I Don't Know Where She Come From

I don't believe in fate. It'd be nice to, sometimes, to feel like things are even just a little bit out of my control. But mostly, I think it's bunk, I think it's what people say when they want to do things they know aren't the best for them. You're usually "fated" to end up with the one who breaks your heart time and time again. You're very rarely "fated" to marry the good guy.

If I believed in fate, though, and that's a big IF, there'd be something to the fact that next year at this time I will most probably be living in the city where Mark lived with Lily (the lesbian) while I died of a broken heart and was reborn a harder and more cyncial person.

There are words that I thought I could live my life never hearing again and be perfectly happy. One of them was (and still is) camp. Mark went back to his old summer camp, a crazy hippie summer camp, to work for a summer and fell in love with Lily because she was there and I wasn't and she was his sixth grade sweetheart. He wrote me letters telling me he couldn't wait to come back to Cleveland, that the purpose of his life was loving me, and then he put his pen down and went off with her.

I dumped him and he stayed in Virginia--another word I never wanted to hear again. Virginia, as far as I was concerned, was full of long-haired blondes with sensible shoes who only wanted to steal my boyfriend. And I realize I'm being incredibly uncharitable to Lily. That she's probably a lovely person and I'd probably really love her, if I'd ever known her in another context than "the girl who stole the love of my life and then broke his heart by deciding she was a lesbian intermittently over a six month period while they lived together."

I'm not a Southern type person. I don't particularly like mountains--they're pretty and all, but I grew up in the plains and I'm happy with the horizon. But the University of Virginia is the most beautiful campus in this country and perhaps the world. They have a fantastic program that will plant me in a career where I could end up positively impacting the world and making an asston of money in the process. If I don't go there, I will probably stay at Case.

Mark came back from Virginia a harder and more cynical person. I see him about once a week, and it's strange to think how much he and I have changed, and yet how much we seem the same to each other. I feel like a completely different person, and yet he can still read my mind, and we can still have conversations using an absolute minimum of words.

I wonder what will happen if/when I go to Virginia. I have a feeling this story isn't over yet. That it is a love story, but not one with a satisfactory resolution. That I should really stop seeing him for the sake of our collective mental health. If I believed in fate, I'd say it was our destiny to be involved somehow. But I don't. So it isn't. So what is it?