Last night our community band practice moved to a church for the night. Ironically it was the church of the girl I lived with before I was with my wife (over a decade ago). I wish I could tell you that we broke up over a mutual disagreement where we went our own separate ways but it didn’t work out like that. Since at one point in time she was once a huge point of my life I thought I would document her, at that point, the facts will be recorded and I’ll put the past behind me.

When I was a freshman in high school I met Kim the night of the High School Homecoming dance (back in 1990 – cripes this memory is of legal age). I had friends in marching band (this was the year before I started playing trumpet at all) and I was hanging out with them some girl was just wandering around a circle of people crying on the shoulders of those around her. I was one of those people, this girl was Kim. She had just been dumped by some guy and the marching band members were taking the pity circle approach. She started crying on me and I didn’t know who the hell she was. Eventually, she moved on to the next person. A few weeks later she started dating my best friend, fortunately, I didn’t go out with them to do anything so I saw very little of her the rest of the school year. She popped up occasionally but for the most part, she was a non-issue.

The next summer I got conned into joining the marching band (ironically I didn’t play an instrument at the time) and I was there around the time my friend dumped Kim (who graduated the previous year) so he could have a shot at chasing after another girl. Kim hung around the marching band practices like graduated seniors with nothing better to do occasionally. One day it was raining and I asked her for a ride home – curse her. This started to be a regular thing, she was still upset with my friend leaving her so she would talk to me about him, and other things. After a couple of months of becoming good friends, we started dating. On a cool fall day down the road from my house, at her friend’s house, I had my first kiss sitting on the hood of her 1991 powder blue Topaz.

I started sneaking out a lot at night to see her, I think this was the start of my 4 hours night sleeping routine. I had made sneaking out of my house down to the science. Sometimes I wonder which was greater, the nights I did sneak out or the nights I didn’t. My parents were not too ecstatic with their 15-year-old son dating an 18-year-old. I’ll also be kind enough to leave out details and allow you to read between the lines when it comes to intimate details.

This was also the year I started writing. I started with poetry and found I had a knack for it. I did the silly love letters and so did she. I think I still have a few of them. Almost all of my poetry is already on this blog but I’m sure there are some journal pages (folks that were analog blogging) I’ve left out. I’m sure reading them today would sound very Emo-ish. If I can find them and read through my chicken scratch handwriting I’ll put them up.

During the summer that followed we spent most of our time with one another, we went to movies, to Cedar Point, and to other related activities. One thing I can remember sticking out in my mind was when we left Cedar Point because the weather was picking up. As we were driving back there was a Tornado setting down in our town. We watched the skies carefully and made it back to her parent’s house. We found out later that a tornado did touch down about 2 miles from us. It was very crazy and stupid to be driving out in that.

We dated for 9-10 months and the following year in marching band I took my friend’s lead and dumped her. I started dating another girl Mari. About 3 months later that relationship didn’t work out and I left Mari. We’ll discuss more on Mari another day. At this point, Kim was going with Nate, some guy ahead of me in school.

Well, Kim and I started talking again since we had always been good friends. On December 31st, 1992 I was having a New Year’s Eve party at my house (with a fair amount of people as I recall) and I get a phone call from Kim. She wasn’t going to stop by because some of the people there didn’t like her, which was fine. She was at her friend’s house at another party just a couple of streets over. Whatever was going through her mind, because though we had been talking again off and on, she wanted me to stop over and talk for a few minutes. So like a good friend (fool), I wander over to talk to her. What I don’t remember if she told me was that her boyfriend Nate was there.

We were talking (and sitting on that damn Topaz again) and someone started yelling inside the house. Out of this house busts this big guy. All he said was “Nate wanted me to mess you up.” and I got punched in the face. Since I was on the edge of the car he caught me in a spin and knocked me down a few feet from where I was standing. This was the second time in my life I have been punched (in a true fight and haven’t been punched since). I think he may have gotten in a couple more shots, it’s been so long ago it’s a blur. This guy’s girlfriend and Kim dragged him off and pulled him back into the house, Kim apologized and I wandered back home.

When I got there I was fuming, I grabbed a baseball bat from my bedroom and started back towards the front door. Luckily from a police record standpoint, I was talked down by the people at my party. Granted half the guys wanted to go over there and start something, but the girls at the party and some of the other guys cooled down the situation. I never went over. Since that night was one of the few times I have been punched it’s etched into my brain.

Things calmed down and Kim and I continued talking. A few months later things didn’t work out between her and Nate and they broke up. We dated a little bit for a few weeks, but just kind of maintained a friendship point of view. After that, we went our separate ways for a while. In the spring of 1994 my girlfriend at the time dumped me right before prom (today we have different takes on how this went down). Shortly after that (somehow I don’t remember) Kim and I started talking again. Talking lead to dating. This was the road that it always was with Kim. Being friends and trying to keep it platonic always lead to something more.

