Chapter 4: Just Another Night Like Another

On June 29th, 2001, at the first (& last) party I ever threw, I met the woman who made my dreams come true... but as Oscar Wilde said, nightmares are dreams, too.

After my decision to withdraw from my courses at Saint Cloud State University in the spring semester, I began making plans to move to North Carolina with my two best friends at the time, who were enrolled in basic training and would be stationed at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville. It had been a year since my first relationship had ended and with the decision to move away made, I let go of any desire to find love and focused upon enjoying my last few opportunities to be with my friends in Minnesota.

Emboldened by my new future & invigorated by the freedom from academic demands that I had craved for so long, I made an uncharacteristic decision: when my parents went out of town for a weekend, without their knowledge or permission, I decided to throw a "real" party at their house. Rather than the small groups of friends I knew well, for the first (and only) time in my life, I would extend invitations to anyone & everyone.

I printed out about two hundred notecard-sized invitations with the address & date, and gave about fifty to each of my three closest friends at the time, keeping the rest for myself. I told my friends to invite whomever they liked, and to let those people know they were free to invite others. We spent the week before the party driving around town, hanging out in restaurants & billiards halls, going to various social gatherings, cruising the streets during popular times at night, and basically doing everything we could think of to let people know about the party, handing out the invitations with the address to those who expressed interest.

Even though I was going out of my comfort zone, though, I was still the same person: responsible, conscientious, & meticulous about the details. I knew I was making a dangerous decision and did my best to reduce the risks involved. I made sure my good friends whom I knew & trusted would all be there, to help me with security during the party and to clean up afterward. I did not provide free alcohol and made sure people knew the rules as they arrived: anyone who got too drunk would be asked to leave in a taxi, no fighting, no breaking things, no one was allowed in my parents' bedroom (and I made sure all of the jewelry & valuables in the house were hidden in their bathroom), and if anyone refused to leave when asked, the cops would be called. I stayed sober and constantly on the move, walking through each room of the house to keep an eye on things, with a few of my trusted friends stationed in each general area of the house.

Even so, that night was a whirlwind... I remember cleaning up puke from behind a potted plant, breaking up a fight in the pool, walking in on a couple having sex in the guest bedroom (hastily backing out and muttering to myself to change the sheets later), and at one point counting 50 sets of shoes in the front entryway (I knew about 10 of the people there). But the one thing I remember most about that chaotic Friday night was an exotic young woman in a long, elegant maroon dress.

When I first noticed her, she was standing in the kitchen next to the CD player, singing beautifully to songs from my mother's Phantom of the Opera CD to a small crowd of people. I didn't approach her or spend too long staring... I just thought to myself, "Pay attention to this one." There was a touch of wistfulness in those words as they flashed through my mind, as I knew I was leaving the state soon, and would most likely never have the chance to get to know her.

She was strikingly beautiful, with lively dark eyes & flawless tan skin, crimson lips, & lustrous brown hair, but truthfully, it was her posture & her choice of activity that drew me to her. Her bearing was regal, majestic, and in the midst of a wild house party, she chose to drink water & listen to music, making a rather eclectic selection and singing along with every word to music that very few people in our area would even recognize. My passion for musical theater was a solitary one, a love I shared only with my mother and a few of my female friends at the time; the fact that she had selected Phantom of the Opera out of the collection of CD's available and knew all of the words by heart impressed me even more than her clear, perfect soprano.

In those first few seconds that I saw her, I felt an ache in my heart, thinking what a deep irony it was to only now come across a beautiful woman with a passion for musical theater in the community where I had grown up and lived for twenty years, right as I was just about to move away. It reminded me of another chance encounter with a young woman from Italy whom I had spent fifteen minutes with, and despite my best efforts, had never seen again... but had also never forgotten.

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This immediate, profound magnetic attraction, I have only experienced three times in my life (well, four, now, but it's been a completely different experience, now that I recognize what it truly means). The first time, with the young woman from Italy, I was completely caught off-guard and had no idea what these feelings meant, what I should do about them, or how I should act, and so I hesitated. I played it safe, I took it slow, and I held back from letting slip any sign that anything was out of the ordinary.

Remember, I was an only child, raised by parents who kept a tight rein on their emotions and expected me to do the same, praised for being quiet & attentive, and taught to value thinking over feeling. I was used to being on a different wavelength than my peers ever since kindergarten, and had been conditioned by years of experience with small-town bullies to be wary of revealing those differences to others. I was accustomed to being on the outside of social circles looking in, observing others’ behavior as I did my best to figure out which people were likely to hurt me or reject me, and which ones would be worth getting to know. Charging in recklessly was so far outside of my comfort zone that it was practically inconceivable to me.

I was single when I met this young woman from Italy at a house owned by a friend of a friend. We decided to rent a movie, and I volunteered to go to the store (yes, once upon a time, you went to a store to rent movies); although she had never met me before, she decided to accompany me, which amazed & flustered me - she was gorgeous, and gorgeous women did not volunteer to hang out with me alone. Indeed, at that point in my life, I saw attractive women as sources of inevitable & intense pain, dangerous creatures best admired from a distance... for the more attractive they were, the more likely it was that I would develop feelings which they would not return, and thus the more dangerous it was to be around them (a valuable lesson, there... we are all prophets & workers of fate, when it comes to self-fulfilling prophecies).

