pan6467

As I write these, some will be funny, some sad, some cathartic, some showing me as a good person, some showing me as a really bad putzhead, like this one will. But these are the stories of my life, and I'm being very retrospective, apologetic and honoring the friends that in my life meant a lot to me.

These may come fast or slow, depending on the pain and how I feel. They aren't in any order of whom I loved/liked best. They just come. It helps me take my mind off the pain for a bit and to remember good and bad times and to share why I love the people I do.

I don't remember how I came to meet Laura, she was just there in the student lounge of OSU-M/NCTC. I had drank and gambled myself out of Hiram College and my parents not knowing what to do with me decided to send me to the local OSU branch. I remember buying books and going to a class or 2, but I mostly remember visiting the student lounge.

At first, I kept to myself just going up and playing the video games and looking out into the lounge seeing people play Euchre and laughing. One day, someone needed a partner and having grown up playing euchre I decided to volunteer. That day changed my life. I was soon a part of the "Lounge Lizards". Don't remember exactly how I became one, but I was. Laura was the glue, I truly believe that held us all together and kept us all from killing each other.

She was one of the first girls I had known since I found the other sex, I never had a "crush" on. She has always been like a sister to me.

During my year there her and I and many from the Lounge Lizards developed, speaking only for myself, some of the first true meaningfully deep friendships in my life. She was one.

I went into the Navy the next year, 1988, actually went on Christmas Eve to Orlando Boot Camp. Where by May 1989, I was out and back in Mansfield.

By this time the Lounge Lizards had changed a bit, some had gotten more serious about school, some had dropped out. My parents very quickly got me an apartment and there I was. Laura by this time had met her now husband, Joe and was living with him and Brenda.

I don't remember much of that summer except a lot of golf, a fight that destroyrd Flounder's and my friendship for many years, pissing my real sister off to a point she wouldn't talk to me for years and difficulty finding a job. I needed a car but my family, had pretty much had enough of me. I was a money pit and can't blame them. But Laura took a chance with me. She loved me more than I loved myself and co signed for a late 70's Ford Fairmount for me.

I eventually found a job as a stockbroker down in Columbus and did well enough to move down there. But again, I found myself miserable because I was pretty much alone in a wonderful city but having a hard time making friends.

It wasn't long before the addict in me self destructed and by June of that year, 1990, my family was tired of bailing me out again paying all my bills so I could use the money I made to live a "nice" lifestyle. Just before I was evicted, I took all I could and loaded up the Fairmount and moved in with Laura and Joe. Brenda by this time had left and was living with her boyfriend Doug somwhere over the rainbow.

That Summer was one where I lived off Joe and Laura, my parents and grandma and did nothing. I was probably in need of deep counselling from an event my Senior year in highschool that truly changed my life and took me years and finally finding recovery to overcome. But that's for another time.

I was a miserable roommate, not doing anything that summer but being a sponge and while Joe and Laura were very kind I knew they resented me, but Laura loved me and wanted to help me. Hell, I resented myself then and took advantage, not really trying to, at that miserable life moment. There were nights when they would ask me to leave and I would go park my car in a rest stop off the interstate and sleep or drive down to a truck stop outside of Columbus and play video games and watch tv there, just so I wasn't alone. I hated being alone, not that I would talk to anyone, but I was around people.

I'd go golfing with some other guys and we'd go back to one of their apartments, smoke lots of weed, snort coke and live in a dingy dark apartment for the rest of the day.

By fall, Joe left Laura and I to go down to New Mexico for his, Master's Degree, I believe. Laura was to move down a month or 2 later. I was really hating myself and not liking where I was in my life but couldn't get out of that depression. Laura and I bonded and in ways we became truly brother and sister.

The time came, Laura moved and I went to a rooming house my parents began shelling out for. The calls stopped for payment on the car about then. I remember going to my dad several times begging him to help me pay off the car not for my credit but for Laura's and he never would. At that point in my life I wanted someone else to take full care of me and my problems, I didn't want to face them and didn't. I remember my dad telling me that he had talked to the dealership that was handling the loan and they didn't want the car, they would have settled for $250 and everything would have been ok. My dad said, go find it son. The car was so beaten by then it had stopped running. I sat in my room, wrote letters to Laura, smoked weed for a few months and did nothing. It was the loneliest and worst Winter of my life, every night I would honestly pray for death.

By Spring, I found a job at the local Dairy Mart and my parents paid cash for a decent car for me. I was doing better, coming out of that depression I was so wrapped up in, that Winter.

Laura had written and told me Joe was transferring to a school in Illinois and wanted me to come down for a week then drive her up to Ohio. I thought somehow, magically the car situation had evaporated and she never knew. I was wrong.

I took the week off and flew down to NM and spent a few days with her and Joe being made to feel like I was part of their family and a brother. I would like to say I loved them, and in a way I did, but in all honesty, looking back, when one doesn't love themself they can't love another, and I didn't love myself.

So Laura and I made the drive. It was fun and we shared some good times and some bad, as people do stuck in a tin can on endless highways going through Texas where there is no scenery what so ever, Louisianna, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee where we saw some truly poor sections of this country. Never once on the ride did Laura ever mention the car. She was always the caring, giving, loving friend I remembered.

Our last night we stayed in I believe Louisville, Kentucky. We talked, laughed and seemed to truly enjoy that night. We made plans that once she got situated at her parents we'd spend some more time together.

The ride up to Mansfield was a quiet one the next day, she didn't say much. But I'll never forget her dropping me off at work to pick up my car, a coworker had been using it that week. I saw a look of utter sadness and tears in Laura's eyes. We hugged and told each other we'd see each other soon. But it wasn't to be.

For a long time I never allowed myself to realize why Laura wouldn't talk to me or why there were tears in her eyes when she dropped me off. I'm sure was the heartbreak of what happened with her credit and the car and how I burnt her.

It wasn't until I dated the daughter of a friend of her aunt and uncles that I truly realized how deeply I had hurt Laura.

A few years ago, she tracked me down online and I sent her an invite to my first wedding. She promised she'd show but didn't and she disappeared again. She found me again last year and we had a Lounge Lizards reunion for an Afternoon. Laura said she had forgiven me and joked that she figured I owed he around $5,000.

She talks to me occassionally by e mail and we have another reunion coming up soon.

I am grateful for her and I don't think i could ever appologize or explain that point in my life enough to make up for the hurt I caused her. But I am so thankful, there has been an oppurtunity for us to become friends again. I miss that sister, that I could talk to about anything and know that she loved me at times more than I loved myself.

This is one of very, very few things I have true regret over. Not what I went through, I made my own Hell to live in at the time, but for destroying the trust and love of someone who cared so deeply about me.

I am unsure of who I will write about next. I hope the story of Laura hasn't hurt your idea of who I am today. I am a different person today, I cannot deny my past transgressions, I can only learn from them and do my best to try to make up for them. This is one, I have been given a chance to and hopefully can.

I love ya, Sister Laura.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"