-{ redgeek.net }-

“Really, Mom, I don’t want to. I know it’s Christmas night and everything, but I’m beat. I have a temperature, hives, and I’m perfectly comfortable just sitting in my living room watching bad movies.”

When my mom gets an idea in her head, she’s like a pit bull. Nothing can dislodge it. Eventually, you’ll capitulate. It’s why my family sometimes refers to her as “Little General.”

She and my father were waiting for a table at the bar of one of their favorite local restaurants, Armando’s Green Flash on the beach, and wanted me to join them for a beer. I’d retired home just after the morning festivities, floating in and out of sleep most of the day in front of the TV. I was clad in standard sick-apparel: torn but comfortable shorts, a ratty old T-shirt, and slippers. For some reason, my allergies had just decided to do a flip-flop on me, and I’d been in the emergency room two evenings earlier after my throat swelled shut in the middle of the night. My skin was blotchy and puffy red, and to top it off, I’d contracted the flu that’d been going around lately. Internally, I felt like a pile of dung, and probably didn’t look terribly different from the outside.

“Ok, ok, I’ll come down. Just for a bit. I won’t be having dinner.”

I briefly considered changing, but didn’t feel up to the extra effort. Besides, my appearance would reinforce my assertion. I trudged to the car and drove the twenty blocks to the beach, wondering why my mother had been so adamant. As soon as I walked in the bar, my mother introduced me:

“Katya, this is Barclay. Barclay, Katya. She attends UCSD as well.”

I was shocked. This was totally unanticipated. Katya was stunning while I was doing a decent impression of a cave troll in moccasins. My mother cleared a spot for me at the bar.

“Um, ah … hi. Please excuse my appearance, I’ve been a little under the weather.”

She smiled a smile I’ve never since seen. Full, from forehead and eyebrows to nose and lips, spilling into her cheeks. Quite ironically, I later found out she was extraordinarily relieved with my appearance, as my mother had been extolling my virtues as a computer scientist at UCSD, and she assumed I was some meek pimply-faced bespectacled geek slinging a pocket-protector. Not exactly the way to impress the girls, mom.

“Your mother warned me. Don’t think twice about it.”

The awkward conversation slowly turned congruent, as we both realized that we were both extremely attracted to each other, and while we didn’t exactly have common interests, we had common appreciation of each other’s interests.

Katya and I were in full relationship swing a week later. We were completely devoted from the get-go: I found four wine glasses with a green spiral swirling through their steam, and clipped four roses floating them in the cups, providing the illusion that the flowers were growing out of the glass, all prior to our first real date. As this was only the second time such a feeling had captured me, it wasn’t yet a pattern. Years later, during rapid-romance number three, I would complete the trifecta, thereby cementing my fall-hard-fall-fast strategy into an unanticipated mantra. But that is a story for another time, and actually, is a novel in progress. I digress.

Katya and I dated for six months. It was the longest and most intense relationship, and hardest breakup, I’d had at the time.

She was twenty-seven, finishing a English Literature degree, I was twenty-two, a senior in college, and going for a Master’s of Computer Science in five years. The final year of my undergraduate year, I was overlapping my remaining undergrad classes with the start of graduate studies. One of the most time consuming classes – compiler construction – required around 40 hours of lab time a week for that class alone. Between graduate study groups, lab time, homework, and class time, I was on campus around 120 hours a week. I tried not to work weekend nights.

Given my schedule, I had two rules:

1. Katya gets one of my weekend nights.
2. My friends get whichever one she didn’t want, if there was a second free night.

Sometimes I spent week nights at home, and sometimes at her place. Regardless, there wasn’t much to them: arrive home after midnight, grab some munchies, and crawl into bed. Maybe fall asleep in her lap in front of a late-night movie. Five to six hours later, rinse and repeat.

