It’s been fifteen years now.
Fifteen years since the last week at Vanderbilt, when despite my studying and false bravado I knew damn well I wasn’t going to make it this time. After three years of barely pulling my ass out of the fire over and over, getting progressively more singed every time, I was going down for good. And I knew it. I couldn’t admit it, even to myself in the darkest hours, because I didn’t have a clue what would happen next, but I knew the end was near. My inability to deal with Horrible, to cut her out of my life, had sunk what should have been a reasonably promising career in political science. And her increasingly erratic behavior had made things worse and worse, to the point where I finally decided that I’d had enough. Granted, that point was only a couple hours after taking (and as it turns out failing) the second prelim exam, so the barn door was locked pretty much after the horse burned it down, but still…
I was bereft. My high school friends were long since scattered to the winds. I didn’t have any college friends; the person from undergrad I was closest to was the one I was desperately trying to break up with. Flunking out pretty much confused and alienated my family, who didn’t exactly have a track record of knowing and understanding me anyway. And there I was, falling off the cliff. So when a rope appeared, I grabbed it without really caring about who might be holding the other end. As it turned out, the other end was a small knot of an Internet community that would become the kernel of my rebuilt life. I started over in a new town, with a new career, and a new girlfriend. I suppose if you want to be technical about it, she was my as-yet-uncounted third (and final) collegiate girlfriend, because she overlapped my last days at grad school by – a week? Maybe?
I say all this because just this past weekend she got married, some eleven and a half years after we figured out each of us was the wrong one for the other. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to attend the wedding in the company of the right one – who I married seven years ago myself. Achievement unlocked. I also saw a bunch of people at this wedding who I haven’t seen in many years and some only sporadically then, so there was a lot of drinking and catching up and reminiscing and recriminating. Which is what put my memory on this track to begin with.
See, everything I was and had been in April 1997 came to an end on the day I left Nashville in May. I couldn’t honestly claim Vanderbilt as my own for years after that, I had a huge black hole yawning open behind me, I had no idea who I was anymore – or who I could legitimately become. So when I say that April 1997 felt like the end of everything, it’s because it really was. My year always seems keyed to the old patterns and rhythms of school anyway. Fall equals new beginning, starting over (moving to DC in 1997, newly single in 2000, starting at Apple in 2004, changing jobs in 2007…) and spring is the end. The end of the year, the early coming of summer heat, the cloud of allergy meds – and for fifteen years now, the annual echo of the closest thing I have to a near-death experience.
I remember walking around campus, lingering in the places I’d hurried through in months and years past, wondering if I’d ever see them again. I made sure to update my Commodore Card to the new model, and made sure there was a little money left on it, just in case – and if the worst happened, there might still be utility in having an up-to-date college ID with my own name and picture on it. A chance viewing of a snippet of a play on Headline News suddenly turned into stopping in Tower Record and buying the soundtrack to Les Miserables and playing “One Day More” on a loop.
And I flashed back to the premonition, turning uphill onto Hillsboro Road on the very first day I moved in, and suddenly being overcome with the sense that “I’m never going to find out what’s on the other side of that hill.” Which, as it turns out, was absolutely correct. Not that it made me feel any better to know that one of my psychic impulses had finally come true. Instead, I lay in bed flipping around radio stations, playing follow-the-bouncing-ball with who had hired or fired Adam Dread this week and listening to Lightning 100 and Thunder 94 – the last time I would ever be so stuck into American terrestrial music radio. It was spring, as green and lush and lovely as I can ever remember Nashville being – the early-morning lawn by Central Library looked like you were nearing the turn at Augusta National – and my world was falling apart for the last time.
Ultimately, all I could do was retreat into my computer and the crazy Internet people on the other end. And yes, there were plenty of bumps and bruises along the way, but they all made it possible for me to regenerate and live to fight another day. Those people on the other end of the cable gave me friends, gave me chances, gave me something to keep my head above water during the long and agonizing process of becoming a new person.
They saved my life.