Part 15 - 5 Years After
"So far, I still know who you are... But now, I wonder who I was." Smashing Pumpkins, Perfect
“Hiya, baby!” I heard my beautiful wife exclaim as she burst through the door of my office, her trademark grin outshining the afternoon sunlight pouring in through the windows. I looked up from my reading to find her surveying with wide eyes the stacks upon stacks of notebooks, letters, cards, old toys and other assorted and sundry items surrounding me. “Wow,” she said in amazement. “What’s all this?”
“A whole lotta crap,” I answered with a smile as she gently stepped around the papers and keepsakes and approached me.
“Well, I can see that,” She answered as she leaned down for a quick ‘hello’ kiss, which turned – as it always does – into a multiple smooch-fest with tiny smile intermissions. “So, besides ‘a whole lot of crap’, what IS all this stuff?”
“Well,” I responded, “What you see before here is a little under a half of the contents of my parents’ attic.”
She dropped her purse and keys on the end table nearest my office door. “Oh,” She said plainly. “They finally made you come and clean out all your old stuff, huh?”
“Yep,” I replied. “You know how it goes with them… They asked me if I could drop by after work and dig through the attic to find one of Dad’s old fishing rods for my sister, and—“
“Wait,” She interrupted, “Your sister’s going
fishing?”
“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “Juan bought a boat.”
“And he got Jenny to agree to go FISHING?!?”
“Apparently,” I chuckled. “Who knows… Maybe she’ll like it.”
“Oh, I doubt that very highly,” Andrea replied. “It’s
fishing. And it’s your SISTER.”
“Yeah, well, anyway,” I continued, “It went from finding a fishing pole to ‘Oh, while you’re up there, get all your old crap out of there. Now.’”
“So you had to cart all of this stuff over here yourself?” She queried.
“Yep,” I sighed, “And, for the second August in a row, my car’s AC is broken.”
“Christ… Interesting way to spend a Tuesday evening,” She said sarcastically as she plopped down on the couch in front of me.
“Actually, it’s really been kinda fun, going through all this stuff,” I replied. “There’s only a little bit of my childhood that actually survived the process of my growing up, but it’s been nice to see it all.”
“Yeah, especially considering how you are with throwing stuff out,” She answered.
“What?” I said with a quizzical look. “I toss out old junk. So what?”
“You toss out EVERYTHING,” she returned. “Frankly, I’m surprised there’s as much here as there is.”
“Well, really, you’re to thank for that,” I replied.
“What do you mean?”
“I’d say like 80% of this stuff is from the house I shared with Mike, Juan and Jen,” I said. “Almost all of it would have been junked if you hadn’t taken it over to my parents’ house for me when I moved out.”
She fixed me with strange gaze.
“What?” I said, returning her look with one of my own.
“Moved out? Or
kicked out?” She asked.
“Okay, we’re not going to rehash all of that. It was for the best.”
She held my eyes for as long as she needed to get her point across. “Whatever you say,” she said with her trademark smirk. She glanced down deliberately to end our current line of conversation; her eyes landing upon a tall stack of notebooks directly in front of the couch. “Wow…” She said, leaning over her own lap to pick one of them up. “Your old notebooks and sketchbooks. I bet you’re glad to see these, huh?”
“Not at all, honestly,” I replied. “Tons of bad drawing and immature thoughts. It’s typical teenage and young adult crap.”
“And what’s different now?” She said with a smile I couldn’t see; her nose buried in one of my old journals.
“Touché,” I responded as I twisted my body to find a large cardboard box to my right. I reached inside and grabbed a robotic dinosaur action figure – one of three Transformers I managed to save from my youth. “Check this out.”
She looked up and found me. “What’s that thing?” she asked with a slight tilt of the head.
“It’s Grimlock,” I answered proudly.
“Grimlock?” She repeated. “What’s a Grimlock?”
“Oh, come on! Don’t tell me you guys didn’t get The Transformers overseas…”
“Nope, ‘fraid not,” She answered, returning her eyes to the notebook lain open in her lap. “Just Thundercats and Smurfs. I’ve told you this a thousand times.”
“God, you Army brats…” I said with a sigh as I placed the mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex on the pile of old toys to go on EBay. I began digging through yet another box of old things as I continued, “No ‘Hulk Hogan's Rock and Wrestling’, no ‘SCTV’… You’re so undereducated on the classics of American pop cul — HEY! Check it out!”
“What?” she queried as I reached deep into the gigantic box before me. With a strain and a grimace, I pulled forth the behemoth of a computer laid flat in the bottom of the box, half buried underneath a Star Wars Hoth playset and a few wayward Lego’s. It was clad in deep beige with a dark brown window on the front. “Holy…” She said as she looked up to catch sight of it. “That thing’s huge.”
