November 1994

At an Open Mike session one night, Dr. Nelson read a story, a long one with tons of pages, but very funny. It was a conversation between two people. He read quickly through each page--not too fast for comprehension, and apparently on purpose. When he finished reading through a sheet, he tossed it on the floor. That, as well as the story itself, was part of the hilarity and amusement of the story.

The Open Mike gatherings seemed to be quite popular that year. I'm not sure how long they'd been around, but I believe they started in my underclassman days, when they were held in the Muskie. They'd been well-attended in past years by students and teachers, but maybe even more now, probably because they were in the Pub where people liked to hang out day and night. Many different people participated now, and it was no longer just a treat for writers: singers and musicians were now welcome. Two married teachers, who also had a band, played Celtic music one night, when the husband taught my Celtic class over Winterim.

We started giving Mike time-outs. Whenever he got too weird and his jokes got way too weirdly dirty, someone called out, "Time out, Mike!" and he was supposed to settle down. I didn't do this myself, maybe because I have a high tolerance for oddballs--so much so that I married one. :)

A popular college myth, which we all believed, got exposed as a myth one day, probably senior year. It was, if your roommate dies, you get straight A's because of the emotional anguish. It may have been the Mirror which revealed this wasn't at all true. I learned in 1998 that this is apparently a popular myth in colleges all over the country, because a comedy movie came out about a kid who tries to kill his roommate and make it look like a suicide so he can get straight A's.

One Sunday evening, when snow covered the ground, Mike drove Pearl, Sharon or Astrid, and me to a church in S--. We got lost. Finally we found the church, but the service was already halfway done. We found the congregation watching a movie (an actual projector-movie, not a VCR tape) about Dave Roever, who lost half his face in Vietnam but now uses this as a witness to how Christ helped him go on.

Some guy called Mario became the target of cafeteria tray jokes. I think he was in a frat. I don't know if he was a freshman pledge or what. But people kept writing these awful, explicit jokes about him on the cafeteria trays. My group tried to avoid the "Mario trays," but it wasn't always possible. When we failed, we'd say, "Uh-oh, I've got a Mario tray."

Our InterVarsity sweatshirts, ordered earlier in the year, now arrived. They were dark blue with gold lettering. The front said "InterVarsity Christian Fellowship" and had an alpha, cross and omega. The back said, "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.--Isaiah 9:2." They seemed to be a fashion statement for our group--one day I went to a meal and found everybody at the table wearing one, even Charles.

Apparently, a lot of things bugged me that semester. I guess Phil put me into a bad mood that lasted until December: I could feel myself getting dark and maybe even turning into less of a nice and caring person than I was before. I didn't like it but didn't know what to do about it. Phil kept sitting at our table at meals--surrounded by people who he knew disliked him--and getting cutesy with Persephone, rubbing his new relationship in my face. Apparently his ex-wife was not worth what respect and sensitivity he once showed to Tracy. I was mad at Phil and getting madder, a typical response to abuse of any type, and it seems this affected my attitude toward life in general. It took time to pull out of this, and the help of a man who treated me much better, teaching me I didn't have to be on the defensive all the time in case another guy turned out to be a Phil. By 1999, I started to feel more like the type of person I was supposed to be.

It was sometimes painful to work on my novel Jerisland, but I had to because it was now my Senior Writing Project. When I broke up with Peter, I couldn't work on it because I had imagined the hero Stefan was like Peter. Stefan and Jeri were supposed to be happy together forever. Now, all summer I had imagined Stefan was like Phil. Before, I put the breakup with Peter in Jerisland and made things happen the way I wished (at the time) that they would have happened. Though Stefan did awful things to Jeri, he apologized and made up for them. In this latest rewrite, Jeri became the dumper, not Stefan. She listened to Stefan's best friend, who tried to convince her she belonged with Stefan. Since Stefan reminded me of Phil, and some of the things I wrote in the story came from my relationship with Phil, it was hard to write that Stefan and Jeri had a happy marriage that lasted forever. But I had to because there was no way I wanted those two to break up. It seemed I could never have a happy relationship that lasted for the rest of my life, but dang it, I wanted Jeri to have one with Stefan!

Apparently we were supposed to read shelves in the library. I had never heard of this rule before, or that any of us had been assigned to certain shelves. But Sharon and I started doing this together. We basically scanned the Dewey decimal numbers to make sure the books were in order. It could get boring quickly, but we talked about life, and the cool and old and weird and German-language books we'd find. We even found one on Egyptian hieroglyphics. We checked it out of the library. We were supposed to draw up our own copy of the Egyptian alphabet, but never got around to that. I loved working with Sharon.

