Places, part IV

A warning to my readers:

This one gets dark, and/or may be triggering to some friends and family.

Reader discretion is advised.
Don't say I didn't warn you.

...the high school (with some college) years, section II...

2000: George W. Bush Defeated Al Gore In A Controversial Presidential Election

I finished my junior year of high school in June 2000 to little fanfare; I had spent most of the first half of the year recovering from Becca as well as burying myself in schoolwork. I didn't miss a single day of school throughout my entire high school career at Preston, and ended up getting awarded a perfect attendance certificate for it when I graduated.

I was the genius to my extended family, after all, and they expected great things from me. My mother wanted me to go to culinary school or become a doctor or a lawyer; meanwhile, I really didn't have much to offer. My work ethic then wasn't what it is now (read: it's much better now for most things), and I learned very quickly -- especially as an adult -- that always being the smartest person in the room in West Virginia isn't that difficult a feat to accomplish.

I did not want to go to college, yet it was fully expected of me and was a given that it would happen whether I wanted it to or not. My mother, who was particularly controlling and domineering in those days, basically forced me into it. As an adult I can see her reasoning now compared to then -- she wanted better for me than she'd had. She, who got married at 20, had me at 22, hadn't gone to college until her 30s (and even then part time), and who had given up whatever dreams she'd had to raise me and take care of me. I see that now, when I couldn't then.

There was also the factor that I had that vast amount of intelligence that most people around me did not possess, and I felt intense pressure (both from myself as well as other people in my life) to put it to use, to refine it, to go to college and "make something of myself." I lived in rural West Virginia -- there wasn't much to do there job-wise unless I wanted to slave away at the university or work at Wal-Mart, or drive 100 miles (round trip) per day to work in a coal mine or a Toyota factory. While my intelligence was my biggest asset, it was also my biggest hindrance on my psyche. I saw myself as above menial work, above a menial life. All I knew that I wanted to do once I finished school was that I needed to escape the black hole of my state.

But that wasn't helping me then. In summer 2000 I was still a kid without direction, and a kid without opportunity and means to find it.

So, once more, I turned to music, writing, and introspection.

I had received a stratocaster and a screaming-loud practice amp for Christmas the previous year, and when my parents weren't home I hooked it all up and let it wail, usually through an effects pedal. I'm sure I was nowhere near as good as I thought I was, and though this guitar is literally sitting next to me in my office almost twenty years later, I can't remember the last time I played it -- I'd be so out of practice now that I wouldn't know where to begin. As I couldn't read music (and still can't), I subscribed to Guitar World magazine (which yes, still exists) and had new songs delivered to my door every month in the form of tablature, which I could read and play. I tried to learn all I could. I imagined myself, as many teenagers did, as being in a band, or starting one -- the impetus behind that being that if I were a rock star, I could also get the fuck out of West Virginia that way.

In my formative teenage years, my musical tastes had gone off in many strange directions all at once. By 2000, I was beginning to refine them into what they are today. Coincidentally, most popular music at the time was absolutely going right down the shitter, so I learned to appreciate stuff that I never would have appreciated before, or would've written off as stupid or otherwise meaningless. Yes, I discovered Weezer and Beck, but I also discovered Fleetwood Mac and garnered a new appreciation for some of the oldies and classics like Johnny Rivers and Dusty Springfield. I was equal parts Motown and Epitaph -- Bad Religion, The Offspring, and Rancid called to my rebellious side, while The Temptations and The Chi-Lites soothed it. There was a song for every feeling, for every mood, and as I had just upgraded to a 56k modem (lightning had blown out my old 14.4), I now had access to find more music quickly. I began amassing large playlists in the infancy of the mp3 years, and burned out my 3-disc CD player in a year or so from everything I was running through it.

Still though, I was mostly unhappy in my life. I had no idea what I'd be doing after high school. The thought of an uncertain future scared me, and the pressure to perform well in school (even though I was getting straight As) was crushing. I had nothing to do during the summer, so in addition to music, I filled notebooks with journaling, recording the day's thoughts and feelings, and hoping that some anime would play on one of the basic cable channels I had access to. Most of the time, it did not.

