penfield | Haunted House

" 'I can forgive, but I cannot forget,' is only another way of saying, 'I will not forgive.' Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one."
- Henry Ward Beecher

While in town for a little family housekeeping, I managed to slip away briefly and attend my alma mater's homecoming/reunion weekend. I was able to stomp the old grounds with some old friends, take in some of the old sights and the old smells and felt old looking at some of the young ladies.

And ultimately and unexpectedly, I tangled with some ghosts there on campus.

It was about ten years ago that one of my senior-year suitemates was celebrating his 21st birthday. But he was celebrating it alone at his computer, in his room, probably photoshopping someone's face on to someone else's body. Nobody else was around.

I was indignant, chastising him. "It's your birthday!" I said. "Put your shoes on, I'm taking you to dinner." It was nothing special, I just took him to a local pizza parlor where we shared a pie and a few laughs.

It felt a little like community service, a good deed for someone in need, although it was more than just charity. I considered him a good friend. He was a genuinely good guy, an eminently sweet and good-natured fellow with an agreeable sense of humor. And, not to give the impression that he was being somehow snubbed, he was nearly universally well-liked; he fit seamlessly in any social situation, contributing only positive energy and the occasional amusing drunken slur. I sum him up this way: If you were going out to get a drink, or do some grocery shopping, or vandalize a building, you would ask him to come along and he would say yes.

But because he was so easygoing and unpretentious, he didn't require a lot of maintenance. So it made sense that nobody was paying attention to the fact that it was his birthday. I felt a sense of self-satisfaction for treating him that day and I assumed that he appreciated the gesture. It was a keystone moment in our friendship.

He stayed at the university for an extra year of undergraduate work after graduation. At the same time, my girlfriend was taking her senior year. When I moved to Washington D.C., I asked him, as a mutual friend, to look after her for me. Being such an eminently sweet and good-natured fellow, he naturally agreed.

About a year later, I was in my D.C. apartment late one night, packing a suitcase for Rochester. I was to fly home the next day to attend my girlfriend's graduation ceremony. She called me on the phone that night and told me not to come. She was breaking up with me.

This is not a story about that breakup, but I should explain that my relationship with this girlfriend was -- even at its best -- problematic. The physical and intellectual chemistry was electrifying, but emotionally we were like two kids in the playground pulling each other's hair. After a year apart, I could feel her drifting; the literal distance between us became metaphorical as well.

So the end of the relationship, while heartbreaking, was not a complete surprise. The truly crushing part was the nearly immediate revelation that she had rather enthusiastically taken up with the former birthday boy.

Words like "betrayal" and "villain" sound melodramatic in retrospect but they were all I could think about at the time. I don't know where the term "basketcase" comes from, but I was a goddamn basket full of cases, or a case full of baskets. I changed my plane ticket from Rochester to Hartford so that ERD could talk me off the proverbial ledge. I remember waking up early one morning and watching a 1980s-era sports bloopers tape just to clear the voices from my head.

When I returned to D.C., I called this guy on the phone at his mom's place. I recited some elaborate speech that I had composed on my return flight and capped it off with this sparkly turn of phrase: "You are dead to me."

I haven't exchanged a word with him since. As much as three years later, I was still ready to knock his teeth out if I ever saw him again.

But my understanding is that the two of them are still together -- in a relative way reducing my relationship with the girl to a mere footnote, but also providing some justification for their original offense. In a weird way, it makes me feel quite a bit better about the whole thing.

I've achieved as much closure with the girl as I think I'm ever going to get -- that person and that relationship remain deeply mysterious to me -- but my return to campus this past weekend made me think specifically about that guy. I miss him and I wish he were still my friend.

Which is not to say that I forgive him. I'm not necessarily interested in waking the dead. But if the occasion arose, a sincere apology would go a long way.