We dated through the summer and she even went to my Mother’s wedding. My step-father and I never really saw eye to eye, he came into the house trying to be an alpha male. It wasn’t happening though. We never got along though for time periods we could fake it and even be civil to one another. Why is this relevant? Well right after the wedding took place ( I played trumpet so I was part of the service) I guess my stepfather made a lot of derogatory remarks to her about her and about me. Then and there I didn’t know this. She told me as we were driving back to my mother’s house for a wedding reception.

I was fuming. I arrived at the house just a couple of minutes before my mother and my new stepfather. I happily started a screaming match on the front lawn. Luckily Kim was house-sitting at her sister’s place for a couple of weeks I went inside and grabbed a couple of changes of clothes and left for a few weeks, never even calling. Sometime during this time frame being a young fool I asked Kim to marry me and she said yes. I was just a couple weeks past eighteen and I was engaged.

I came home and stayed for a couple of weeks before I was to leave for college. The big day arrived and I was supposed to use my mother’s minivan to haul all my stuff an hour south to school. Originally my mother was going to drive me down to school and Kim and my friend Tim were supposed to come and help move stuff. My mother said she would go but my stepfather also had to come. I didn’t want him there and asked if we could just take the van and Kim would bring it back afterward. Well, this escalated into a screaming match that rivaled the wedding reception just a month or so earlier.

I hadn’t been on speaking terms really with my father at this point, and there was a lot of animosity between my mother and him. My stepfather helped fuel this by mocking me and saying my father should take me down (I literally had to be at the school the next day for college marching band camp). Time was dragging on and the fighting escalated, I ended up kicking the minivan in the front passenger side fender and leaving a huge dent that stayed there for a few years until my stepfather pounded it out. For a little FYI the minivan was already packed and filled with all my stuff. Even if I had compromised and capitulated and had him go there literally was no room for a fifth person in that van. My mother had enough at this point and handed us the keys.

I think I cried the whole way down to college this was the second time my mother chose my stepfather over her child on what was an important day in his life. We made it to school and I settled in. We were going to do a long-distance relationship. There was a phone on campus where I used to make collect calls to her (or I had a huge roll of quarters sometimes). When I called collect I used a fake name so her parents wouldn’t know it was me and think it was a wrong number if she didn’t answer the phone. She came down and visited once (which looking back for a 40-minute drive really is pathetic – that’s less than one way in my daily commute). After three or four weeks I had enough and broke it off with her. I started dating someone at college and I called it a day.

Christmas break rolled around and I was kind of in between girlfriends at the time (another post for another time) and Kim and I managed to get back together. We spent most of the month with each other and when it came time to go back to school, I took a side trip to see my grandfather who was in the hospital. We drove down to the Dayton area about 4 hours away and stayed at my grandfather’s house since no one else was there. That night Kim went to bed and I stayed up and wrote a letter to my grandmother. The next day we headed to the hospital but stopped at my grandmother’s grave and I left the note for her there. We went and visited my grandfather who had suffered and stroke and lost 60% of his body mass. She was there for me and I appreciated it.

School rolled around and I reconciled with my girlfriend from the previous semester. Now for some reason, this should have been a straight break-up with Kim moment. I held off for a couple of days and Kim came down to visit. The situation was not a surprise to my college girlfriend, she knew what was happening. I took Kim to the local mall and we walked and talked, but my college girlfriend stalked us and was obvious about following us. After getting back to the car Kim asked what it all was about, I explained and broke up with her. She dropped me off at my dorm room and I thought then that she left. I went up and spent time with my college girlfriend, while this was happening Kim proceeded to make out with my roommate’s best friend. That’s the kind of rebound girl she was.

At this point, you would think that the Kim college years era was over, well not quite. I get a phone that she is pregnant and needs to talk. I arrange that I come home that weekend to talk to her. The problem was college girlfriend insisted on going and I had not told her about the pregnancy. I manage to get up north and slip away for a little bit to talk to Kim. This leads me back home and my college girlfriend is upset. She tells me she is pregnant (I had not told her Kim was pregnant yet). So I’m 18 years old and I find out in less than seven days that I have two girls pregnant. To add to the top of the tower here, my college girlfriend and I break up.

A few weeks later I’m dating someone else and I find out that both my college girlfriend and Kim have miscarriages within a week of each other. I don’t tell anyone and did not tell either one of them, so it’s a coincidence that they both told me, and today I think they were both lying to me about the incident. Around this time period, my grandfather died and I was dealing with that also. College progressed mostly Kim until summer rolled around. I was not going back to school the following year, so two weeks after moving back I moved out of my mother’s house and moved in with Kim who had taken over her sister’s apartment.

Kim managed to get me a job at the local Speedway, which at the time was about the size of two of the cubicles I have at work now. I enjoyed working there, I enjoyed the night shift. One day however I got in a disagreement with the manager and just up and quit. After that my high school friend that originally dated Kim secured me a job at a local marina. I did that for a year paying the bills until I secured my first computer job. All through this Kim and I stayed together. One day a girl saw us at a restaurant and told me (a year or so later) that she felt so bad for me that she wished there was something she could do for me. I used to go out and hang out with friends until the early morning hours and around this time I finally got my driver’s license (I was twenty).

