Send me dead flowers...

You know, I really could have used all those congratulations & pats on the back about 12 years ago....I wish you guys had been around then. Heck, I'm just glad you're around now. In any case, thanks for being supportive of my past self; I was sort of proud of him back then, too.

And yes, that was really it. The end. No more Kara. She doesn't show back up on my doorstep in 2 years...or in 10; we never have some chance meeting in a grocery store or a bar that leads to wild, animal sex in the parking lot & an all-night trip to Vegas; I never pick up a ringing phone again & hear that familiar silence...she's gone. She's been gone for a long, damn time. I guess you might not know that just from listening to me...

And yes, I couldn't take it anymore & told her so there at the end, and I knew that it was the best thing for my life & for my sanity, and everybody around me told me I had done the right thing, just like you guys.

But how proud of me would you be if I told you that I also send her a card to her parent's house on her birthday & on Christmas every year for four years after, no matter what was going on in my life, even though I never heard back from her? That I wondered for years & years if today was going to be the day I would run into her somewhere, or finally get that phone call? That I even had a little fling again with Heidi a few years later, just because she reminded me so goddamn much of Kara? That I called Angela her name in the middle of an argument not even four years ago? Yeah, I have my moments, but I have my moments of weakness, too..and they seem to last a lot longer.

Kara & Ted didn't last much longer; she was right about that. I guess it was about a year after I had last seen her when I heard the news from Heidi. By the time I found out, however, she had already started dating another guy - yet another guy that I knew from back in the old days. A guy that used to get stoned & eat dog food, and whose mother had her makeup permanently tattooed onto her face. A really smelly, unwashed, borderline-retarded, ignorant redneck shit-kicker who was the spitting image of her father, the father that she had rebelled against her whole life. A guy named C.J. (not to be confused with my ironically-named future Ex J.C.), who she would move in with inside of a month & alienate most of her friends in the process. The guy that she would eventually marry.

When I said before that that was the last the last time I had spoken to her, that wasn't 100% accurate. Right after I found out about her & Ted breaking up, but before she moved in with C.J., I broke down & called her one day. It had been about a year & a half since we had broken up, and that had been the magic time period before, so one day while I was at work, I decided to just bite the bullet. She answered the phone, and this time it was my turn to hesitate for a moment & then say "Hi.".

I could tell I had caught her off guard, and she just said "Hi." back to me. I could tell already that she wasn't happy to hear from me.

"Do you wanna talk?", I asked her.

"No, I gotta go. I'm walking out the door.", she said. She didn't want to talk to me.

"You're walking out the door?", I asked her.

"Yeah...I gotta go!"

"Ok....bye, Kara." I'm sure she could barely hear my voice, it was so low.

"Bye!"

The next day, the phone rang. It was C.J., the new boyfriend. He actually had the nerve, at 25-some-odd years old, to call me up with some junior-high "You better not be talking to my girlfriend" crap; which I just laughed off. I told him that, given his new girlfriends' history, it wasn't just her talking to other guys that he needed to worry about. Then I told him to fuck off & hung up the phone.

I figured at the time that it was just C.J.'s inbred redneck instinct, and that he just called me, man-to-man, but I found out from Heidi, years later, that Kara was actually right next to him when he had called me, and she had encouraged him to do it. This bothered me for a lot of reasons. Not that she had a new boyfriend & that he was a jealous asshole; I had accepted that by then...it was the fact that the whole scenario seemed so unlike her. More than anyone else I ever knew, Kara took care of her own business & fought her own battles; she never needed anyone else to do it for her. If she didn't want to talk to me, the Kara I knew would have just flat-out told me so; she wouldn't have had her boyfriend call me up with his freshman attitude, she would have just done it herself, and shoved anyone out of the way who tried to do it for her.

And there was one other thing...

