The finish line in sight in Give me your soul

So, I had my first uncomfortable parent meeting and that's always a fun experience to have in your dating life. Generally speaking, I come off pretty normal to parents so they don't have many problems with me. I got through a grueling parent interview and Barbara and I had...no so much their blessing but their wary and begrudging willingness to stand aside and let us date. They were actually pretty nice to me, though. They had me over for dinner a lot, we played games and watched movies or they drove us places. The longer I stuck around, the less resistant they were to me.

I had so many amazing times with her. Her parent's mistrust did not stop us from having fun. I remember the night we had a date to see the first Harry Potter movie at the Spectrum and I had my first freeway driving lesson the same day. It was pouring rain and my instructor kept urging me to drive faster despite my being terrified to drive the infamous California freeways in bad weather. I remember the date we had on the Balboa pier. We rode a ferris wheel and I was recovering from one of extremely few sunburns I've ever had and she kept peeling my dead skin. It was super creepy and felt weird but it makes me smile to think about it. I remember when we went to the Universal Studios City Walk and found an action figure of Jesus with wheels in a random shop. Or when I brought her to Cyber World (a place that offered computers set up for gaming that me and the guys loved to frequent) and taught her to play Counter Strike and she got kind of hooked on it. The point is we did stuff I remember fondly.

The best part about her was that she was pretty open with me. She would tell me how she was feeling about things. She was smart and opinionated she knew what she wanted and would go for it. If she wasn't, I don't think we would have ever gotten past just kissing. I'm just not a bold person. We agreed not long after kicking things up that we wouldn't have sex because we were too afraid of accidental pregnancy. We didn't really have any good place for privacy during our relationship so most of our intimate moments happened in semi-public. During the second semester we arranged our schedules so we had the same free period at the end of the day. We would find a way to sneak on to the stage and prop the back door open so we could spend the whole time in there fooling around.

We had a good relationship, I think. We didn't have any really big fights for the bulk of it. We had a few little things we disagreed on that we teased one another about constantly (like how she was a Pepsi person and I was a Coke person) and I think that helped. I would have pretty miserable that year if not for her. I hated having to face graduation. I stabbed my evil counterpart and put her in a coma, the vampire I loved was moving away and the Mayor was planning to turn into a demon and devour us all. That may also have been season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...I have trouble remembering. Perhaps I was just upset to be leaving the place that gave me friends and I was worried I would lose everybody. I was young and stupid but even I knew that people tended to grow apart.

Barbara's parents got us tickets to Lion King for my graduation. It was fun! We had our grad night in an airplane museum I never knew existed. Where to most other high schools in our district have grad night? DISNEYLAND. Psh. It wasn't bad, though. There was fake gambling and a small movie theater. There was a mechanical bull-esque set up where they operate it with bungies...bungie bull? I don't know. They cheated, though. Anybody who stayed on for more than a few seconds just got dumped off by pulling the bull hard to one side so it tipped over. Except me, I saw it coming and wrapped my arms around the head. When they tipped it I was still very much on but they made me get off anyway. That night was the first time in a while I had seen Ishan, too.

Summer was when they got me. Barbara's parents (her mom and step dad to be more accurate) brought me to church with them a few times hoping something would rub off on me and it finally did. I was easy at that point, too scared at what the future held. Also, before them, I had never had good experiences with Christian people. They had all come off too sanctimonious and hateful. They were pretty damn happy when I gave in. They still wouldn't rescind the dating rules but it was fine. Barbara and I had long ago mastered sneaky canoodling. The problem was the same as with most people who find religion later in life...I became pretty insufferably pious. Our relationship, then, had two problems: the first was a moral view that what we were doing was wrong and the second was that I turned 18 while she turned 16...now it was all the more dangerous for us to fool around.

Many problems spiraled out from this point but that's where it began. I was at a crossroad in life and I wanted to run in every direction at once. Even with the bolstering power of religious intensity behind me I couldn't stop myself from collapsing into a miserable pile. It didn't help that my attempts to integrate myself into the more hardcore college theater department failed so miserably. Barbara got to shoulder way too much of the shit I was pouring out because of it and ultimately she cut herself free. She was very justified in doing so. She had never been anything less than loving and supportive to me and never gave me a reason to doubt her feelings but I did anyway.

So, that's high school. I could gush on about my time there for a billion years but I thought it was best just to keep this less long. I only need the important milestones for self-reflection.