About a million years ago, in the fall of 1992, I met this guy.
I don’t remember a lot of detail. I was twenty-two, and attending my second science fiction convention ever, and my first as a nominally professional author (with one [1] story sale under my belt). I was living in Austin, working as a substitute teacher and waitress, and helping my father split up with my mother for what was mercifully to be the final time. The few memories I have of Armadillocon mostly revolve around meeting a girl named Martha, who took me under her wing that weekend and was to become one of my closest friends for the next few years. But somewhere in there I met, and liked, another young writer named Jak.
After the con Jak and I connected online and exchanged email for a bit. He lived in Oregon, but his parents lived in San Marcos, about forty minutes south of Austin. Two months later, around New Year’s, he was back in Texas for his brother’s wedding, and I arranged to pick him up from the airport in Austin and drive him down. The plan was to hear his brother’s band play, but we missed that, and then I remember sitting somewhat awkwardly around his parents’ house.
Jak was married, and his wife Seana was at home in Eugene, almost nine months pregnant with their first child. But he’d mentioned in email that they had an open relationship (this was the year that the word ‘polyamory’ was first coined, and long before either he or I had heard of it). We liked each other; I thought he was cute, and I hoped something would happen. Eventually he caught on, and we wound up kissing on his parents’ back porch ... until he pulled back and called it off. Turns out that his parents knew nothing of his and Seana’s open relationship, and he worried about their reaction if they discovered their son ‘cheating’ on his nine-months’-pregnant wife with some random chick.
I didn’t take this well. I suspect that I was profoundly put off by what I perceived as cowardice or lack of commitment to his lifestyle and relationship choices. At twenty-two I was newly determined to make the world accept me on my own terms or not at all, and had correspondingly little respect for anyone who took a less extreme stance. Also, I did not at all like being forced to sneak around. That sort of thing touches bad childhood places for me, so I don’t experience it the way some people do, as ‘delicious risk’.
Time does funny things to one’s memory. Jak and I corresponded a couple of times a week through the first half of 1993, but I only know this because I recently combed through old files and found the saved email. My lasting impression, years later, was of a vague sort of awkwardness over the events of New Year’s that were never quite resolved, but the archives tell a different story. We were friends — very real and close and affectionate friends, if only via text — for at least another six months, until he left the BBS I was on and our correspondence fell off sharply. It disturbs me that I could have forgotten that.
Four years followed with no contact. Then, only a month after I began nine lives, he found me online, signed up for the journal, and dropped me a note. We never completely lost touch again after that, but — mostly because of my aforementioned vague feeling of awkwardness, I think — we didn't resume real correspondence, either. I got the occasional news update, so I knew that he had moved to San Diego, and years later to Hawaii; that he and his wife had a second daughter; that he was still writing.
It might have gone on like that forever if I hadn’t created pool. Jak immediately became one of the regulars, and through his frequent posts I began to get a sense of his personality that eclipsed the vague awkwardness.
About a month later (we’re now up to late September), Jak happened to be visiting Seattle for other reasons, and we got together for dinner. I don’t remember much detail of our conversation; I know we talked about writing, and relationships, and tried to reconstruct what actually happened on New Year’s Eve 1992. (His memory was better than mine, and he apologized for being such a jerk. I no longer remember enough to have any idea whether he was really a jerk or I was just intolerant.) Mostly I remember laughing a lot and being very happy. I had expected to like him at least a little; I was startled by how very much that turned out to be. At some point during dinner I realized very consciously that Jak and I could be good friends, and that I was very sorry he wasn’t living nearby.
He’d already made a couple of remarks on pool inviting me to come visit him in Hawaii; after seeing him in person I began to take him seriously, and over the next few months I kept watch for airfare sales. In January the gods of travel smiled upon me, fares dropped below $400, and I made arrangements to come out for a week in mid-March.
Almost simultaneously with this, another drama was in progress elsewhere in my life, and Jak volunteered to be a sounding board. It was too complicated to discuss via email, so that led to our first phone conversation ... which started out being about my little drama and wound up, several hours later, on the subject of religion by way of Santa Claus. And I talked to him the next day, and the next, about anything and everything, and before a week had gone by we were both shyly admitting to what I call ‘crushflutters’.
During the month of February it seemed that the third week of March receded more quickly than it approached. I think there may have been three or four days when I did not talk to Jak at least once, but perhaps I'm overestimating.
“As far as long distance relationships go ... they suck as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been through that once, and it was once too often for me.”