I don't know if I can accurately describe what life was like in a time before the internet and smartphones dominated every aspect of it -- to people who didn't live through it, I mean. It was, for lack of a better word, boring. Especially in West Virginia. When the school year was on, I could bury myself in books and papers and work/study until I tired myself out on any given night. When school was out, it was three months of...nothing. With oppressive summer heat and no AC on top of that nothing. I could have been researching career paths or trying to figure out what college I was going to be forced to attend, but...I just didn't have the drive or the care to do so.

When I was a child, I had some hopes and dreams. As mentioned before here, I always wanted to be a creator. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to draw comic books, I wanted to write novels and movie scripts and television series. I'd also been inspired at a young age by Ghostbusters, when Dr. Venkman tells Peck that he had "PhDs in parapsychology and psychology." It was the and that I'd found so fascinating there. I looked up schools who had parapsychology programs -- one of them, ironically enough, was New York University. I ordered the catalog and literature from them only to find that tuition there -- for fall 2001 -- was just shy of $30k per semester.

I was smart, but I wasn't $60k-a-year-in scholarships smart. At the time, I didn't really know what student loans were, and as an adult nearing 40 now, I am very glad I didn't.

Because I was already on the college track, I'd taken the ACT in the spring. I got a 23. A full ride, room-and-board-and-everything scholarship to WVU started at 26, so after studying, prepping, quizzing myself and generally not sleeping for a week or so beforehand, I took the test a second time. I got a 24 the second time. I'd also already been enrolled in dual-credit courses starting that fall, both Composition English 1 and 2 (which ironically, I'd be teaching ten years later), and History 151 and 152. The credits earned from them would transfer to most colleges in the area.

Looking back on this time now, I can see that I was very depressed, and had been since I was rejected by Becca. That was just the beginning of a long downward slope that got worse by the end of the summer. As mentioned, I became more isolated and withdrawn, and by the time the school year started again in August -- this time for my senior year -- I was just tired and numb all the time.

It would, as they say, get worse.

Adding to my dark thoughts and feelings were the fact that an acquaintance I'd known in Morgantown, a fellow nerd on the far outskirts of my group of friends, had been killed in a car accident that fall. His name was Matt, and though I didn't know him that well, his death weighed heavily on my thoughts.

That fall, the weather went haywire really fast. We got a freak snowstorm the first week of October, which snapped tree limbs and bent other large trees in half, followed a few weeks later by the worst windstorm I've ever lived through -- which ripped siding off our house like it was paper and knocked out power for at least a full day. My parents were worried about money and insurance, and I was worried about, well, everything. It was the beginning of my anxiety issues, the beginning of a deeper downward spiral.

I was feeling pressure from all sides to pick a college and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, at seventeen, and really the only thoughts I had were two things: die or get the fuck out of West Virginia. It had been almost a given that I would go to WVU even before I'd applied there, but I didn't want it. I didn't want anything; really, I just wanted to be left alone. I could stay in this room 24x7, I thought, only coming out to eat and to use the bathroom, and that would be far better for me than trying to force myself through more schooling. I didn't have a plan; one was being thrust upon me. I hated my life. I hated everything about it -- the expectations put on me, the feelings of dread the next year produced, feelings of being unloved, unwanted, and uncared for (whether it was true or not), feelings of inadequacy and of jealousy of others who seemed to have it so much easier, and were so much better off, than I was. I didn't have a car or a license or rich parents, I didn't have almost anything I'd wanted in life. Instead, my parents had uprooted me from the town I lived in and loved, from a house I lived in and loved with close access to entertainment and opportunities and my friends, and had dropped me into a farmhouse on top of a mountain half a mile from the nearest paved road, into a school in which I would never truly fit into, and now I was being forced into college? Being forced to go to school for four more years to do what, exactly? I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I slowly came to realize that I had no control whatsoever about anything actually happening in my life, I hadn't had any control over it for a long time, and (perhaps the worst part of all) I didn't see that changing anytime soon.

