2001-05-22 - 10:03 a.m.

yesterday, i wrote to Morrigan about yesterday's diary entry, and got to thinking about people i'd been close to in the past...

people i miss... or at least, that i miss how they were...

yeah, i wish we'd kept in better contact with siobhan. we became good friends and hung out more after our confession... but her personal life got a bit wild and she drifted away... too many parties and drugs... she was wasting away before our eyes... you could see the bones beneath her skin, and she was having fainting spells... i saw her more when i was at usf. we were both there on our parents' tuition remission plans. she was doing better. put some meat back on her bones, had that glint in her eyes again. we had coffee together a couple times, but nothing more. and we always said "call me, let's hang out..." but never did. i called her on our birthday last year and left a message.

*inserting a note here, post-typing... i got off onto a tangent here, discussing a very painful incident in my life. not something i'd planned on writing about just yet, but you know how flood gates are...*

gard. i loved gard. like a brother. like a best friend. like something more... that's the biggest regret i have about getting involved with temple... she fucked up my relationship with gard... yeah, she ruined my life and turned all my friends against me... yeah, she lied about what we had... to me, to herself, to everyone... yeah, she fucked me good, blackened my reputation and left me for dead... but what hurts most is the loss of gard... that and how she made me treat violet...

funny that... how all the regrets i have in life can be traced back to one person... and i'm not the type of person to have regrets in the first place... but temple really screwed up my life... damn... anyhoo...

gard was a great guy. i got along with him like no other. we didn't have the open flirtatiousness that i'd later find with josh p, but we had an amazing comraderie... until temple. until i became utterly and hopelessly infatuated and obsessed with a girl who gard was utterly and hopelessly infatuated and obsessed with... until she took a liking to me and feared gard's obsession... until i heard stories of how he "raped" her... until she told me that she wanted me to save her and take her away from him... until i did just that, and we had the times of our lives in arizona, frolicking in the desert... until he picked us up from the airport after our trip to arizona with a cum-filled condom on his windshield and a scowl on his face... until she caved into his obsession and told me that we couldn't even be friends... until she told everyone that i "raped" her... until i found out several months later what she had told people...

that hurt the most. i loved her. i would've died for her... and she knew it. i worshipped her... as did so many others. what was it about her that made people lose their senses and make her their world? i'm the last person in the world to take rape lightly. i'm the one victims come to for support. i was a victim too. i know the pain inflicted by sexual violence and abuse. how could she say such a thing? it's painful to think of all that i lost over her... but in hindsight, i can kinda see how it happened. temple was a pit of misery, and for misery-mongers like me, it was bliss... for gard, it was bliss... for violet, it was bliss... but for temple, it was misery, but it was a misery that she perpetuated. i never saw her smile in all the time i knew her except when we were alone in the desert watching the ravens fly and frolick. i never saw her so happy.

yet when we returned, gard and violet spent every waking hour in her room as if i had deprived them of sustenance and they were literally starving for her attention. they looked at me like mad dogs ready to strike and tear me limb from limb. gard saw condoms in my bag when we were leaving for arizona, and he obsessed over that the entire time we were gone. he got temple to believe that i had actually brought her to arizona for the sole purpose of fucking.

i brought those condoms because i figured that we might need them if the last few times we were alone together were any indication. what would gard think if he knew she spent valentines day with me drinking wine in golden gate park under the moonlight with our hands down eachothers pants... or that the last couple times we were alone before leaving that it was all we could do to keep from tearing eachothers' clothes off... eh? of course i brought condoms. i would've been a fool not to.

she asked me about my intentions our first night there in my dad's living room. she asked if we were going to make love. i said "only if you want to." and i took her grabbing my crotch and saying "fuck me" as a yes. every time we had sex, i either asked if she wanted to or she told me to. now how exactly that is rape, i do not know... but in hindsight, i can see how she was able to say it was. as i said, temple perpetuated her misery, despite the appearance of hating it. she was sort of schizophrenic in that way... self-loathing... very Catholic in a sense that she would castigate herself for any pleasurable situation she got into... she never let me see her happiness with gard, but from his stories, you'd think they had a perfect relationship... and for that, i assumed he was a lying bastard who didn't know the pain he was inflicting... and he didn't know... how could he? when other people were around, she was cold and sometimes frightened, but when we were alone, she was affectionate and loving... it's no wonder that people were so wont to believe that i was nefarious... and it's no wonder that i myself turned on gard and violet... any happiness temple shared with people on an individual basis was done in private... and when others were around, she felt like a whore... like she'd betrayed some trust... she was a complicated girl... and yes, i regret getting involved with her... i hate that i became another victim... i lost everything over her... and i didn't find out why until several months later.

i put mel through hell wondering what had gone wrong... assuming that gard and violet had won out and forced me out of their lives... assuming that temple was jealous of mel... and maybe that was it. it wasn't until after mel and i started seeing eachother that temple told people i had raped her... and even though gard and violet were the only ones to believe her, no one really questioned it... like i didn't question when she told me gard had raped her... or when she told us that griff had raped her... or when she told us about being raped in buena vista park... why? because you just don't question that sort of thing... not when the person telling you has visible pain talking about it... not when the person telling you is as fragile as temple was... not when your world revolves around her...

i hate that getting involved with temple created such a rift between me and gard... i've thought often about getting back in touch with him, but i'm afraid to. i know the intensity with which he loved temple, and i know that he wanted to kill me over what happened and what suposedly happened... just as i felt about him when temple told me he'd raped her... i can only hope that he's had some revelation in hindsight of what happened between us all. i miss gard. i miss what we had. if there was any man i could've felt comfortable enough with to have an intimate relationship with, it was gard... funny that i ended up in bed with his brother =P but that's another story...

i also hate that i let temple come between what i had with violet. i let temple's views of her taint my feelings, and when violet called me from her father's house in tears over where her life was and how she'd let herself go, i gave her the coldest of shoulders... i don't even remember her hanging up, i just remember i was reading or drawing or something and next thing i know, there's a dial tone. that's probably the worst single thing i've ever done to someone, and it still creeps its way into my conscience on ocassion.

and lastly, i hate that in the beginning of our relationship, mel took second seat to temple's shadow... that i let myself obsess over what could've possibly gone wrong to have broken our friendship... that i let that pain i felt outweigh the love and friendship i found in mel... that after losing my world, i was more concerned at first about getting it back than in building a new world with mel...

but all's well that ends well... here we are seven years later, and i have a new life, and i have mel who's been with me through thick and thin. i couldn't be happier or luckier to have what i do in this life. and all the experiences i've had will make for a great movie when i'm dead ;)