Arthegarn's Soap Opera I
Date Friday, March 29, 2024 - 08:24 AM PST
Topic Experiences


I am having an extremely dull day at work so I thought I could write a small post to update my Shmeng friends about my life and, incidentally, explain why have I been missing in action for so long, why didn’t I attend the Shmeng party when I had been looking forward to it (and saving for it) for a couple of years and what are all these rumours about me getting married and, if true, against whom.

It turned out a soap opera. But here it goes
AN UPDATE ON ARTHEGARN – CHAPTER I

Last time you heard from me something mildly coherent that was not a “We Catholics are a pretty nice people, and you are going straight to Hell” or a “Unitedstatesians deserve what they have” thing (I am not including the occasional I-love-Schizo’s or Toy-Dolls-makes-me-horny-I-need-more’s) must have been well over a year and a half ago. At that time I was still in love with a girl whose name starts with an Y and who older Shmengers will remember from my Love & Anger posts (newer ones, don’t bother looking for them: I asked Devin to erase a long time ago them and they were pretty dull, however sincere, Oh-my-heart-is-breaking-so-badly posts anyway). We will henceforth name her Penelope, as a tribute to her unending love and faithfulness to her boyfriend-fiancé-whatever.

To make a small resume on behalf of those who didn’t have the privilege of peeking into my distressed and extremely gothic soul at the moment, the story goes like this: I have always been a lonely Catholic nerd. I met Penelope in the Driving School in January 2001. (Yeah, I was 27 and I had never driven a car. There were a lot of things I hadn’t done yet…). We fell in love (I did, at least) but she had a boyfriend who was, at the moment, working at Washington D.C. Her heart was divided between me and her six-year long relationship and she thought about it and didn’t break with him when he came to visit her. As soon as his plane took off we got involved. After that my life for the following two and a half years was a constant repeating of the same theme:

Arthegarn: I love you so much
Penelope: I love you so much I can’t believe I could ever do without you
Arthegarn: I love you so much and we are so well together… When are you leaving your boyfriend?
Penelope: I love you so much… As soon as I next see him face to face
Arthegarn: I love you so much… look, there he is
Penelope: I love you so much… but I just can’t leave him
Arthegarn: WHAT THE F**K ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
Penelope: I know, I have done it again… feel free to hate me but I just can’t… I have to give it a chance. But I love you so much…

At which moment Arthegarn would take a deep breath, leave, be heartbroken and deliberately avoiding her for a couple of months, then meet her again and tell her he still loved her… and the circle would begin again while his friends would tell him he was a dick-headed prick. I really loved her. Hell, I wanted to marry her, and for me marriage means the good old thing, not the there-is-always-divorce-and-child-support one. She was the first woman I ever made love to (I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been so sure, meaning completely deluded, of our feelings) and if I had had it my way she would have been the only one.

Well, so last time you knew of me I was in some or another point of the Wheel.

The situation went on until July 2003 when I decided I HAD to break the circle. I remember the day. We had agreed she would break with her boyfriend after her exams. I knew she wouldn’t, and I think this time she knew I knew. She didn’t, of course, so I left her (again). But we both knew we were bond together and that I wasn’t that much a Vulcan anymore. Sure, anger and hatred could fuel my engines as I tried to take off, but in the end I would not reach terminal velocity and I would fall again, and everything would begin again.

I had to break the circle. I am not good with flirting, I am extremely shy and a full-time coward when it comes to giving the first kiss. I am also far too serious for that. Either I am not interested (and girls notice) or I am interested (and girls notice and run away). But I had the theory that a nail takes out another nail and I had a couple of months to get myself a nail. I needed it. So I did some of the most stupid things I have ever done and amongst these was joining MSN Match. If you are curious enough my profile is still here (in Spanish, I am afraid).

Some days after I made my profile I left Madrid for Benidorm, where I knew a beautiful and intelligent gothic girl whom I found interesting and whom I thought maybe I could look interesting to. The experiment was a total failure and included such encouraging words as “If your penis ever touches me I’d get sick”. That night, with the echo of those words still ringing in my ears while she tried to make me horny with a scene taken out of “Play it again, Sam” I remember I decided I would never understand girls. Callei and Shade had to hear me whine about it (and actually uncovered things I hadn’t thought of at the moment)

When I returned to Madrid I found, to my mild surprise, that I had even got written to by several girls in MSN Match and similar pages. I screened the messages (meaning I eliminated those who would write less than five sentences and those with bad grammar and/or orthography on their profiles) and I answered some messages.

One of the most promising conversations I had was with a girl who wrote a little funny and who said she was from Madrid “but I don’t only live in Madrid”. She said she taught French and Spanish. I asked her about where did she live and she said she wouldn’t tell me because I might stop writing to her. So I sent her a (risky) Sherlock Holmes mail in which, deducing from that fact, her job and the way she wrote I told her that she obviously lived somewhere in the United States close to the Mexican border.

I think that’s when I conquered her. I was right, she lived in what the Spanish call “the fifth pine tree” or “where Christ yelled thrice”, meaning in El Paso, Texas. Literally oceans apart. She had been living there for almost ten years.

So she was impressed by my brains (not that I have anything else to impress with, anyway) and we started chatting. And we liked each other real hard. I knew part of what I felt had to be a reaction to Penelope’s absence, I am quite good at pshrinking myself. But there was a part of it that was genuine. I really liked her. Then there came a moment in October when we both really wanted to know each other in person and decided we didn’t want to wait until she got her holidays in Christmas. So, considering that if everything went wrong I would at least get to spend Halloween in an American Goth Club (there were in El Paso) I took a week off, a plane ticket, and I went to meet her in October...

More to come next week.

Arthegarn

PS: She also keeps a MSN Match profile under the same username, I believe

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