I looked it over as I held it in my outstretched arms. “God… My first ever computer!” I smiled a little boy’s smile as I gazed upon it. “Oh man… Wow… I wonder if it still runs?”
“Who knows,” she stated, lightly fingering the corner of the next page in the notebook. “How old is that thing? And how on earth did it survive this long?”
“I dunno,” I answered. “It’s in a box full of old toys and stuff… I guess from when I moved out of my parents’ house. Mom must have just dumped it in a box along with whatever stuff I accidentally left.” I held it aloft and stared at it, reminiscing of the weeks spent learning how to actually play a game on the stupid thing. “You know, if this thing still works, I bet I could throw Slackware on it and make a pretty sweet mail server out of it.”
Andrea chuckled loudly. “You and your ‘Slackwares’ and your ‘Grimlocks’…” With a dismissive shaking of her head, she returned to reading the notebook. “God,” She said, turning a page, “You are SUCH a nerd.”
“And YOU love me for it,” I said with a loud grunt as I heaved myself and the old computer over a huge stack of papers and envelopes. I carefully negotiated the maze of nostalgia I’d created and brought the ancient machine behind my desk to a huge table full of them. Returning to the small empty space in the floor where I’d been sitting, I knelt down and began sifting through the big box full of old manuals and cables and whatnot. As I began sorting through the junk in an effort to locate a power cable, I asked my wife, “So… Reading anything interesting over there?”
“It’s one of your old journals, it looks like,” She answered as she lifted her eyes bashfully to meet mine. “You… Uh… You don’t mind, do you?”
“Pshaw…” I answered with a dismissive wave of the hand, “Feel free. I have no secrets from you.”
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” she answered with a smile.
“Not at all,” I answered as I pulled out a massive conglomeration of wires. “You were either present for or already know about 90% of whatever’s in there, I’m sure. When’s that one from, anyway?”
She flipped the notebook’s cover over; laying her right hand on the page she was on to keep her place. Seeing nothing telling on the front, she flipped the cover off and looked at the front page of the notebook. “The first entry is from October 25, 1997,” She replied.
“Hmm…” I said as I dug through another box. “Anything interesting happen in 1997?”
“Well, I’m up to a little past your birthday, almost to February of 1998. You’re talking about…” She paused for a few seconds.
“What?” I prodded.
“You’re talking about Katherine,” She said flatly.
“AHA!” I cheered brightly.
She frowned. “Well, you didn’t have to get THAT excited about it…”
“What?” I answered, holding a cord aloft in my fist. She cocked her head at me. “Oh… No, I wasn’t’ talking about that,” I responded. “I found a power cord!”
“Oh… Well, yippee,” She responded with a sardonic tone in voice as she returned to her reading.
“What?” I asked, my spider sense a-tingling.
“Nothing,” she said softly. “I just find it hard to get all excited over your power cord.” There was bitterness in her voice that I’d only heard once before in my life.
“Sweetie…” I said, ducking my head under the desk to plug the cord in, “If reading that thing is going to piss you off, I’d rather you just put it down.”
“No, no, no,” She said. “I’m fine. I’m just… Fine. I want to keep reading it.”
“You don’t SOUND fine,” I replied.
She sighed. “Well, what do you expect? I’m sitting here reading about how excited you are about some girl on the internet from San Francisco and how she ‘completely touches your soul and—’”
“Oh, God,” I cried. “Please, don’t go on. It’s too painful.”
“What?” She asked. “The memories?”
“Oh, no…” I responded. “The memories I’m fine with. It’s the poetry. I can’t be held responsible for any of the crap I wrote from that time.”
“Well, you wrote it,” She responded, returning her eyes to the notebook. “That makes you responsible.”
“Yeah, yeah… Semantics,” I replied. “Different time, different person… You know, all of that crap.”
She nodded without looking up from her reading.
The next hour or so was extremely fruitful. After a little bit of jumper switching and replacing the CMOS battery, I managed to make functional the old beast of a machine my father brought home as a surprise for “the family” almost a decade ago. I didn’t think I’d be able to, but I successfully installed Linux on it and even got it to run – this time with considerably more success than the first time I sat down to its dingy yellow keyboard. I was merrily chugging away with configuring Sendmail on my brand new old machine when I heard the familiar plop a notebook makes when it is tossed to the ground.
“Done?” I asked without moving my head from behind the monitor.
“Let me ask you something,” Andrea asked in lieu of an answer.
“Sure, sweetie,” I responded, this time shifting so that she could actually see me.
“Do you still think about her?” She asked earnestly.
“Who, Katherine?” I responded.
“Yeah.”
“Hmm… Sometimes, I guess,” was my answer. “I think about everyone that’s touched my life at some point or another.”
