Dear Amy at 21…
This is a weird year and there really isn’t anyway to talk about everything. After all of the funerals we are a bit of a shell version of ourself.
Harry Potter comes out after our birthday and we sew a set of Gryffindor robes which gives us a sense of stability with a deadline, but it just isn’t the same. We’re emotionally detached from everything, and that’s putting it lightly. Our other half is busy with work so we head home for Christmas alone instead of the two of us like we planned.
A lot of stuff happens, but to sum it up. Being emotional unstable and detached for the world led our relationship to sort of crumble. Alex seeks out a friendship and feels like he is emotionally cheating even though he never physically did anything and so we end up moving out and back to Quesnel. Our manager at Staples decides to put us off on a leave of absence rather than accepting our resignation, and our mother-in-law tells us that we can take Jones.
Jones is their cat who loves us a bit more. He recognizes the sound of car and waits for us by the door, he has mini meowing conversations and cuddles with our head. We think about it, but there’s just no way. There is a bit more drama than I am outlining, but it is one of those things we can’t dwell on.
Back home there are two Chinese exchange students who are around at our place, and we get our payout for our car accident finally. We get back into WoW, eat nothing but spicy chicken cup of noodles for a month, and eventually start talking to Alex again. By end of February we are moved back into our grandparents house in the Okanagan and registered for university in the fall. We head back to work where Alex is surprised to see that we moved back and we work through our issues.
This is where we really start to find ourself and how comfortable we are with our emotions. It isn’t a bad thing to be emotional, but there are limitations and we need to learn to be more vocal about our feelings… something that we generally avoid; looking back on it, I think we didn’t open up to Alex a lot during the funerals because we expected him to abandon us the way that others had. We didn’t want to get left again so we kept it all in.
We get a new car with our settlement money and it speaks German when we turn it on… well the dash has scrolling German to let us know any issues. Probably one of the best cars we have ever had: Nimoy, a 1989 525i in a deep silver color. It has the odd rust and paint chips, but any car of that age would. It’s beautiful, so please cherish the small time we have with it. A man will offer us $4000 for it at a gas station, and we don’t take him up on the offer because we love it too much.
Our renewed focus and understanding leads to a stronger relationship with Alex, and then some other things as well. We go to a cabin, go canoeing, go fishing, dye our hair, and just have an amazing summer with Alex. We enter our photography in a Fall Fair and win a fair chunk of money, start University in the fall, and are reunited with the Jones cat. In October everything seems to happen at once again: we get food poisoning, our car gets destroyed, and then we get bronchitis for a few weeks.
The long and short of it is that the auto shop we took our car to for winterizing ends up totaling it. They called to let us know it was done and we could pick it up the next day, then we went to work, and they we got a call from a police officer telling us that it had been in an accident. The lady who was putting it back in the lot put it in drive instead of reverse and shot through the shop wall. They tried to claim that there was a malfunction with the car, but they had just been working on it – so it was technically still on them.
The shop tries to give us a loaner car… but it doesn’t have plates or full insurance, and there is the bonus wasp nest in the gas pump flap. If you can, get someone to speak for you – I still feel like we were a bit too nice, but we ended up with a decent settlement again… not that it was what we wanted.
This chain of events also leads us to miss about a month of school which takes a toll on our grades, but we make it through. Luckily the renewed vigor and strength we get from coming back from last year kind of holds us together. Nothing will ever be as bad as all those funerals, just keep that in mind. It all gets easier, and some of it gets better.
-A
A. N. Stetzl 