Stepping back for a moment, any of you who know me well know that I am the very definition of the term control freak. I have to be the boss, be the leader, be the center of attention (unless I have chosen not to be for some reason), and I will be listened to, respected, and obeyed -- even if I have to do it by force -- or you will face the consequences, as well as my deep, volatile anger. It is legitimately the only reason I became a manager at my current job (the bump in pay I received was mostly negligible) -- so I could tell other people what to do instead of being bent to others' wills and wishes. I don't respond well to authority figures' edicts, proclamations, or ultimatums because I need to be that authority figure. It is one of the most deeply defining aspects of my personality: my way, my rules, my control. If someone is above me in leadership hierarchy they'd better have a damn good reason why they're there, or they'd better have my respect -- because without it, they're not even going to get so much as my acknowledgment.

When I don't have that control, and I don't have the ability to obtain it, my natural response is that I need to get it or obtain control over something that will give me leverage. At that point in 2000, the only thing I could leverage was my own life.

So here's the story, folks. It is a story I have told very few people, generally only very close friends and some family -- the story of how I tried to kill myself. It is not easy for me to write about, as (with everything else in this series of posts), writing about it makes me re-live it to a certain extent. While I've briefly mentioned it to many in passing, and while I don't feel like there should be a stigma to talking about it openly, there is. You tell people you tried to kill yourself and they look at you like you're insane, or look upon you with pity -- not empathy and understanding. So, it's something that I (for many obvious reasons) don't like to talk about that much. I am not the person now that I was when I was seventeen, at least not in most respects, and I feel that I've evolved and, well, grown up. But that person is still a part of me, deep down, and it helped shape who I am today. So, let's tell the story.

It was mid-October. I don't remember the date in particular because, truthfully, I just didn't care. It was before the huge windstorm mentioned above, I know that, because that was early November. I was in a very dark place. I didn't have a gun, I got queasy and sick at the sight of my own blood (to this day, I still do) and hanging myself when I was fat was simply laughable. I didn't want pain, I didn't want to suffocate or drown or any of that, and we didn't have a garage to where I could do the old carbon-monoxide-exhaust-pipe trick. So, basically, an intentional overdose on pills was truly my only option.

I took an entire bottle of aspirin, handfuls of pills at a time, quickly, and went to sleep.

This. Did not work.

I awoke a few hours later and violently vomited great clusters, chunks of pills -- with blood and mucus mixed in -- multiple times. I drank water to wash the chemical burning out of my mouth and throat; it felt like someone was squirting fire out of me from the stomach up. Every time I drank more water, the vomiting came again. This continued for several hours in the middle of the night. I have had food poisoning and the stomach flu multiple times, bad enough to where I wanted to die, but this was something completely different. This was a burning, dizzying pain that blurred my vision and made me so weak I couldn't move.

After continually drinking a few glasses of water every hour or so and after multiple hours of throwing up, it got to the point where there was finally nothing left inside me. When I was able to keep the water down, and started feeling more normal, I knew it was done. I vaguely remember cleaning up the bathroom and returning to bed to pass out -- it was a weekend, so I didn't have school -- and I just slept.

I awoke feeling no better, and felt a great deal of shame for multiple reasons -- the first being that apparently I couldn't even kill myself right. Worse yet, I was in no better situation than I was in before trying.

I'm not sure my parents ever really knew. I tried telling my mother about it once, but I'm not sure it really stuck, or if she actually understood what had transpired or what I was trying to say. I'd also like to say that it changed me as a person at the time and gave me a new, more optimistic outlook on life and the future, but it really didn't. If anything, it made me more hopeless and sad, made me feel more trapped. Nobody knew about it and I didn't tell what few friends I had -- outwardly to the entire world I was still the same witty, sardonic Brandon I'd always been. It was yet another mask. By this time I'd put on so many masks for so many different people and situations that I didn't know who I really was anymore underneath all of them. Realizing this, of course, made me even more sad.