One night Kim went out and didn’t come home, she stayed at a friend’s house – a single male friend’s house – after a night of drinking. from all accounts nothing happened, I don’t happen to believe that. The reason I didn’t believe it was that my high school friend kept saying she came on to him when I wasn’t around. I believe him, not her. Things were getting worse and worse over the next year, I would go out more and she would do her own thing. She criticized my friends, or say they were too young. or into the wrong things. Though we did manage to go camping twice while we lived together.

The first time we drove somewhere in the backwoods of Pennsylvania with her parents. Her parents treated me even worse than she did, so for the week we were there I hated it the whole time. It’s hard to get me to go camping as it is now (ask Xie) let alone with people I don’t really like. The second time we went camping I took a friend with me, in the middle of the trip Kim went storming off and said she was taking off and going home leaving us 300 miles away from home with no way back. While she was so confident and storming off to her car I told her to “Screw off, ” I then laughed at her and told her I had her keys which she asked me to hold. My friend and I left her at the camp and went off hiking. Things reconciled and at this point, we are in July 1997.

At this point, I was hanging out in a different crowd with people with which I’m still friends of them until this day. There was a girl who caught my eye and I was interested in it. My friend from the camping trip and were talking and I asked him if this girl would be interested in me if I was single. He said she probably would be (he had no clue). This is a Tuesday night. I went over and talked to my mother and asked her if I could move my stuff back home. I then showed up at the apartment with at least 10 people with 3-4 vehicles and I told Kim I was moving out the group then paraded through the apartment and had me moved out in about 20 minutes. I told Kim I would come back and we could talk about it after I got everything unloaded.

I went back and spent the night at the apartment (nothing happened) and we talked most of the night. She borrowed 100.00 from me so she could pay rent. The next day I asked the girl I was interested in out on a date. Kim called me on Thursday night to see if I wanted to do something on Friday. I told her I had a date. The next morning there were books and items strewn across my mother’s lawn. Things that I had forgotten to take with me. The date went off without a hitch and the girl told me that a year or so earlier she had seen me at the restaurant broken and wished she could have helped me. This girl was Xie and I married her.

You would think this is where it ends, but there is an addendum. Xie had recently broken up with her boyfriend. For some reason, it was in her boyfriend’s head and Kim’s head that we mutually dumped both of them to be together. It was a matter of circumstance, but to them, they felt the logical thing was to date each other. Xie and I laughed and let them be on their way. Kim degenerated more and more, she slept around a lot, somehow everyone thought I wanted to hear and know about the stories so they filtered in. After trying to make me jealous didn’t work she dated a couple of people and then one day a couple of years later I get a note on the windshield of my car outside the apartment Xie and I had. It said she missed me and really just wanted to be friends. Well, we’ve seen how being friends worked out in the past, I never called her.

I did have to deal with her for a few years at the High School Alumni Band every year, but I guess while I was in Oregon she got in a big huff with someone and said she was never coming back. Yay me! That was a treat to hear when I came back. Other news that passed through the grapevine while I was in Oregon was that she worked as a lunch lady for a little bit, my sisters told me they saw her working at the school. She was married, but the marriage only lasted a few months. Now it seems that I hear that she is single and can’t find anyone that wants to settle down with her (I don’t blame them).

The last year we were together she was working for my father, and still worked for him a little while after the breakup. She borrowed 100.00 dollars from him and never paid it back. So she owes him and me each 100.00 dollars, it’s definitely worth eating the loss to have to not deal with her again.

For the last couple of years, she has been on the sidelines with Tim who helped me move to college all those years ago (as friends they always have been) during the Vermilion Woolybear Festival while the whole band is on the float. She kept her head down, pulled a hood over her head, and wore sunglasses, but it was her. I think she was hiding from the band, in general, more than just me since Tim looked shocked my first year back from Oregon seeing me on the float so I’m sure she had no idea I was up there beforehand.

I started this off by saying I had practice in her old church. While on break I wandered around a little bit and saw a K Pearce in the member mailbox area with a pamphlet in it. I then found a board that had pictures of all the members and who they were. There was her picture. She looks a good 10 years old then she should and who knows if the picture is recent. I thought for a minute to put my initials in an art style she would recognize as knowing where they came from on the pamphlet in her mailbox. I thought about putting my email address, or just typing in “Google Creeva”. I then realized I might find it funny or humorous at that moment, but it wasn’t worth it. The humor did not outweigh the pain of maybe actually having to hear from her or deal with her in any way.

If you know her and see her, you can happily tell her about this. I’m happily married and in January it will be my tenth wedding anniversary. I’ve managed to sum up most of the highlights of the relationship in a few paragraphs. If she wants to meet in public and talk about them I’ll be happy to…….as long as she has the 200.00 she owes me and my father. I’ll give her time to finish a coffee at the very least. I’d even bring the coffee, all conditional on the back debt being paid. Otherwise, I just look at the life she has, where she has gone, and what she has brought upon herself. Do you know what I do when I do that? I laugh.