a relatively comprehensive list of people I have fallen in love with

1

the earliest I really fell in love with somebody was, I would say, in the 4th grade, with this girl named Lauryn. I think that this spelling of the name is predominantly used among black people, but she was white, with rust colored hair¹.

we met at the Catholic² school I went to from 3rd to 6th grade. the reason I went to this Catholic school is that i had outgrown the Montessori school my mom had moved us to Columbus for me to attend. we toured public schools and they were less like nurturing wombs and more like rambunctious containment pens; I think she was mortified by this and managed to find Annunciation Catholic School which was essentially a progressive liberal hugbox school, with small classes of roughly 24 or so students. you had one teacher who taught you almost every topic in your grade, and who loved you very much.

there were some classes that your primary teacher / surrogate mother did not teach you, namely ones that required specialized equipment or skills -- PE, Music, Art, and Computer. Lauryn's dad was the Computer teacher for most of my time at Annunciation, but that is not very relevant to the story. I think that he also managed a car dealership or something.

my mother is a sociologist who works in public policy, so her sending me to a private school was an act of heterodoxical bravery, generally frowned upon by her professional community. I am grateful to her for this choice and generally speaking, I really liked my time at Annunciation.

I am pretty sure that Lauryn was among the smarter and more socially aware girls in my class, probably by a lot. My mom described her at the time as “fast”, as in, maturing quickly and eager to do so. I think this is apt. I will give you an example:

Lauryn and I got into Runescape around the same time, and as far as I am aware, both spent hundreds of hours playing, though not together that much. My username was Dragonare45, like a millionaire but with dragons, and misspelled. I don't remember hers. My friend David's account, I do remember, was named DaveysMom64 (not sure of the numbers). His dad had gotten custody of him fairly recently; my mom and (divorced) dad had been long time friends with her, and definitely certified that she was mentally unstable and not a good parent, and addicted to drugs or something I don't remember. Anyway as a way to show David how much she loved him, she leveled up an account and gave it to him, and would periodically log in to earn more in-game money to fund his adventures. She mostly accumulated resources via Pickpocketing, which was her highest stat by far, which is FUCKING INSANE.

Anyway, my primary activities in Runescape were fishing and exploring. I liked fishing because runescape had these different ways you could modify your text in chat to be rainbow, wavy, etc., insane feature. and basically while fishing people would sit around and make, essentially, copypastas. one of my favorite things to write was (wavy text):

.oooo! i am a ghost!

in runescape your messages appear centered directly over your head, so if you have a long message with spaces in it like that, it looks like the message originates not from you but from an invisible person to your far right! oooo! it took me a while to figure out how people were doing this so I was very pleased to do it myself.

another common one was to position noooo im drowning! over a body of water using this method. which, again, was abundant because we were just fishing. by the way, fishing is not a minigame and requires no interaction at all, you simply stand there as your inventory fills up with lobsters, and periodically walk to the bank to store them.

Aside from that I loved exploring. I actually think I received an adorably great exploration experience due to my lack of any knowledge about the game over hundreds of hours of playing. In RPGs there is a concept of like, an area having a certain ‘level’ to it, like you are meant to go to places in roughly some order and if you go too far out of order then you will be ‘underleveled’ and everything will just instantly kill you. or you will be ‘overleveled’ and instantly kill everything, and get rewards that aren't super worthwhile to someone of your stature.

I didn't really understand this and I never got to be very high level. So to me various areas, and in fact most of the world, was simply terrifying and full of fantastical yet incredibly dangerous monsters. and I would navigate through a mixture of caution and sprinting.

my favorite place was the Tree Gnome Stronghold. I also did not understand the game's fast-travel system so my periodic sojourns to this beloved village took me hours(?). There are I think several things you can do in tree gnome village, including playing gnomeball, which I spent time doing but never figured out exactly what the point of it was. my favorite thing to do was to help the gnome chef get ingredients and receive delightful exotic gnomish dishes. the gnomes rode these large green flightless birds with long necks and big beaks, called jabberers. I even made a gnome riding a jabberer out of sculpey III, which hopefully some day I'll be able to attach an image of to this post.

I was aware that other players were much more powerful than me and assumed this was because they had simply spent roughly 10x as much time playing the game. i viewed them with the same distant awe that I might view a cool teenager.