I was incredibly lucky. I could've sent myself into multiple organ failure, I could've blown out my kidneys or thinned out my blood so much that there would have been no recovery, and it would have been an incredibly painful, gruesome death to endure as one organ shut down after the next. I don't want to even think about the possibilities any further than that, honestly.

Stepping back for a moment, if anything, my suicide attempt put me more on the path (at that juncture of my life, anyway) of becoming sociopathic in my behaviors. I've done research in the years since, I've taken the tests and have studied the traits, of which I feel that I, even now, match up with quite a few of. Some I very strongly matched with then, but don't now, and others I very strongly match up with now but didn't then. Others I have never matched with, and still more I match with only a little or rarely. Do I think I'm a sociopath now? No, not really. Do I think I was well on the road to becoming one when I was in high school, if my path would've stayed the same as it was then? Yes, absolutely.

Others will say that you don't "develop" sociopathic tendencies, that they're something hardwired into you and your brain chemistry -- I don't agree with that. It's the classic nature vs. nurture argument, and while yes, I do think some people are born sociopaths, I don't think ALL sociopaths are, and probably not even the majority.

And yes, I plan to write a post discussing how closely I match up with those traits in the near future.

Anyway.

I was a month too young to vote in the 2000 election, and truthfully I wasn't paying that close attention to it at the time, as I was not generally a political person when I was in high school. With nothing else to focus on or occupy me, I very slowly resigned myself to my fate of college and graduating high school in a few short months. I spent the winter reading and writing, burying myself in my schoolwork as an attempt to keep my mind occupied with something constructive. The election came and went. Thanksgiving came and went. I turned 18 in December 2000, and I don't even remember my 18th birthday or what I did for it. I remember that my mother bought me an Eagles Hotel California t-shirt, which I had until it fell apart a few years ago.

Christmas and New Year's came and went with little fanfare, and I was happy to have the year 2000 behind me when it was all said and done. And it took me years before I could look at an aspirin bottle again without feeling incredibly queasy. It took even more years before I would let myself take aspirin again for any minor aches and pains. Surprisingly, it still works.



2001: The September 11 Terror Attacks Killed Thousands

Okay, so here's the big one. Let's just get it out of the way now, and I can tell the rest of the story of 2001 afterwards.

When the actual 9/11 attacks happened, I was sitting in my 8AM Math 121 class at WVU, and nobody knew anything about it. It was a Tuesday morning, and I had back to back classes all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I didn't even hear about the attacks for several hours, when my Geology professor announced what had happened and that he was cancelling classes for the day so everyone could go home and "be safe with your families." Almost all classes at the university were cancelled for the rest of the day, so I took the PRT -- WVU's above-ground light rail system -- back to the medical center where I worked, and worked all afternoon in the lab with the radio on, listening to the latest (remember listening to the radio for news?)

That night, we stopped at the grocery store on the way home and I purchased a special-edition afternoon run of the local newspaper, The Dominion Post, and immediately took it home and sealed it up inside two manila envelopes; it has remained sealed to this day, and it is somewhere in this house. Upon arriving home, I put a blank tape in my VCR, set it to 6-hour mode on one of the news channels, and hit record. When it had finished, I put a second tape into the VCR and did the same. I still own those tapes, as well. One of these days I'll hopefully digitize them.

So now that's out of the way, let's tell the story of the rest of 2001.

I returned to school after the new year with a strange mindset. I was over the hump, so they say, and barreling towards the end of my high school education at a fast clip. I still didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and didn't know if I'd ever get out of West Virginia, but I sort of settled into a mindset of "some people have it way worse than I do" and decided to at least attempt to make the best of it, because who knew what the future would hold?

