Note: the Alison Peebles referred to herein is Alison Anne Peebles, born December 21, 1982, and a citizen of the United States, and does not necessarily bear any relation to any other Alison Peebles.
Warning: this document is open and honest, perhaps distressingly so, and does not paint a very good picture of me in this relationship, mostly because I was not a very good person at the time.
My relationship with Alison was plagued by self-doubts and psychological games. I'm just going to try to explain this the best way I can, and if it makes no sense to you, that's okay.
It's complicated, because I knew when I started going out with Alison that I didn't really like her—rather, that I didn't have any reason to like her. I suppose one could say that at the time I was both antisocial and desparate. I basically met her online even though she had gone to my high school's sister school; we had never really encountered each other there. What happened was that one day freshman year, a friend of mine left herself on AIM when she left the room, and someone (Alison) was still talking with her. I struck up a conversation. We continued talking all that spring semester, on AIM and ICQ.
During that time we flirted with each other progressively more obviously, but I still kept denying it to myself. It all came to a head near the end of the semester, when she was talking about the Commencement dance she was helping to organize. At some point the possibility of my going to it with her came up, and though I resisted making a decision at all until after the arbitrary deadline she had set, I changed my mind and decided to go then, and it was okay with her. Anyway, we ended up making out on a couch at the dance, and the next day I told her that we were going out.
What followed was a summer during which Alison was a camp counselor nearly the whole time. I wanted nothing but to make out with her, but visits were very few and far between. We exchanged letters and phone calls sometimes. I briefly held a job at the grocery store, then started working as an intern for the DMV (doing computer stuff), which I've done every winter and summer vacation since then.
We had a few glorious days when she was back from camp and I wasn't yet back at college, but then I had to leave. That semester, I constantly pressured Alison to have cybersex, and didn't take very good care of myself. She visited once for a few days, for a Sleeping Bag Weekend, since I was trying to get her to seriously consider attending CMU. We made out, but it wasn't enough for me. I think it was at this point that I heavily pressured her to have sex with me, but she didn't want to. I'm very glad of that now, but at the time it added to the already building tension of our relationship.
Over the winter break I worked for DMV. Alison and I saw each other quite a bit. New Year's Eve, we went to the Saratoga First Night, and at some point, I took her aside, alone, and told her I loved her. She had told me she loved me way before that. I had thought that if someone could say that so early then she must not mean the same thing by love as me. I'm not sure what to think about that now. The truth was that although there was something that I guess maybe “loved” her in a way living in my body at the time, that thing is not the person now writing this web page. I had so thoroughly decimated myself that there was barely anything left, and therefore it was easy to “love” her.
Anyway, I went back to school and that semester, I again constantly pressured Alison for cybersex. I had bought her a webcam and also pressured her for nude pictures of herself. These things were placing significant demands on her time and energy, especially because when I wasn't pressuring her for those things, I still wanted to be talking to her constantly. I begrudged her every activity that took any time whatsoever away from us. Naturally, this didn't mean she stopped such activities. It just added to the tension. I was also unwilling to leave Laura (my computer) to get food if Alison might be there, and didn't live on the same floor as all of my friends, but with a freshman who pissed me off constantly but who I was generally too shy to tell to stop doing something that bothered me. I think that semester, though, I spent a very significant portion of my time, perhaps more than I did in my own room, on my laptop Robert in Mark and Mitch's room talking to Alison. So, I lost weight and was miserable, and distressed Alison more and more.
Alison had promised to visit me over her spring vacation, which was the week before mine, travelling to CMU by train and then travelling back to Albany together with me the same way. She first cut this visit back by a day or two, which I tolerated, and then cancelled it entirely because of a science fair project she wanted/needed to work on. I found this intolerable. She said that we would stretch my spring vacation further, but this was unacceptable to me, because neither of our parents would give us much chance for heavy making out or sex. I didn't say this at the time, and didn't even really admit it to myself, but it was very obviously true, although what I did say at the time—that it was a symbol of the fact that she took a relationship less seriously than I did, that to her a relationship was not everything while to me it was—was also probably true. Anyway, I had her call on the phone (I think; maybe I called) and we broke up.
It was not exactly a clean break. I was numb for a while. Alison and I kept talking. I decided that I had made a mistake in breaking up with her. Actually, I was simply desparate and panicking. I convinced her to meet with me over my spring break, and we talked about our relationship. At the end I convinced her to agree for us to go out again. I continued to believe that for a few days with no internet access, afraid to call her, and then when I came back to CMU I talked to her online and she said she had changed her mind. Relatively soon after that she totally stopped communicating with me.
I tried to contact Alison in several ways over the next few weeks. I sent her a card with a few dollars in cash, asking her to use it to call me, and telling her that if she returned it I would just throw it out. Due to an addressing mishap it took a long time to get back to me, but she did return it, and true to my words I immediately threw it in the trash. I knew she was checking my ICQ away messages although I couldn't mention it for fear she would stop, and I knew she was checking my webpage (this was before I started keeping my journal). I left her messages there.
I've had a long-established convention that I'm very careful to always capitalize the word “I”. I've repeatedly told people in the past that if I ever use a lowercase “I”, it would mean that something was very seriously wrong—that I had lost control. I did use a lowercase “I” once or twice in those away messages, and Alison still didn't respond. I took this as a sign she didn't care whether I lived or died. I was despondent, but eventually despondence moved into tiredness. I threatened to go to her high school graduation, which was later that year after I returned from college, and she responded telling me basically that although I could go, and she couldn't stop me, I wouldn't be appreciated there. I didn't make good on that threat.
I tried to rest and recover over the summer, but I was still pretty hurt. Somehow I learned that Alison would be coming to CMU. I was very distressed, probably even more so than she was knowing I would be there. It felt like she was invading my domain. She emailed me after September 11, and we met and talked things over. We were on vaguely amicable terms for a while, but next semester she found a new boyfriend, which distressed me greatly, and then I managed to piss her and several other people off greatly without even realizing it at another friend's birthday party by making some half-thought-out comments about how it would be nice if all of the worthless people died. I don't think we've spoken since, although she still reads my website and I still read her LiveJournal. I've made several oblique reconciliatory comments about things she'd understand in my journal, and she in turn has made several oblique hurtful comments about things I'd understand in her LJ. I guess that gets us up to now, when she doesn't really mean that much to me any more, except as a significant part of what made me who I am today.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Tue Mar 16 20:38:48 2004