I enjoyed re-shelving books. Pulling or pushing along the book cart, going upstairs in the elevator (the only one on campus besides the one in the Wehr Center), going in among the stacks putting books away--it all made me feel so important: "I work here!" We put the books in numerical order before taking the cart away from the circulation desk, to speed up re-shelving.

Re-shelving took me away from the desk and from life in general, sticking me in among the stacks, where I wanted to be. I still had no clue where Tara and Sarah's "haunted bookshelf" was. (They said books would fall out of it.) Sometimes I felt a little creeped out in the juvenile section, a tiny room at the very top of the building. My friends told stories about it being haunted. But I'd find the most wonderful and obscure books in the library, and often come back with books on the cart, to be checked out. I loved checking my own book out rather than waiting for a clerk, writing my name on the card, putting it in the card box, and putting a date due card in the book.

On November 3, I had just prayed for help forgiving Phil. I had also just written to friends the day before about the hurt and anger I didn't know how to deal with. As I shelved new books, I had to go into parts of the Religion section. So I started looking around for books on knowing God's will and other spiritual questions. Then I saw this little, white paperback with the title, Forgive and Forget: Healing The Hurts We Don't Deserve by Lewis B. Smeade. (Here is an interview with the author which describes the book's philosophy.)

It said hatred was stage 2 of forgiveness. It said that in order to forgive, first I must confront the person who wronged me--say how he wronged me, and that I hated him for it. It had to be done, or I wouldn't be able to release him in my heart, and he wouldn't know that he'd done something wrong. The author gave an example of a woman who asked a supervisor to put in a good word for her, I believe it was. Instead, he stabbed her in the back. She knew about it, but he didn't know she did. She pretended each day to day that it hadn't happened; each night she'd go home and throw up. Finally, she told him he'd done her wrong, "and I hate you for it." After that, she stopped throwing up after work. Dr. Phil McGraw also says that sending a letter is sometimes necessary.

So I confronted Phil in a letter, which I let sit and then showed to Pearl for advice before sending. It's often said that we should confront people rather than just complaining about them to other people, that the pain of confrontation is brief in comparison to the pain of having a problem continue.

The letter went into detail about the emotional abuse Phil had put me through. It made clear that I saw him with my last letter coming out of Muehlmeier, and that I felt there was nothing about that letter to upset him. It chewed him out for showing it around rather than considering it. It gave my perspective on the marriage, which is that it was real and valid. The letter explained that I had to confront him if I ever hoped to forgive him.

He never responded to the letter--probably because I told him not to unless he sincerely repented. I didn't want to talk about it. I'd already had quite enough of his dismissals any time I tried to tell him he did something wrong. I wanted him to stop sitting with us and getting mushy with Persephone, to stop greeting me in the halls; I wanted to be left completely alone so my anger would cool down. I wrote, "No more will I be walked over." Persephone found the letter accidentally, but after talking with me about it, decided she had nothing to be angry with me about.

After reading this letter over again almost 12 years later, though I would have tweaked a few parts here and there, I find nothing to regret. It never threatened or begged; it gave my point of view completely. It was brief, only about 4 typed pages. Though I did not yet know the term emotional abuse, the letter effectively accused him of it--and certain forms of physical abuse as well, the ones I mentioned before in the September chapter, him forcing me to do things I didn't want to do. The previous letter also went into some abusive things that happened, and begged him to get counseling for himself.

Since he never apologized or repented during that time (at least, that I ever heard), and carried on his behavior to subsequent relationships, I was probably talking to a brick wall. But somebody had to confront him. Persephone also confronted him, calling him an a--hole for things he did to me and told her about. Knowing her, she probably also confronted him about things he did to her.

So there you have it: First, I went to him directly with my concerns. Then I discovered that Persephone told him off for the things he did to me. And he did not repent. Since we had no church in common, and he no longer went to InterVarsity meetings, there was nowhere else to go. The next stage, adapting Matthew 18:15-17 to my situation, was to stop associating with him.

On the 8th, I dropped the letter in the Campus Center mailbox, went into the Campus Shoppe for a bit, then started out. Who should open the door for me, but Phil! How did he, a commuter, always show up in the same place and time as me? I stared straight ahead and walked past him.