So you can imagine my surprise to hang out at Lauryn's house and see that she was a good bit higher level than me, and very fashionably decked out with a Dragonscale skirt (the highest level armor in the game at the time i think). If I remember correctly she got the skirt from a 16 year old that she was runescape dating (she claimed to be 14 herself). she showed me how runescape girlfriend/boyfriend pairs hang out -- in a hangout spot of your choosing, doing something called ‘dancing’ while you chat. in runescape you can right click and Follow somebody to automatically move behind them. if two people follow each other, they just walk in a circle forever, in an oddly rhythmic way due to the game's grid-based movement system.

Inspired by this I changed my character's gender to girl and hung out in metropolitan areas asking if anyone wanted to be my runescape boyfriend, because I also wanted high level equipment. I never got even the slightest amount of interest, which to this day I find somewhat surprising. I was not very “fast”.

We were probably the two youngest kids at annunciation to have cell phones, probably for the same reason, which is that we had divorced parents and our primary caretakers found the other parent to be unreliable, and so made sure we had our own way of being contacted. I used my phone a lot and it was almost entirely texting her. I had a nokia and she had a motorola razr, which if i remember correctly she was quite proud of.

My earliest cringe memory is of playing club penguin with her. I remember bragging to her that if anyone ever pissed me off (irl), I could show them my “evil grin”, and they would become immediately disquieted and regret their actions. She replied something like “really? how does that work?” and in that moment I realized that I was completely making shit up (actually I probably doubled down once or twice first). I think this was the first time I reckoned with the human ability to bullshit -- the way we can create narratives we believe in, to suit whatever purposes are at hand, completely unburdened by reality. I hadn't done it on purpose so it was a bit disturbing.

Somewhat relatedly I had many quasi-psychotic beliefs as a child. I remember being in my grandparents' yard, by their lake, on my cellphone with somebody, ostensibly her, explaining the fact that i am part reptile and cold blooded. you could tell because of the way that the skin on the back of my hand was covered in triangular creases (which is to say my skin was scales).

I hadn't needed to check if anyone else's skin was also actually scales, because I already could tell I was part reptile (lizards are very cool), so this was just confirmation.

I don't remember very much of what we actually talked about. I remember her and her sister talking about how their dad was gay and how he had a crush on this boy, Jackson I think, who was her older sister's age or older (he drove I think??). so the dad would bring him on family trips and stuff. Jackson as far as I remember was around constantly during my visits at Lauryn's. I am pretty sure he showed lust towards both sisters and I don't remember what his nominal relationship was with either. I do not remember Lauryn fawning for him in any way but it definitely seemed like she found him a lot hotter than me (as an adult I would say that is probably the wrong way of modeling it though). I also don't remember the chronology here, I don't really remember for how many years I was preoccupied with Lauryn. I went to Annunciation until 6th grade, I have to assume I would have been preoccupied with her if she were there too, but I can't remember her being at school with me by 6th grade. Whatever, maybe I will investigate later.

I remember in general feeling lots of anxiety in my relationship with Lauryn. I primarily listened to Modest Mouse during my time knowing her. I remember being in a cabin on a family trip, listening to Heart Cooks Brain, writing the entire song's lyrics to her, and holding my arm out over the edge of the couch to hold my phone in the one spot in the cabin I could find cell service, and feeling very anxious but also idk.. lost? dissociated? (about her and wanting her to reciprocate ways i felt). kind of like i was an egg frying on pavement. and i felt the song captured that. I think her favorite Modest Mouse song was Trailer Trash. I think it is now among my favorites too.

this pattern of finding the smartest, most mature, most socially intelligent girl in my peergroup, befriending her, and filling every waking moment with unrequited pining for her, would surely continue. In this case, don't really remember much about our actual friendship, mostly just anxiety. I think we probably earnestly got along pretty well though. I think she's probably still a really fun person, and I doubt anyone at the time was as eligible for me to have a crush on. I hope she is doing well.

1. I think this fact, combined with my great liking of the movie Freaky Friday, caused my immediate family to conclude I must have a really big crush on Lindsay Lohan. That was accurate but I didn't feel their conviction in it was justified and it made me uncomfortable to feel they were invested in it. I did have a narrative for much of adolescence that I was ‘into redheads’, but I don't know how much that was indoctrinated into me via the Lindsay Lohan thesis. Anyway this narrative slowly went away after Lauryn faded from my life and psyche, and this list contains nobody else with red or rust colored hair. ↩
2. Catholics represented a small minority of the student body, and received a 6% discount on tuition ↩

2

I was not in love with Kiondra in terms of romantic passion / desire for codependence, but I will write about her anyway because I remember her fondly. She is the first girl that I actually dated. I met her in the Starkville school system which I attended from 7th grade to 10th grade.