I wouldn't say that it was optimism, per se, but rather more of a "I need to see what happens next" mentality. So basically, I leveled off a bit. My rebellious teen years were long over by this time, so I was mainly just trying to be normal in the eyes of my teachers and peers. I was dressing fairly normally, I had a normal haircut, I always kept clean-shaven (though admittedly it was hard to grow any real facial hair until I was mostly through college anyhow). I took Driver's Ed and got my permit. I made some friends -- Brittany, Kristen, Chad, John, Hannah, Becky, Robbie, Whitney, and Shanna -- most of whom I'd stay in contact with for many years afterwards. Brittany would be my best friend for several years, throughout college and afterwards, and Shanna and I were so close that we were practically dating. If things had gone differently, we probably would have been.

I was still far from "normal," but I was slowly getting there. I applied to WVU in the spring and was almost immediately accepted and awarded a number of scholarships, including the "employee dependent" scholarship, because both of my parents were employed by the university. This scholarship covered most, if not all, of my in-state tuition, and state and federal grants not only ensured that I'd have the cost of my books covered every year, but would provide me with a refund check in cold, hard cash -- basically, spending money that I would need as an adult. As my education was free and I wasn't going to be a financial burden on the parents for it, I figured I'd see where it went. If I didn't like it, I didn't have to keep doing it. It was also decided fairly early in this process that I would just remain living at home with my parents instead of on campus -- my parents both working at the university meant that I would have transportation to and from school every day regardless, and this would actually motivate me to go to my classes. It also gave me the benefit of being able to get away from everyone and everything and decompress for a while when I needed to. Sometimes I'd get an early ride home from campus with my neighbor, who was also a student there, so I wouldn't even have to wait until the end of the day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

While I didn't necessarily dislike my high school, I was ready to be done with it. I'd been going there every day without fail for three years, and was ready to get out and move on with my life. I was on the school newspaper staff, and wrote a few articles for the paper -- but I stayed far from the yearbook committee. I didn't want to have senior pictures done, so I didn't get them done. Instead, we just ordered a set of the normal school pictures, which I didn't look terrible in, and I ordered one of the lower-end "graduation packages" from whatever company was doing it (Herff Jones, I believe). Even in the lower-end packages I got a mug and a t-shirt, both of which I still own and use today. I didn't buy a yearbook. I didn't go to prom, either as a junior or as a senior, and I had no clue when homecoming was or what it was about. I cared not for such foolishness.

As graduation neared and I finished up most of my work for the year, I sent out probably close to 100 graduation announcements -- or, as I liked to call them, "send me money cards." My school was small, so it's not like I could personally invite everyone to our graduation -- there was a limit of three tickets for each student to give to only the most important friends and family, apparently. I remember this angered a lot of the students' families, who wanted to bring everyone possible to the high school graduation and....who knows, tailgate or something? I hadn't a clue. I wanted my grandmother to come, but even in 2001 she was frail and it was a very long trip for her, and an even longer day (she didn't die for another seventeen years, but still). Instead, my aunt Barbara would end up coming along with my parents.

During the last week-ish of school, I reconnected with Becca a bit and made my own peace with the situation -- she and I had grown apart quite a bit over the course of the year prior, but we were still close-ish, and part of what kept me going was the friendship I had with her as well as the thought in the back of my mind that maybe, eventually, things would change. She wasn't necessarily opposed to us being in a relationship, but her feelings hadn't really changed either, and we'd already grown apart enough to where going to different colleges in the fall would just make it that much harder to stay in touch. So, instead, I wrote her a letter and told her not to open it until well after graduation.

In that letter was everything I needed to tell her, all of my thoughts and hopes, everything that I'd personally experienced since we'd met, and how she had broken my heart but it wasn't her fault -- I was a different person then, naive and immature, and how much her friendship had helped me ever since that first awkward day we'd met. I may or may not have told her about the suicide attempt; I can't remember. I just remember telling her that I wished her the best in life, and that she'd helped save mine. I remember it being one of the most honest letters I'd ever written, and once she had it in her hands, my pursuit of a relationship other than friendship with her was officially over. Time marched on, and so did we.

