Michael and I: Part One

Since the day that I was able to construct sentences correctly, I considered myself a natural storyteller. It took me a few years afterward to discover more about the stories that I wanted to tell with my first book attempts. But it wasn't until high school where the perfect story fell into my lap, one I experienced firsthand- one so worthy, that I spent years just trying to make sense of it and did not even attempt to put it on paper until I felt that my abilities as a writer were far enough along to really be able to communicate its complexities and the story itself in the manner that it deserved.

As you all well know (at least I think you do), I have been dating my boyfriend Michael for almost a year now, but what your perspective of the relationship lacks keeps you from knowing the real truth about what life was like for the two of us just a few years before we had met face to face last June, 2010.

I would first like to say that when I was introduced to the internet, I didn't make a conscious decision to spend the majority of my time and future love life on it. At first I found it to be really intimidating and my agoraphobia kicked in during my first experience in a chat room, but my anxieties slowly subsided as I dealt with anxieties on a more social level. At school, I was the ugly, nerdy girl who had the potential to be pretty. I had cut outs of my favorite anime characters in my binders and was often referred to as "fatty" in the hallways of my middle school. Instead of watching MTV, I watched Dragonball Z. You could say that I set myself up for an antisocial lifestyle that consisted of me on the computer until the late hours of the night, every night. People understood me there. If I ran across someone that I didn't like, I could simply leave the chat or delete their username from my friends list. Life was as simple as a mouse click.

In high school, I started getting attention from the boys and became more involved in extra curricular activities, but the core of me was the same nerdy girl who was terrified of reality. My habit of living online remained consistent throughout the entirety of my time as a student, even now. I wasn't particularly fond of any of the boys at school because they all seemed to be focused more on my maturing body, rather than what it was that I had to say. Online, the interactions were anything but physical, and I liked it that way. I even became involved in a long distance relationship rooted online which lasted longer than any of the relationships I had witnessed at school. 

Douglas was kind and endearing, but fragile and often jealous of my life offline, so to speak. It was my first encounter with what I thought to be love. We had a lot in common. We were together for about a year, and throughout that year we collided with some problems often associated with long distance, but we were young and not prepared for the sacrifices. I say collided because neither of us really managed to overcome them gracefully, as in we fell on our asses and have the scarring to prove it. My feelings for Doug began to drift, and I began to distance myself from a relationship that was dominated by well, y'know.

Then Michael joined the chat, and suddenly the internet did not seem so simplistic.

He did not make it any easier for me to continue to try to make the relationship work. Actually, he unintentionally made the relationship seem like a lost cause. Out of nowhere he came, hurdling into my life like a human life preserver. At first our friendship was innocent, but the further away from Doug I drifted, the closer to Mike I became. He nurtured the side of me that was dormant, a side of me that was happier and content with who I was. I had never encountered such an extraordinary human being in my life. He was the breath that I had been deprived of through years of suffocating verbal and physical abuse from the opposite sex.


Michael: If I could reach through the screen, I would.
Jessica:  What would you do?
Michael: Hold your hand.



We talked every night religiously. I would rush home to this faceless man who made my insides twist and turn and my heart nearly work itself to death. Eventually I found that I was more than willing to give myself to Michael, and that startled me, but for once I really embraced it without a second thought. Once my relationship with Doug had dissolved, I turned to Mike and discovered that he was having a little more trouble coming to terms with his feelings.

Michael: Had to harden to survive.

Michael: Roses grow thorns, kittens learn to bite.

Jessica:  Yeah, I guess you’re right.

Jessica:  It sucks though

Michael:  One of those crappy facts of life.

Jessica:  Why do you think I am online all of the time?

Jessica:  To run away from real life and live in a fantasy for a while.

Michael: I need to start facing reality.


Michael was at war with himself. He could not make sense of how he felt about me, us. Could there even be an us? How could we make something so unrealistic a reality? I was a Texan girl, born and raised, still in high school, and he was a New Yorker who commuted to college everyday. The man was torn between wanting to love this imaginary girl and wanting to play it safe. And he did. Soon after, he met someone, and I was left staring at his offline status, wondering what the hell happened. I did not want to accept that his finding someone in New York was inevitable. He was amazing. If I could see it through a chat window, the entire state of New York surely must have seen it.

Jill must have seen it, and she had something that I didn't.

Michael is offline.
[ Last conversation: 20 days, 11 hours, 15 minutes ago]

...She had a hand to hold.

To be continued.