“Do you ever miss her?” she asked.
I could see where this was going.
I sighed slightly, and then got up from my computer chair. Carefully navigating the piles of crap strewn across my office floor, I sat down on the couch beside my wife and smiled sweetly. “Why do you ask?”
“I dunno,” She said. “Curious, I guess.”
“Were you curious before you read the notebook?” I asked.
“No, not really.”
“So, what’s changed since you read it?”
She thought for a moment. “Nothing, really, I guess. I just saw what you were thinking while you were going through that. It was pretty intense.”
“Yeah, well… I don’t know how much of that was her and how much of that was me,” I responded.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, think about it. I knew her over the internet, you know? She was here for a week, and yet I had all these profound thoughts and emotions and feelings for her… Now, looking back, I can’t really honestly say I loved her as much as I loved the thought of her.”
“What does that mean?” She asked.
“Like… I dunno. The thought of being with someone so deep and emotional and profound. It made me feel good to think that there was someone out there who understood me… Understood my deepest thoughts and emotions.”
“I see,” She answered.
“No, no you don’t,” I replied. “I was, what… 21? I don’t think I was even capable of a deep thought at that time… Shit, I don’t think I’m even capable of one NOW.” She laughed, and I continued. “I think back to then and I realize that I had no idea who I even was at that point in life. I mean, sure, I had a sense of self and I was probably more mature than other people my age at that time, because I worked all the time – but as far as emotionally, I was really pretty immature. It’s hard to really know someone when they don’t even know themselves.”
“Well, you’re pretty emotionally immature NOW,” She responded with a smile.
“True,” I said with a grin. “That is true… But hey, I’ve gotten better, haven’t I?”
“A little… A VERY little!” She said, taking my hands into hers. “So… Do you ever regret it?” She asked.
“What… Knowing Katherine?” I responded.
“Well, sure. Any of it.”
“Not one bit,” I replied. “She taught me a lot.”
“How so?” My wife asked.
“Well, without her, I probably would have never gotten to the bottom of the issues that laid dormant between Me, Mike and Juan… I probably never would have learned the difference between loving how someone makes you feel and loving someone… And I definitely never would have gotten those bitchin’ shoes.”
“Ah, the ol’ Air Katherines,” She replied. “Where are those, anyway?”
“You know, I have no idea,” I replied. “Probably still in Mike’s garage from that time I went over there to help him dig a pond.”
“God… what a disaster THAT was,” She said as we shared a chuckle.
“You know… you actually have Katherine to thank for our relationship,” I said.
“Uh… Do WHAT?” Andrea replied sternly.
“Well, think about it. If it weren’t for that letter you got all nosy about, I never would have known how you felt about me.”
“So?” She responded flatly. “You’d have figured it out eventually.”
“Possibly,” I replied. “But would you have wanted to leave something like that to my ‘keen intellect’ to figure out?” Just then, a tone emitted from the ancient fossil of a computer I’d just dug up. I quickly got up off of the sofa and headed to the machine to continue the installation of the various utilities I was installing.
“Oh, sure… I see how it is,” She replied.
“What?” I asked, throwing a different CD ROM into the drive. I emerged from behind the desk and headed back to the couch to resume our conversation.
“The computer beeps and you have to go running,” she said with a smirk.
“Well, sure,” I responded. “I want to put that thing to good use. It’s a piece of history.”
“It’s a piece of junk,” She replied glibly.
“Hey now,” I stated. “If it weren’t for that computer, I wouldn’t have a career right now. In fact, without it, we wouldn’t be husband and wife right now!”
She gasped, shocked that I’d say such a thing. “Whatever do you mean!?!” She demanded.
“Well, think about it,” I replied. “If it weren’t for that machine, I never would have gotten the job at the computer lab at Georgia State – which means I never would have gotten the job with Gary over at Ross. And if not for that job, I wouldn’t have gotten so damn bored that I needed to chat on IRC – which means I never would have met Katherine, and you never would have snooped in my mail, which means I never would have figured out how you felt about me, so I never would have waited for you to break up with that… That fucking mongoloid—”
She laughed. “God, it’s been five years, and you STILL use the same insult for him.”
“Well, what can I say?” I answered. “He IS a mongoloid. I bet he’s still changing oil for a living.”
“Well, regardless…” She said dismissively, “I don’t think I have a computer to thank for our marriage – or an internet girlfriend, or anyone else for that matter. I think we would have ended up together no matter what.”
“Hmm…” I replied, “I can get behind that.” And with that, I took my wife’s hands in mine, leaned in, and softly kissed her.
“I love you,” She said with a bright smile as our lips parted.
“I love you, too,” I said with the full confidence of a man who knows what love truly is.
THE END
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