Graduation was scheduled to be outside on the football field. We'd done rehearsals of it earlier in the week that May, when it was dark and gray. It was scheduled to be held on June 1, a Friday night. I lived 20 miles from the school, and there was literally nothing to do at home that night (I had all of my graduation robes/stuff with me, as well as my guitar to play as I killed time), so I planned to just stay at the school and hang out with friends from 3:30 to 6 or so, when families and parents would start filtering in for the ceremony, parking, getting their places in the bleachers, etc.

Around 3 that afternoon, the sky became dark as night, enough to where the parking lot dusk lights kicked on, and a severe thunderstorm rolled into the area, dropping a few inches of rain as well as some hail and horrendous lightning. As the football field quickly became a mud pit, the announcement was quickly made that graduation would be moved to the following night, Saturday June 2, and that it would be held in the gym as a backup plan, and I went home as normal. The strict ticketing rule was immediately put into effect, as the gym only had so many seats.

And so, the ceremony commenced the next night. Truthfully, I was bored by most of it and was attempting to not fall asleep throughout it. Our Valedictorian was one of the rich kids, and ended up going to Brown, I believe. Where he is now, who knows, as I didn't really know him at all. Despite my perfect attendance and straight As, I was still ranked 50-something out of 360 or so, even with a 4.25 cumulative GPA (there were many others with 4.5s or higher due to weighted classes).

After the ceremony, hats were thrown, pictures were taken, and we went home. I didn't really feel any different. Gladiator premiered on HBO that night, I watched it, and then I went to bed.

Becca eventually read the letter, and wrote me a long email telling me that it made her cry, but it was a "good cry."

And so ended my high school career. Many of the people I went to high school with I would never see again -- many others would die long before their time, including a few close friends. Suddenly, my last free summer was in front of me, a summer where I would spend relatively little free time alone and would, instead, be plagued by a series of unfortunate events.

I've mentioned here in the past that I have two historically unlucky months out of the year -- August and October. In 2001, the bad stuff began happening in August, but I am (again) getting ahead of myself.

In summer 2001, as I would be entering WVU in August, I took a job in the department of Microbiology as a laboratory technician; this was offered to me through a family friend who worked in the department, and would be paid with money from his research grant. It was minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, and was 20-30ish hours per week. This meant I'd be making about $400-600 a month before taxes, which was not a lot, but it was amazing money for me at the time when I had literally nothing else to do, and the job was simple -- clean glassware, mix some formulas, answer the phone, order some parts here and there, and keep the research lab in general running condition. There were four graduate students who worked there doing research, in addition to two professors. Two of the graduate students were post-docs, and the other two were but a few years older than I was, doing doctoral work. I spent many long hours in the media room, autoclaving glassware, getting distilled water at the proper percentage out of the onsite distiller machine, and doing the general lab labor. It was not a hard job, and was definitely not a hard job for someone of my skills and knowledge base. I started it six weeks before classes started, after which point my working schedule would change slightly.

Over the summer, I slowly received replies to my graduation announcements. Most of them had a little money inside them, ranging anywhere from $10 to $150 or so. I finally had a little money to my name, and could purchase some things that I wanted (something that previously had been a very rare opportunity). I only felt a little guilt about spending said money on frivolous things -- such as when I spent the $10 that a family friend sent me on a Judas Priest album, and said family friend died the next week. I'm sure she would've appreciated that, heavy sarcasm intended.

By the beginning of August, I was in a decent groove -- I was ready to start college. This was, of course, a drastic shift in my demeanor from the previous fall. I was beginning to lose a little weight, I looked and felt pretty good for the most part, and things were looking up. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to major in, but I'd already gotten my courseload and schedule (that was done on orientation day, back in April or May) and it was full speed ahead to the future. I'd even gone shopping and had gotten some new clothes and shoes, like I was a kid in grade school again.