I admit I skipped a few Intro to Christianity classes. But sometimes I just didn't want to get up and run off to a 9:15 class. I'd either be tired or depressed about Phil again. Once or twice I actually felt under the weather. (Maybe this is a symptom of depression; after all, up until this time, I wouldn't dream of skipping class unless I was sick or had a bout with insomnia or had to tend to Phil's nervous breakdown.) So I'd skip it, and copy the day's lecture notes from Mike. I followed the syllabus, read the assignments, did the research essays and studied for the tests, so I didn't miss much. Since I knew the material, I made an A or B in the class.) And I didn't have to tell the teacher where I'd been. I did show up to most of the classes, though sometimes I think I barely made it on time. (I don't remember now how often I was late or on time.) But then, after all, I just took this class for the credits anyway. It was interesting, but I'd taken all the required courses and only needed a certain number of credits so I could graduate, so I took whatever looked like fun.

Sharon kept torturing Tara and me with the song "Zombie" by the Cranberries. She'd sing, "In your head! In your head!" until we pretended to hit her. One of us would say, "It's in my head and I can't get it out.� So Sharon would sing, "In your head! In my head!" and laugh.

A twinge of insult lasted only one nanosecond. I didn't feel insulted after that, just wondered what was going on. Charles hadn't been coming over much, I had given up on trying to be in love with him (I guess I no longer felt that "spark" as he called it), and after his comments I started to feel like we weren't really seeing each other anymore. I tried to work up the courage to break up with him. I'd even been depressed lately, wanting to be with the Guy I had a crush on, so depressed Clarissa even noticed one day before dinner and asked what was wrong. (I didn't tell her.)

We also had different political opinions; we were both Republicans, but his opinions were much farther to the right. One evening, he turned on Rush Limbaugh's TV show, to my dismay. I kept my mouth shut to avoid trouble. And he could get vocal with people who disagreed with him on politics. I knew this just wasn't going to work out.

On the tenth, the group walked back from lunch and got to where the sidewalk forked, one way leading to Muehlmeier and the other to the apartments. Charles usually came along with us to our apartment, but lately he'd been splitting with us and going alone to his room in Muehlmeier. I thought he did this because Sharon complained about him coming over every evening. He said good-bye to us again on the tenth, and I thought about pulling him aside right then and breaking up with him, but wondered if it was really necessary: as far as I could tell, we were just friends now, no more. Our dating status seemed to have dissolved without a word. So my roommies and I just said "bye" to him and walked on.

Had he heard about the angry letter? If so--well, I had to send it. Confronting an abuser--whether by letter or otherwise--and cutting him off if he won't repent, is standard advice. Did he mean the secret marriage? If so--well, the practice is hardly limited to the young and foolish. Couples far older and wiser than we were, agree to secret marriages long before the public wedding. I never did find out what "things" Charles "heard." All I knew was he said we needed to grow up. I haven't a clue why he included me in that.

As far as I was concerned, he didn't break up with me--we broke up with each other. It was mutual, the first time I'd ever experienced such a breakup. Finally, I was free from trying to feel attracted to him and from wondering if other guys realized I could still go out with them.

My apartment building was now dubbed the Morland House. The other was the Hill House. I loved Northanger Abbey (by Jane Austen), especially the movie (find it on amazon.com�I can't get the URL). I would forever associate the name "Morland" with Catherine Morland, the heroine. So it was funny and fitting to live in a building named Morland.

Pearl asked to use my phone one day, since her phone was out of order for some reason, so she sat on my bed (the lower bunk), where the phone was. She told me later, "I saw an Alice in Chains CD on top of a Sheila Walsh CD on your radio, and I thought, 'That is so Nyssa!'" She laughed. (In case you don't know, Sheila Walsh is a sweet, contemporary Christian music singer, once a rocker but now much more mellow. It might have been the Dirt or Facelift Alice in Chains CD, and Sheila's For A Time Like This, which is mellow but not too mellow.)

The school play, Measure for Measure, ran from November 10-12 at 8pm each night. I didn't go to the first showing. A guy in one of my classes said he went to the opening night performance, but the acting was bad and the words were all muted and unintelligible. He couldn't tell what was going on.

Pearl and I went to the play on Friday the 11th. It was weird to see Phil in it, playing the role of Vincentio, Duke of Vienna. I tried to remember that other people I knew and liked were in the play. One of these days I'll have to read the play and find out what happened, since that guy in class was right. Even Phil didn't sound convincing.

I dreaded having to sit and watch this guy I'd been trying to avoid and ignore. He even had the lead role, so I had to see him most often. During an intermission, I heard a girl near the bathroom say "Phil O'Hara" with a smile. I think she was a freshman. I wondered if he even knew I was there, if he could see me in the audience. I suspected he could, but I'd also heard somewhere that with the lights off you can't see the audience that well. Later, I admitted to Pearl that while watching I discovered I did still love him, after all.

