Alicia by JMcQ

Early in the summer, I started talking to a girl that was on Yahoo. The profile seemed a little cheesy (discussing vampires and various “goth” imagery), but I was lonely and thought that she would be a nice person to talk to. I added her and it took her a few days to sign on, but eventually we began talking and things seemed really well. Well enough in fact that we hung out a number of times during the summer and actually even started to take things more seriously. Not seriously enough to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but still it was a nice change of pace considering I hadn’t had a serious girlfriend of any sort since dating Ashlee my sophomore year of college. Ashlee’s companionship should not even be seen as a true relationship, as she was very immature and really treated me like garbage. To find anyone that Alicia really reminded me of in my relationship life, I had to look back to my first year at DePauw, to the few months of perfection that I had with Alyson.

I’ve talked about Alyson before, but Alicia was much in this same vein. We had actually met a few years before (2000) when I went to Amanda-Clearcreek’s prom with Tabie (an ex that I only dated for a month or two), a friend of a friend of Alicia’s. I really didn’t believe her at first, but she produced a picture of me, as wild as it seemed. Everything seemed to be aligning to make this one of the best relationships I’ve had, but school got in the way (which is one of the reasons why I don’t date much in the first place). Alicia was one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen, but had absolutely nothing in the way of self-esteem.

The girl’s body was flawless, she was smart, devoted to her dream and worked her ass off. We only really met because she was stuck at her mother’s house, paying off credit cards and debts incurred by an asshole ex-fiancée that liked to crash pretty toys. I vaguely mentioned her in issue #11 under much happier auspices, but this was before she was getting called in for 48 and 72 hour shifts. I was a little selfish in that I wanted to spend time with her, but in my defense this was no where near the assholishness that I approached during the last days of my relationship with Alyson.

For those of you who are not familiar with this point of my life, Alyson and I stopped talking soon after her brother died from an overdose. Her brother was apparently a big wheel in the celebrity-drug-suppliers, hitting up people like Kid Rock. I just had no desire to deal with all of this drama and decided to just stop talking to her instead of trying to fix matters. She’s married now actually, to an architect – moved out to Boston the last time I chatted to her. I knew she’d be a success from the first time I chatted with her, but I’m really digressing from the point of this piece.

Alicia had many of the same musical tastes as I, moving a little bit more into the rock vein than I, was friends with a lot of local bands and was fairly opinionated. She liked spending time out as much as she did just chilling here. My taste of bad movies came to bite me in the ass again when we picked out School Daze (how Spike Lee can make such a bipolar movie is beyond me), but beyond that it was all perfect, wine and roses type shit when we were together. Hell, the only problem that I could conceivably come up with is that her cell-phone was the spottiest, worst-reception piece of shit ever and that fact was only multiplied by the fact that she lived out in the middle of Amanda (a hick-heavy farmer village about 15 minutes outside of my city).

I didn’t feel like such a freak when Alicia and I were hanging out, whether it be driving out to Zanesville or Polaris in her car, eating at BW3s, or even having her wait for me at Kmart before I got off of my shift. Call me an idiot, but I really thought this was what a good, solid relationship was like and I could even imagine spending more than three months with this person. I guess this leadup has a fairly obvious dramatic moment, but there is a reason why so much of what I’m saying is in the past tense.

I’m really not sure what happened with the relationship, but I’m guessing that all the duties that Alicia had began to take over her life. The last few times I had talked to her on her cell phone, I gained minor flashes of what was happening in her life. She moved down to the basement of her parents house, then finally had enough of a relative’s shit and moved to Lancaster, and that is where the story ends. I still have her cell number and yahoo name (that she never gets on), but I figure that she just wanted things to fade off into the sunset - why should I really try to impose myself on her like that? Regardless, Alicia was one of the most memorable women I’ve dated, and is probably one of only three people I’ve seen that have honestly made me feel human. People like Ashlee and Jessica made me feel like shit, like I was completely unworthy to breathe the same air they did, but Alicia truly was a bright spot in the dreariness that was last year.