April 17, 2018:

The second was an angel for a while.

We were close the first two years. Very close. We wanted each other but there was depression and there was loss. But there was also tenderness and the warmth of connection. We'd sometimes shower and sleep together without sex, just arms and legs and skin, with wet hair and the books we'd read aloud to one another.

The first time to my house we drove her little bug. I took her 'round the places I loved, putt-putt in her little aircooled engine. In my itty-bitty bed she wanted more, perhaps it was the distance from the dorm or perhaps it was the reason she'd suggested the trip. There were fingers and blowjobs and I think some very quiet middle-of-the-night-don't-wake-mom fucking, with suppressed giggles over our naughtiness. "I swallowed it all," she said, after one of the blowjobs. We were learning.

She was the angel I dreamed would save me, when my other more formal love relationships went bad. In loneliness and despair my journals are filled with fantasies. What if, what if, what if? The ifs would happen now and then but our formal love relationships remained just as broken.

She changed.

Her heart was terribly broken by a boy a long, long way away. The result was an entirely new personality: controlling, demanding, rigid. Centered on rules and rituals: This is how it must be. Trying, obviously, to keep some control over a world she'd learned could not be trusted.

You don't control me, though.

It was sad. We'd been really tight. Then we weren't.

We tried a formal love relationship for, like, a week. She demanded it. "Are you gonna make me an honest woman, or what?" It went bad immediately. "You need to get over here right now," she'd say. But, the thing is, no I really don't. Especially not if you put it like that.

She married our friend from school. They named their kid after another friend from school. I was long gone by then. School was a waystation for me. I took the academics extremely seriously, the social networks not so much.

Decades later she tried to reconnect via social media. She was still giving orders. Now to her children, her synagogue, probably to her hairdresser and her maid and every other unfortunate to cross her path. Cult behavior: I am the keeper of the sacred rules! Where the cult had become literal: an orthodox religious sect neither of us could ever have imagined or respected when we were close in school.

I unfriended her.

I miss the way she was when we were first friends.