A Glutton

I was depressed my first year at college.  It was the first time that I had lived away from home and I was living at my aunt’s house on the upper west side, which meant that I was considered a commuter.  You don’t make a whole lot of friends at school being a commuter.  Most commuters still have their friends from home so it isn’t a big deal that they aren’t making new college friends.  And yeah… I did and still do have a lot of family that are one LIRR ride away from Manhattan but when you are living in the city, Long Island seems like a world away.  I may as well have been living in Japan.  I had a girlfriend but she lived in Rochester.  I spoke to her most days and she had to put up with my depressed, friendless, overworked talk for an entire year.

I spoke to her the other day and told her that I didn’t know how she did it, that I must have been miserable.  I was so depressed, I must have just spoken in moans and groans.  I couldn’t imagine having to listen to me that way for an entire year….actually two when I think about it.  I was just as depressed the second year.  She told me that she didn’t remember me being depressed.  I guarantee that I was a miserable wreck that whole year and somehow she doesn’t even remember it.  How could this be?

She was in Boston my second year and she said she wasn’t happy either.  She didn’t like Boston at the time.  I visited her there twice.  The second time was a Valentines weekend when I drove four hours on a whim and surprised her.  That was the last time I was there.  She knew that.  She said that I hated Boston.  I don’t know if I hate the city itself but there are lots of things in that city that I do hate.  Being a New Yorker, that was to be expected but the one thing that I remember really hating most  about the city was how clean it was.  I felt like the train stations looked like Hollywood sets and that bugged me.

Apparently, I liked everything that wasn’t nice at that time.  She said that I acted like I liked the hardship that I was in, like I was meant to go through it.  It’s weird to hear about a former self and to realize that you haven’t changed.  Earlier this year, there was a lull in the drinkin.  The holidays had come to and end and I had returned to a girlfriendless, ghost-filled house.  I walked out on my balcony to have a whiskey and a cigarette and it hit me.  The pain of my break up had finally caught up to me.  I felt a knot turning in my stomach as I embraced the cold dampness of my balcony and I smiled.  The pain had returned.  It had been many years since  I felt that pain, the pain of the end.  I missed it.