She asked me a few questions on the short drive, which my twitter-pated brain did its best to fumble through. We spent about five minutes picking out a movie (which one, I cannot remember, although I will never forget the way she held her hair in a bun above her head as she gracefully pirouetted through the aisles), and we drove back - that was the extent of our interaction. Absolutely nothing profound or significant was discussed or transpired, there was nothing different or unusual anyone could have seen observing us, yet the electric fascination I experienced the first moment I met her was undeniable & unforgettable.

In the following weeks, I did my best to collect information about her in a roundabout, indirect manner that did not reveal my interest, let alone the mysterious, almost spiritual intensity of my feelings, which the origin of & reasons for I could neither explain nor describe. Unfortunately, my efforts were largely unsuccessful... I never learned her name or saw her ever again, and a month later I found out she had left the state, the destination uncertain, with no plans to return.

This experience affected me deeply... for months, I wondered if I had just missed my soulmate. It filled me with a fierce dedication to pursue the opportunity without hesitation or fear, should I ever experience it again. And so I did... with the only two other women I ever felt it with, the two women whom I trusted and given more to than I had ever given to anyone before, who in turn chose to betray me, wounding me more deeply than anyone else ever has.

Although I am tempted to say I wish I had never met these two women, I recognize the role they played in my spiritual evolution and the lessons I needed to learn, and I am grateful that the veil has been lifted from my eyes and at last I understand the reason behind the instantaneous magnetism I felt for them... it was something that needed to happen, and while I wonder if it really had to happen the way that it did, I have learned to trust in the divine hands that weave the threads of our lives. That being said, I have no wish to ever see or talk to either of them again, and would not shed a tear for them under any circumstances. It is not my place to "warn" others about those who have wronged me, or alert the world of those whom I might consider wicked, dangerous, or immoral, and while I have little respect for the secrets of these women after they betrayed my own, I do respect my own soul & my principles enough to refrain from vilifying or slandering them unnecessarily. They have their own lessons to learn, and while it is not in my nature to wish anyone ill, if those lessons happen to be painful, then I hope they think of me and the pain they put me through, and realize that karma is inescapable: the pain you cause to others will always find its way back to you, in this life or the next.

I hope they realize how their selfishness & vanity were partly responsible for robbing me, my sons, and countless others of their dreams & opportunities. I hope the full awareness of what they did and what they destroyed hits them like a ton of bricks and its weight haunts them for the rest of their lives. I hope they see how they ruined their own chance at having everything they said they wanted. I hope that they realize the value of what they discarded and never again experience a love as real & sincere as the one they threw away. I hope they find it impossible to forget how they lied, stole, betrayed, & condemned someone who had never manipulated or taken advantage of them, who had done everything he could do to help them. I hope they feel shame & guilt from which they cannot escape. They denied their own personal responsibility and in doing so, they denied their own power and held themselves back from wisdom, maturity, enlightenment, & evolution. Abdicating ownership of their lives & choices, they abandoned the truth & the light and resorted to lies in order to support their delusional view of the past, framing themselves as helpless victims while stealing from, slandering, & sabotaging someone they claimed to love. They chose to force me and my sons to pay for the consequences of their choices because they were too cowardly to accept responsibility for them. As victims, they did far more harm & damage to others than anything that had been perpetrated against them.

The fourth time I experienced that magnetic attraction, I realized that my first response to it - wariness & reserve - is the correct response. Like the old trick of taking one’s date on a rollercoaster to increase the chances of them falling in love with you, I believe there are women who have learned how to exploit this reaction for their benefit. Most, I would opine, do so in a responsible & ethical manner, with consideration for the man’s feelings and the unwritten rules of societal etiquette. Some, however, do so with sociopathic levels of emotional indifference, and these are the women who provoked my intuition’s alarm response, which I misinterpreted as attraction.

I noticed how my heart rate elevated and my pulse began to race whenever I was near these women, never suspecting that it was my innate wisdom sounding a klaxon, screaming at me, "run, be afraid!" In my naivete, I never thought to question my ability to recognize what love was or to interpret what my emotions were telling me. Had someone suggested this possibility to me, I might have saved myself a great deal of heartache… though it is also possible that I would not have listened until I had lived through it myself.

Intelligence can be learned, but wisdom, I have found, must be experienced.

When we do not know any better, we misinterpret our heightened physiology as desire. We think - foolishly - that this must be love, this grand and momentous feeling which happens so rarely, which muddles our thoughts and spins our head around… and so certain are we in our belief (which, if we asked, we would be forced to confess is based purely upon what we’ve seen in movies and read about in books - romanticized stories that sell well because they appeal to our imagination and sense of how things “should” be… while reality selfishly maintains its casual indifference to our opinions) that we never consider alternative explanations… until we are encouraged to re-evaluate our beliefs by pain or discomfort, and even then, many of us will seek the most comfortable, least painful truth to believe.

Admitting when we are wrong is uncomfortable, and if we care more for our comfort than the truth, then in ignorance we shall remain.

Only once we admit we do not know something can we begin to learn the truth about it, and for most people - ruled by ego, lacking detachment, not yet cognizant of their own incognizance - such an admission is inconceivable to their pride.

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There was a tap on my arm: one of my friends notifying me of a pile of vomit behind a potted plant. Duty calling, I grabbed up cleaning supplies from the closet and headed downstairs to fulfill my custodial obligations before the stain or the smell achieved semi-permanence... but in the back of my mind, I was already hoping for the opportunity to be around her again.