On the way home from work one sweltering 100-degree evening, my mother and I were caught in bumper to bumper traffic and were rear-ended, hard, by a lifted Silverado from the late 70s/early 80s. The truck was lifted so high that its front bumper was sitting on the hatchback of my mother's 1993 Ford Probe. The hatch would need to be replaced, as well as the entire back end of the car, pretty much. I can't remember if the frame was bent or not, but the repair costs were over $1000. Thankfully, neither of us were hurt, nor did we have any real lasting physical injuries from the accident. As it was my mother's only vehicle at the time, she got it repaired (but it was in the shop for a week or two, as I recall).

A week or so later, right before I started at WVU, my aunt Eilene -- who had been in the hospital for a few days because she had been sick and was about to be released, had a blood clot break off somewhere inside her body during a walk down the hospital hallway, and collapsed and died.

I haven't written much here about my father's side of the family, as for a good chunk of my life, they were fairly ancillary to it -- as my father had basically broken off all contact with me eight years before, I didn't really associate with my extended family on his side that much. It wasn't really by choice, honestly; I lived about 50 miles or so from any of them and I really just wasn't around and/or in their lives. They always wondered why my father didn't want anything to do with me, and Eilene and my uncle Ronnie (my father's brother) were particularly vocal about it as my father had moved in with them as a teenager after his own father offed himself in the 70s. I spent many days and some holidays at Ronnie and Eilene's house as a child, and had a closeness with them that I didn't have with anyone else on my father's side of the family. Adding to that, I'd just seen both of them while out shopping a few weeks previously, and they'd sent me a graduation card with $50 in it.

I remember getting the call at home that day (it was a day I had off), and then remember letting my mother know -- and then numb and in shock, I sat outside on the front porch of the farmhouse and chainsmoked half a pack of cigarettes, staring off into space. I'd been a smoker since before I graduated high school, but it was that summer that I really became a real smoker, a cigarette aficionado, if you will. I had my favorite brands, my favorite flavors (remember when you could buy flavored cigarettes?) and figured that I could allow myself one vice. If nothing else, I could tell myself that at least it would kill me slowly, unlike downing a bottle of pills at 1 in the morning and hoping for the best.

Eilene's funeral was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I told my mother that we needed to go, that I wasn't going to just not show up, and she agreed. It was the only funeral I've been to in the 21st century. Eilene looked gray. Generally, I mean, they look dead of course, but she was gray, no real color to her face, nothing. She didn't look like herself. Her body just looked like an empty shell. I found the entire experience deeply unsettling. My Uncle Ronnie was deeply somber and kept his head down for most of the funeral, withdrawn, broken. As people filtered up the aisle of the funeral home to pay their respects, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see my father standing above me.

"Hi, dad," I said. He looked down at me and nodded slightly, lips in a tight line across his face, and kept walking. He didn't say a word.

It was the only time in my adult life I would see my father in person, to this day. And he looked just as broken as everyone else did.

We followed to the cemetery and watched her be buried, in the scorching hot August sun, near the top of the cemetery's hill. And then we returned home.

I started at WVU the following Monday. Three weeks after that, September 11 happened.

Everything changed after September 11. I know people say that a lot, and generally mean it in grandiose, exaggerated terms, but for the rest of that year, it all felt very real and everything was changing around us in real time. For the first time, no planes flew overhead for days at a time. When they did start flying again, people would visibly cringe if they looked like they were flying low. The National Guard would fly training sorties in their Apache helicopters up and down the Monongahela River. We were a nation of fearful people who didn't know if 9/11 was going to be the start of World War III or something worse, and I was just an eighteen-year-old kid just starting college, watching a good chunk of his friends who had gone directly into the military three months prior all getting phone calls one by one -- they were being called up for active duty. There was talk of reinstating the draft. President Bush told everyone to not let the terrorists win, to go out, spend money, and keep the economy going. My mother did that, actually -- after the Probe was fixed, she went out and purchased a new Honda CR-V. The Probe was paid off and was being reserved for me -- when I could actually afford to pay insurance and put gas in it, of course. That was not going to happen anytime soon, so it sat in the driveway most of the time.