I mentioned earlier how, when she & C.J. got together, she started to drift apart from some of her friends. Well, I was talking to Heidi one time, about 2 years later, and the subject came up, as it always did. I asked her if she went over to their house to visit often, and she told me how Kara hardly ever invited anybody over anymore. I asked her why, and she told me a story, wherein Kara's good friend Dorothy, whom she had known since they were little girls, had come into town one night & slept over at Kara & C.J.'s. Somehow or another, the three of them all wound up sleeping together in the same bed, and, apparently, at some point during the night, after Kara had fallen asleep, C.J. rolled over & tried to put the moves on Dorothy. Dorothy shoved him off & pretended to be asleep, but the next morning, she told Kara about what had happened. Well, apparently, Kara went apeshit....but not like you might think.

Allegedly, she started yelling & screaming at Dorothy, calling her a liar & accusing her of either trying to ruin her relationship, steal her man (and I use that term loosely), or both. They got into a huge fight, Kara refused to even entertain the possibility that C.J. would do something like that, and Dorothy stormed out of the house crying. As far as I know, they weren't friends anymore after that.

Now, I know you guys never met her (I don't think),and I know you can only know so much about someone by reading about them, but does that sound like something that the Kara that I've been writing about for the last few months would do? Or would you expect that Kara to instead go to the kitchen drawer, pull out 2 butcher knives, hand one to Dorothy, and proceed to go stab C.J. in his sleep, cut off his prick & shove it in his mouth until he chokes on it? Yeah, that's what I would have thought, too...

I had known Kara for over five years at that point, and I had seen her go through just about every range of emotion in just about every situation you could be in; I could safely say that I knew Kara, better than anyone else did at that point. And I said it then & I'll say it now: something was rotten in Denmark, because had that been Joe, or Ted or I that had pulled that stunt in bed with one of her friends, we would most certainly not be here talking about it today. Even if we had been innocent, she would have never given us the benefit of the doubt; not over one of her friends like Dorothy.

I don't know if she was being abused & was afraid of him (I just can't imagine Kara being abused by anybody...I know it could happen, but I'm serious as a heart attack when I say I would have put all 100 pounds of that girl in the ring with Mike Tyson in his heyday & she'd have bitten off the first ear), or if she was just devoted to him like she'd never even come close to being with one of us, of what the hell was going on. I never found out. I just always thought something just didn't seem right...and I guess, deep down, I always figured that it wouldn't last, and somehow, sometime, she'd be back.

But she wasn't.

The closest it ever came to happening was on her birthday in 1998, four years after I'd last seen her. I had heard through the Heidi grapevine that she & C.J. had been in a big fight, and had separated for a while, if not completely broken up. Whatever happened, it was enough to make her move back home to her parents' house for at least a little while. I heard this news about two days before the date, and when her birthday came around, I remember I sat there with the phone in my hand for what seemed like hours, telling myself over & over that I shouldn't call...that it should all be in the past & behind me, and I should just put the phone down, go on with my life, and forget about it.

But I called her...

And, in what was probably a blessing in disguise, her mom answered the phone. Her mom & I were very friendly back in the day, and I was pretty sure she knew it was me when I asked if Kara was there, even though I didn't identify myself. She wasn't there, though...she had gone across the street to her friends house. He mom asked if she could take a message or tell her who was calling, but I hesitated for a minute & told her that I'd rather not say, that I wanted it to be a surprise. She told me to try her back in a little while, and I said ok, and hung up.

I'm sure her mom knew it was me. I'm sure she told Kara, too. I'm sure she knew those Christmas & birthday cards were always from me, too, even though I never signed them. I knew she could find my number without any trouble if she wanted to call me back. She never did. A few days later, she was back home with C.J. like nothing had happened. I never tried to call her again.

One day, about five years ago, I woke up from a dream that she was in & learned later that day from my friend Art that she & C.J had gotten married. Apparently, she had gotten pregnant, and they went & did a quickie wedding at the Justice of the Peace, with just her mom & her sister there to see it. I heard they had a miscarriage not long after, and that they were constantly fighting & just generally having a rough time of things. They did eventually have a baby about a year later, though, I was able to hear through the grapevine (not the Heidi grapevine...she, too, was long gone at this point). It was a little girl, and I'm not 100% positive, but I think she named her...well, a name that she had always said she liked.