I am many things and foremost among them is that I am an American. Americans think that having an absurd hip/waist ratio is hot. Well, so do I. I also think that the sweetly fragranced cocoa butter she wore has permanently imprinted on my concept of what smells are attractive³. The only perfume I wear, really I would call it my signature smell, is a sweet milk and cookies scent, and I consider it a nod to her creative direction.

Kiondra was consistently nice to me. We dated on two separate occasions, 2? years apart. Both times I broke up with her because I was in love with this other girl (who is next in this list and who did not want to date me) and thought that meant I should break up with Kiondra lest I be guilty of infidelity via thoughtcrime. It is this kind of dysfunctional nonsense that later compelled me to adopt polyamory. In any case Kiondra deserved better and I'm sorry.

She taught me what physical chemistry actually looks like. I was typically quite awkward with people I had crushes on but never with her. I don't remember what it was like when we first met, but I do remember the second time we dated, it happened after we'd ended up taking Computer class together. At first things were a bit tense because, well, she clearly felt I was an asshole after I'd dumped her the first time. But I remember we were working on some worksheet together, and we ended up standing very close to each other while doing so, and it had happened completely naturally without me needing to think at all about what to do, and I was like “wow, this feels great.”. So we started talking again not long after.

I think she felt I was an ass for dumping her, but I wouldn't say she felt some kind of way about me that I didn't reciprocate. I don't think I particularly fulfilled any needs of hers except horniness and a desire to be a cute girlfriend, which she was great at, I don't know a word for this desire. Like, we liked each other and had a shared interest in this fun dating stuff. Frankly she was not a very needy person. As far as I could tell she had several close friends, a supportive home, and was generally pretty happy. Come to think of it she may have been the most mentally well person on this list.

We spent basically all of our time together trying to find clever ways to have some privacy in contexts we were otherwise pretty closely monitored in. For example I identified that my backyard had a blind spot where you wouldn't be able to see us without us having advance warning, and we started innocently picnicking there. We spent nearly all of this private time making out and dry humping, which we referred to as ‘moving’, since, like God's children in Eden, we had no vocabulary for these acts. I think it is at least a better term than dry humping anyway, which sounds kind of gross or inelegant. She was quite elegant and under her creative direction I would say grossness was out of the picture.

From dating Kiondra I learned interesting things about the state of racism in Mississippi. Unlike Lauryn, whose name merely sounded black, Kiondra actually was black, which she had in common with a majority of students at Starkville high school. I definitely did not expect to get any flak at all from my fellow students for dating her, and indeed I did not. Generally speaking I mostly interacted with white boys at school and I think dating Kiondra was positive to my social standing since everyone agreed she was a nice person and would probably be fun to date.

However, I specifically remember, during some point that we weren't dating, that she'd displayed some interest in this guy Christian who I was friends with. Like me, and unlike the majority of the white boys of my cohort, Christian was a nice fellow and did not participate in the constant antagonistic status games of our peers. He was probably among my top 2 favorite white guys in my class. Anyway the boys were discussing this development and he was like “Yeah I mean she's nice but I couldn't date her, just not how I was raised”. And I was like “What??” and he was like “Yeah my dad would kill me if I dated a black girl, my parents don't believe in that”. I specifically remember being like “wtf do you mean it's not how you were raised??”, as though it were teleologically absurd. I brought this up with my other favorite white guy, who was also the hottest and most popular guy in my cohort, and he echoed the same thing. (Incidentally Christian was also barred from visiting my house due to my lesbian parents, as was any other boy I invited over from Starkville high that I can think of)

It's hard to describe my reaction to a post-woke audience, as this was a completely pre-woke context. In many ways Mississippi culture remains pre-woke. But, my reaction had very little to do with anything righteous. I found this attitude completely bizarre and antiquated, but as I saw it, the main victims of it were the boys themselves. Mind you, Kiondra was easily among the most eligible girlfriends in my class of a few hundred. From my perspective, my white guy friends were at much higher risk of having their desires for the opposite sex unmet than she was, so I don't think it occurred to me to feel bad for her.