Meanwhile, I had a 17-hour semester for the first semester of my college career, and it was brutal. I had preliminarily chosen Psychology as my major -- the study of the mind -- so that I could not only understand myself better, but to possibly use it as a stepping stone to a career in the field or a related one (sociology, anthropology, etc). My Psych 101 class was taught by a grad student, but it was very difficult for me. After studying hours upon hours for a test in that class, burning myself out on it, and then getting a 30% on it, I summarily dropped the class. I was not going to be a psych major.

My first semester at WVU was incredibly humbling -- I was no longer the smartest person in the room. I wasn't even in the top 50% of smartest in most of my classes, or so it seemed. I slogged through my core classes as best I could, got several Bs and B-minuses, and felt like I was drowning. I had no real friends there, really -- there were a few people I knew from high school, but my closest friends had gone to different colleges -- Becca to Fairmont State, Shanna to Pitt, Brittany to Potomac State. I caught up with Kristen more, who had gone to WVU with me, as well as a friend from Morgantown High, Stephanie. But, really, I didn't make any friends in any of my classes -- I was swamped with coursework, and when I wasn't, I was at my actual job.

However, there was one friend I made who remained my friend for the next seventeen years. Her name was Meredith, and she was in my Intro to Creative Writing class with me.

Mere was a non-traditional student by that point; she was several years older than me, and had gone to Appalachian State for a few years, I believe, before transferring to WVU. She wanted to be a doctor and was very strong in the sciences, and was taking the creative writing class to kill time. Meredith was brilliant; she may be one of the smartest people I've ever met to this day. She could write like it was second nature to her, she could sing like a bird, and she was exceedingly kind. During that first semester at WVU, she was like a guardian angel to me. She showed me the basics of what being a college student was really about, taught me about life, about music, showed me how to roll a cigarette with loose tobacco and papers (American Spirit, naturally) and was more of a mentor and guiding light to me than anyone else I'd met at WVU to that point.

I didn't fall in love with her or anything, but there was an attraction there. It was an attraction of mutual admiration and respect. It was love, but it was not a romantic love. It was a love of deep understanding. She was older and far more mature than the simple green freshman I was -- she'd been married and divorced, had lived in many places, had seen and done many things that up until that point I'd only seen in movies and read about in books. She was a sexual assault survivor. She'd had several major surgeries and her health had always been a concern. And, because she was a med student, I didn't see her much outside of class -- we'd primarily keep in contact via email or via AOL Instant Messneger (AIM; oh, how I miss the glory days of AIM). She and I bared our souls to one another in long late night AIM sessions, telling each other our life stories. She was one of the few people I trusted with the suicide attempt story, because I knew she wouldn't judge me for it.

Mere and I stayed in contact throughout the entirety of my college career and long afterwards, moving from email and AIM to Facebook. As much as she helped me over the years I also helped her when her fiance at the time killed his mother and then himself. I was there for her when the doctors thought she had cervical cancer and performed a hysterectomy, only to find out later that she did not have cervical cancer, but cancer somewhere else (I don't exactly remember where). Because she couldn't have kids, she bonded very strongly with her niece and helped to raise her. When she posted last year that she was sick again but was doing well and had gone into remission, that she was fighting everything off, I cheered for her and sent her my best wishes.

When a few weeks later, she died, I was very, very upset and broken by it.

I never got details on how or why, or what had happened; I only saw the post from her mother on Facebook as well as a barebones obituary on the funeral home's website. I don't know whether she was buried or cremated, and I didn't want to ask for any details.

2001 ended, finally -- and after everything that had happened during it, I was not sad to see it go. But, I had a new focus, I had a job, and I was working to better myself. After such a tumultuous year it was the best that could be expected.