One day in June, I could hear the pain in her voice when she phoned me. I was in the lab, and the final phase of the compiler was due in a few days. The floor was littered with the sleeping bags of those who opted for full immersion. I excused myself from my lab partner: “I have to take this.”

I walked the tunnel out the back of the basement lab to a private outdoor area, and she broke down: she needs more out of me, she can’t deal with a couple nights a week. She needs more, she needs me to be around, to be around and conscious and interactive. I, of course, break down as well, trying to tell her it will all be better in a week or two, after all the projects and finals. She didn’t agree, or she couldn’t wait that long. I couldn’t tell which.

I’d fall into this same situation years later, and as I would try that time as well, I tried to salvage the relationship. It hasn’t worked yet for me.

It was the last time we spoke.

I was in bad shape, but I finished school. If ever there was a black-belt test, that was one: perseverance and endurance under hardship. I was concerned she was torn enough to abandon school.

She didn’t walk at gradation – I don’t know if she ever did graduate – and I never saw her again. I found out years later she moved to Oklahoma re-establish a relationship with her father that until then had been virtually non-existent, got married, and had children. I truly hope she is happy.

As everyone does, I recovered, I found myself again. Cut to recent history: I’ve been helping a friend get through her breakup with her boyfriend. I predominantly listen, and offer little advice. I’m struck by an undercurrent of similarity between her situation with that I had with Katya, although all the tangibles are different.

I wonder if I should have done something different. In the romantic comedies, you give up school and work and friends to chase down the girl at the last available moment, living a presumed happily-ever-after. These comedies poison our minds, imbuing a sense of unrealistic requisite devotion; a caricature of passion overthrowing pragmatism. Heartwarming, yes, but in reality these are the things that break marriages.

What about passion versus passion? Martial arts is one of my passions, and at the time, completing my degree was not something I was willing to compromise – perhaps not a passion, but damn close. Non-negotiable.

I’ve heard many girls say they can’t stand being second to something else, that they must always come first. While I understand the sentiment, I don’t agree with the absoluteness of it. If she must always come before my martial arts, where is the compromise? Is it always myself that must yield my interests to her? There is a lack of temporal cognizance – I’m not saying that my passion always comes before the girl, but neither does the other happen. She lets me have my classes and retreats and training, and I let her have her writing or painting or music, and occasionally, one of the other of us will have to sacrifice that passion for the other for a time. There is no first or second, but components of ourselves that we’re not willing to compromise in totality, although each of us must be willing to compromise at times. Last year, A. and I did Thanksgiving with her family and Christmas with mine, and were anticipating doing the reverse the this year. This makes sense. (And trust me, spending the holidays with my parents not a trivial compromise.)

It reminds me of the hypothetical situations people are so fond of presenting: If it came down to me or that, on this important date, which would you choose? It is isolated, requiring an absolute and enduring compromise without external influence, disregarding the history and future. Say I have to choose between a martial arts retreat and going to Thanksgiving dinner with your parents. Well, did we go there last year? Or did I get to go to my retreat last time? What about next year? When we compromise, we shouldn’t abandon. To me, these fabricated entanglements are as telling and informative as that which my roommate asked his girlfriend: If I were a zombie, would you let me eat your brain? That is, artificial, humorous, and completely useless.

So what could I have done differently? Everything. What should I have done differently? Nothing. To compromise more than I did would be to compromise that which was the one thing I was unwilling to concede. While it was never my intention to cause Katya any pain, and am sorry that I did, I hope that she also appreciated the good times as much as I. Obviously, I still think about her, and I will always love her. People may disagree with my evaluation, but I know in my viscera that it was the right path for myself. People may say that until I’m willing to give myself over completely I’ll never know true love. Perhaps that’s true, but perhaps in giving up everything, I give up myself, and am no longer the person she fell in love with.

Or, perhaps I just haven’t found the person to give myself over to yet. To the person that doesn’t require it.

In the end, I gave, I tried, I felt, and I lived. No regrets.

(And right now, A., is laughing and/or crying.)