Crucially, Kiondra actually seemed to like boys. It's kind of hard to get across what I mean, but, people can have a lot of different relationships to dating. In my pretty conservative context most girls weren't really comfortable with dating to begin with. And then among the ones that were in principle willing, I again don't know how to put this, but there was no evidence that they thought dating sounded fun regardless of whether they participated. And I mean who can blame them, again, it was kind of a mean environment and a lot of the boys had exploitative attitudes towards sex/dating⁴, their dads probably didn't want them to date, etc.

(I think the stiff uncomfortable relationship to dating was more common among the white girls than the black girls, but as I have written about [elsewhere] the school was fairly racially segregated via the now-abolished track system. Kiondra was part of a minority of black students that mostly took classes in the mostly? white “Accelerated” track.)

So yeah I was fairly astonished that people would let such a trivial thing get in between them and a girl such as Kiondra. I remember saying “Well, more for me I guess 😆” as an earnest taunt. But you know I found many things people did strange. On the one hand I always felt rather alien growing up, and on another hand I think I was generally aware that relative to my peers, I lived in the future. I had gay moms, I was one of the first people with an iPhone, I was the only one with internet friends, I was the only one who could code, etcetera. So interracial dating joined this list in my mind of great technologies for which I was apparently an early adopter.

Anyway, back to talking about Kiondra and our relationship. We did not really understand each other that much I think. Though I guess I can mostly recall feeling not understood when I was breaking up with her, explaining my reasoning, and her being like “wtf is wrong with you?”. Which I think is very reasonable and sane of her.

But I also think we did not very much get each other's sense of humor. To give a kind of related example her nickname, which survives on her still-active facebook page to this day, which I'm pretty sure she gave herself?, was “Bouncer-Cheer”. Because she was a cheerleader but also had aspects of a bouncer? Except not really, she just thought the image of her being a bouncer was inherently funny, which is true in some sense but also what?

She now posts shortform vertical videos to her facebook. In one example I will give you, she says “Closed mouths don't get fed, but mouths wide open, can't properly chew. Tighten up 🤏”. I actually did find this video funny/cute but it is also bizarrely inane. I think this video and my reaction to it is pretty representative of her humor at the time and my reaction to it. Oh right, for example, she took a lot of pride in insisting that she really wanted a really big truck since she thought the image of a small girl in a big truck was funny.

One thing that is interesting to me to reflect on is that, I would say one of my personality quirks is that more than other people, I really am annoyed by and resent people taking up space with joking that I don't think is funny. Like it truly infuriates me. But I don't think she ever annoyed me. I think what I hate about unfunny jokes is that there's this like, you know, a lot of people make unfunny jokes in such a way that they may as well put a gun to your head and order you to laugh or else. Like, it's an actual fucking hostage situation. The point of the “joke” is the bid for positive feedback irrespective of the merits, and you are forced to either betray God and yourself by rewarding their petulance OR endure psychic torture by giving nothing (not to mention inviting possible retaliation as well). I always choose the latter.

But I would say Kiondra maintained a level of flare, conviction, and self-satisfaction that left me free to just be like “???”. In fact she would even tease me for not getting her jokes, which we both seemed to enjoy. I think of all the people on this list her subjective experience and psychology was the most distant from mine.

So in sum I would say she was a delightful and good-natured person, and very hot, and as you can probably tell, I remember her wistfully and think back on my experiences with her often. I am definitely saddened to think that I might have ended up having a mostly negative effect on her self esteem, when I was so grateful for our time together.

Also I am being pretty literal when I say she taught me what physical chemistry looked like. I seriously had this like idk awkward pining approach to dating for most of my adolescence and at some point I had to be like “You know, any time dating actually went well, it didn't look like this awkward pining stuff at all. Take Kiondra for example -- everything just felt easy and natural. Come to think of it, I have been super upset that these women I'm in love with don't want to have sex with me, but upon reflection, I can hardly blame them when I don't actually appear to want to have sex with them either.”. Without those experiences of actual chemistry (which to be clear, represented a minority of my dating efforts), who knows how long it would have taken me to catch on.

I hope she is doing well and wish her the best.

1. Similarly to how after being infatuated with Lauryn I had this narrative I was particularly “into redheads”, after dating Kiondra I adopted a narrative that I'm particularly attracted to women with thick thighs. Unlike the redhead narrative, this narrative has persisted strongly to this very day. ↩
2. This wasn't really the norm, but it was common enough that being humiliated by an asshole who brags to everyone about what he was able to get you to do was definitely a live concern. Which is kind of a vibe killer and it's not like people had super developed theories of mind about dating such that they could confidently tell who would and would not do something like that. ↩

(to be continued)