I shared this on VirPed and figured I might as well share it here too.

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As a child I was shy and insecure and had a few health issues that alienated me from my peers, most prominently my physical birth defect. As a consequence I was never any good at traditional boy pursuits like sports and displays of masculinity, and to be honest I hated those things anyway, so I didn’t hang out with my peers much except in school. I felt more comfortable around girls, but I wasn’t into girly things either, so I avoided them too, preferring the company of adults or just preferring to be alone, in my own little world. That’s where my imagination and creativity came from. And when I realized my sexual orientation at age 12, it just served to further alienate me.

I didn’t go on my first date until age 18. It was with a girl named Deedee, who most of my peers would’ve considered a knockout. She was tall, pretty and well-built, but obviously she wasn’t my type. We went to a Halloween party, and over the course of the evening we spent our time apart. Later Deedee made it clear to me that she was irritated at my lack of attentiveness. Eventually I took her back to my place. She was pretty hammered, but she wanted to get frisky, so we went to my room, where she proceeded to try to seduce me. She gave me a massive hickey, and where a lot of guys would’ve been turned on by this, I just grew bored and antsy. I had to pee like a racehorse, but Deedee held me down. Finally, I took her home and that was the end of it.

A year later I found myself living in another city after a near miss with a little girl I had babysat for a few months. I was living with my best friend Jake, and we were at the local mall when a girl approached me and asked for my number. I gave it to her but was really not that interested. When she called me, Jake answered; I didn’t want to talk to her and had Jake tell her I was gay.

About a year after that I was back in my hometown, living in my very first apartment. I had made friends with the single mom who lived behind my building (not my doing—it was she who approached me). Anyway, she had four kids, two boys aged 10 and 8 and curly-haired 4-year-old twin girls. I, of course, adored the girls and spent a lot of time with the family just to see them. About this time a girl six years my senior approached me at work and asked me out and I accepted. In some ways she was my ideal, petite, slender and small-breasted, but she overcompensated for her youthful look by dressing provocatively, caking on the makeup and wearing her hair big and overdone, in that late 80s/early 90s manner, which I absolutely detest. She was also aggressive and took charge of the relationship, driving us on dates, selecting the locations we went and so on. I didn’t mind that so much, but she could be overbearing, and she pressured me into sex relentlessly. We had kissed a few times, but I resisted sex for a while. I finally gave in around my 21st birthday, wanting my first time to be special. As it was she was on her period, but she offered to give me oral sex. I accepted, even though I was hesitant. I had really wanted my first time to be intercourse, but what the hell. Well, for about a half hour she tried her damnedest to get me off, but it was a no go. I could get an erection, which is pretty much a mechanical response in me, but there was no excitement in it for me and I did not achieve orgasm. She called me the next day and broke up with me; I was both sad and relieved.

About this time a girl I vaguely knew from high school named Melanie showed up out of the blue on my doorstep. I had always admired her from afar, not in a sexual way but just for her bizarre personality, which I suppose I related to on some level. Anyway, she had this beautiful childlike quality that I adored. She always had scraggly, unkempt hair, wore no makeup and dressed in baggy childish clothing (a giant Snoopy t-shirt and jeans was her favorite outfit). But it wasn’t just her style; she had this amazing childlike spirit that is just indescribable. For example, we once built a two-headed snowman, her idea. I like to think it represented us; we were simpatico freaks and we were always together. We loved walking around town, or going to the local Italian restaurant for cheesy breadsticks. Like me, she was an aspiring author and artist, creating her own children’s books.

But there was a shadowy side to her as well, a side she hid from everyone else. And she was severely bipolar. In her manic phase she often did insanely spontaneous things, like hitchhike to Florida (from Michigan)—long story. In her depressive phase she had attempted suicide several times. Despite her crazy ups and downs, I was fascinated by her, if not exactly attracted to her. But I wanted to be, and I think I could’ve been with time. Once, I had a glimpse into her secret self. She told me about her camping trips with her father when she was a child; she said she enjoyed the trips, except for . . . and she wouldn’t say. But I knew. There was pride in her realization that her father never took her younger sister or their mom on these trips, but there was also a cloudiness to these confessions. Likewise, I think she had some inkling of my sexuality, even though I never said a thing about it. But she knew how I was with kids. Nevertheless, we were pretty close. I suggested we should date and she agreed, but we never did anything, if you know what I mean. Our romantic relationship was in name only, but we were still very good friends, and we were content to just be together . . . until I was suddenly struck with a series of severe panic attacks out of the blue. These were devastating, and I didn’t know what to do. I finally decided I needed to get out of town and moved back to Tennessee to live with my grandparents for a while.

Before I left Melanie spent one day poking tiny holes into a piece of paper while I worked on my book. I didn’t think much of it, figuring it was just a manifestation of her usual craziness. The paper contained a little poem she had written, which went as follows:

It all makes sense,
Walking down a forgotten road.
And dreams will be so clear again.
And far, far down the road.

Meaningless, really, but beautiful in some kind of essential way. So I went to Tennessee. A few weeks later my grandmother sat me down and told me that Melanie had committed suicide. Worse, she had done it in her car, sitting in the parking lot across from my old apartment. Months later, I came across the little poem she had given me and tried to make sense of it, and the seemingly random dots she’d spent an hour poking into the piece of notebook paper. And then, I saw it. I flipped the paper over, and there it was, as obvious as anything—she had written a message that said: Todd, please don’t go.

I was horrified. Up until then I hadn’t seen the clues: all the time she’d spent with me before I left, her suicide across from my apartment, and now this. She had been in love with me, but she couldn’t admit it outright. And I had effectively abandoned her, this fragile, peculiar girl who no one understood but me. But right before I’d left we had officially broken up. Melanie said it was because we knew too much about each other, but in reality it was because of my bullshit, my inability to love her as she deserved to be loved. And it was because of me that this amazing soul had chosen to leave this world. Granted, she had a LOT of issues and had attempted suicide before, but it had always been half-hearted and she had never succeeded. She had always held on. Until now.

That’s it. That is my last big secret, the one that I could never share before. But I’m getting it out now because I need to. Of all the mistakes I’ve made, this is the one that hurts the most. How could I have been so obtuse? The world was robbed of one of most amazing human beings I ever knew, and it was because of me, and that is something I have never been able to get over. And there you go.