that I spent all night writing this damn thing and now I'm really sleepy and missed the end of dreamertt vs BBoongBBoong. Hopefully someone likes my story, and feel free to criticise how ridiculous it is, you won't have been the first to think so.
. Compare that to the guy who doesn't get any of the girls you talked about earlier in the story, what do you think his outlook on life is? Do you think he thinks how life is unfair because he doesn't get x y or z? Who knows, but all you can do is think about how lucky you are, and how your life is going compared to others and realise to yourself, "hey im doing alright aren't i" and my answer, is yes you are doing good, don't forget that!