But I don't really know anything else, and basically all the information I've heard in the last decade, I just told you about. Pete did run into her & C.J. in a Wal-Mart about 2 years ago, and they had apparently just bought a house somewhere out in the boondocks near where he lives. He said she looked the same, just with a few more miles on her. And he said she asked about me. He didn't tell me about it for almost a year, just because he didn't want to endure the 20-questions that he knew I'd put him through. I don't blame him.

And, I really don't know what else to say about Kara...other than the fact that, aside from the time I've spent writing this project, I really don't think about her that much anymore. Sure, it still crosses my mind, but I think that might just be habit more than anything else, after all these years.

I don't really have the right to say this, because I don't know really anything about her life, or how she is today, but I know I've always thought that she sold herself short. Not just with C.J., just with...life. I mean, maybe she's happy, and maybe they're successful, I don't know (although the last I heard, she was a maid & he worked at a gas station), but for all her faults, I really thought, just for a minute, that she could have really done something with her life. She had...something about her. I don't know if she could have been a rock star (she used to want to play the guitar in high school, and I remember watching her standing in front of the mirror, trying to pick out the chords to John Fogerty's Old Man Down the Road & being convinced that she was gonna be famous.), or a doctor, or an actress (good possibility), or what...but I just always thought that she could have had something more, somehow. I don't mean to put her or anyone down, far from it...look at me, I don't have jack shit. I don't know...maybe I just never could understand why the whole world wasn't as fascinated with her as I was...

And how funny is it that, now, after all the time & effort it took me to even start writing all this, and how quickly I wanted to be done with it...now, I don't want to quit writing about her. It's not that I don't want to be done with it, and it's not that I'm not over her...it's just that I still don't feel like I've found the right words to do it all justice yet. Maybe I never will...

I think a lot of it is that, the reason we stopped talking was so stupid, and so small in retrospect...I wonder if she even remembers what it was today. Yes, by all indications, Kara hasn't been the same girl I knew for a very long time, but still, even today, something will happen, or I'll see something on TV, or notice something while I'm out somewhere...something that she would have thought was funny...and I'll wonder what she would say about it, and I'll wish I was still her friend. There have been times in my life that I just would have liked to talked to her about problems I was having, or things that were going on in my life...nothing else, just to talk to her. I've still never found anyone I could talk to as easily as I could to her; somebody that seemed to know me well enough that they could talk to me like nobody else could, also. I know she did me wrong, and I know it was nothing but heartache & trouble, and I don't miss Kara, my girlfriend...but sometimes, I miss Kara, my friend.

But she did do me wrong, and as bad as she might have thought I always made her out to be, I think I've always let her off pretty easy. I did every damn thing I could for that girl, and nothing was ever even close to enough. For as close as we were, and as much as she claimed to care about me, she never once took my feelings into consideration in any of the things she did. She hurt me time & time again, and she didn't think twice about it. She knew that I would go to the ends of the earth for her, and she'd send me there & back for no better reason sometimes than she was bored, and then when she got bored with me, it was on to the next person in my high school wrestling photo.

I let her completely rule my state of mind, and I let her influence every decision I made for more years than I care to count. I've tossed some of the sweetest women in the world out of my life like yesterday's newspaper, just because I couldn't see past her memory, and where some of those women are concerned, I'll regret it the rest of my life. I've glossed over everything she did & all the pain she caused me for years, to carve out this pristine place for her in my memory that isn't even close to what the reality was & has done nothing but paint the rest of my life with a tainted brush & kept me chasing the memory of something that never even existed the way I remember it in the first place...

But I loved her.

And someday, more than anything else, I'd like to feel that way about somebody again. It's been a long, long time.



Bye, Kara.