Usually, the actors and actresses in each play would come out in the lobby so you could congratulate them on their performances. After Lucky Spot, Pearl and I had stopped to congratulate Phil. This time, I don't remember if we stopped to talk to our friends in the play, which we might have done, but we said not a word to Phil.

Sharon and I went on many walks that fall through the woods and down by the lake together. We talked about many things. We spotted the covered Friendship Bridge, which had been partially destroyed when a tree fell on it. It later collapsed. This might have happened in a storm. The tree was still there when we saw it. The school knew about this, and the Zetas were to build a new one. I believe this was also the first time I ever saw the Friendship Bridge. I know I saw this in the fall of 1994--though a Mirror issue says the Zetas built a new bridge in the summer of 1994--so they must have left the old one the way it was.

Those brown Dodge Caravans were everywhere that fall! Phil's model was very popular. (They were popular in 1993 and 1994, but Phil's was used, which confuses me now because how could he get a used minivan in a new model?) I used to like it, and there was another one on my street that past summer, which we thought was funny. We always had to check the license plate in a parking lot because it was easy to get confused. Now, they reminded me of Phil. One of the other students, a female non-trad, also owned one. So I saw them a lot, and always had to check the license plate or the driver.

Even worse, Phil kept parking his minivan in the lot next to my apartment building, in view of my window. I knew he was probably either in Muehlmeier seeing Persephone (doing who knew what) or in my own apartment building seeing Dirk. Did he park there deliberately so I'd know he was there? He wasn't supposed to park there, but by Grossheusch, according to campus rules. I kept hoping he'd get a ticket. He rarely parked by Grossheusch.

Was he trying to upset me? He knew I lived there. He knew I had to walk right by the parking lot to get anywhere on campus. And he usually parked right next to the sidewalk. It was all I could do to restrain myself from kicking the tires. But I forced myself to, because I knew it was right.

On the 12th, I wrote this to friends: "I also want to say I'm feeling happier now than I have for a while. And the day after I wrote in the journal about this hate and anger I didn't know how to deal with, I had to re-shelve some books in the religion section of the library. I had several spiritual questions, and started looking over the titles to see if there was a book that could help me. And there was a little white paperback called Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts you Don't Deserve. So I snatched it up and checked it out at the desk. It's been quite helpful, and even though I still think what's-their-name is an idiot and a jerk, it seems my hatred has lost some of its intensity. The problem is that I keep wanting to hang onto it, but the book says, hatred's power is short-lived. It may give you power, but it won't last as long as the power forgiveness gives you. The book also told me to confront the person who's hurt me, and tell them just what they've done to me. I did just that in a letter, and I feel so much better now because of it. They had been going on their merry way like they didn't know the damage they left in their wake, but a day or two after they got the letter, I could tell they now had a better concept of what they'd done. I now pray that God will convict this person, because He's the only one who can."

Persephone and I had a long talk. We had some different opinions about things, but she decided not to be mad at me for being mad at Phil. She must have realized the angry letter was necessary. Among many other things, she spoke of Phil's increasing troubles at home, and called his mother a "dragon." Shortly before this, Tracy agreed to do something with Phil and Persephone, to their shock and now mine. Phil ended up driving so erratically that Tracy (obviously when the minivan was stopped) got him to go down on his knees, and demanded his keys from him.

What was really odd was that Persephone said she didn't even like Phil as a boyfriend. She ripped on him whenever he wasn't around, and would have preferred dating James. She said she'd just sent James a letter saying how she felt, when Phil asked her out. James tried to talk to her, but Phil came over.

Her dad was like Phil, and her mother wondered why she'd want to date someone like that. Once, I found my observations on Phil were the same as hers on many counts. He also had another nervous breakdown, but instead of skipping classes and caring for him, she left her roommate Trina with him and went to do something with the Mirror staff.

Phil had argued that I should find someone with my own ideas of fun and partying, as if that somehow determined lifelong day-to-day happiness. Well, he found someone who liked to party, but seemed to forget about the things he said were most important to him in a wife. Phil refused to use birth control for religious reasons; Persephone did not want children and planned to get her tubes tied. I had agreed to use natural family planning because it meant so much to him, but she would use a permanent form of birth control. After he complained so much that I would not convert to Catholicism, I don't know why he wanted to date someone who would have obviously refused conversion even more fervently than I (she was Methodist and, I'm told, later tried Wicca). He didn't want "one of those feminists" who didn't want to obey her husband, but she was even more of a feminist than I was. Helene even jokingly called her a feminazi.

Phil followed the Catholic teaching on birth control, but no longer wanted to follow the Catholic teaching on premarital sex. Those two things together are a recipe for trouble, as he learned the hard way. This is probably why Persephone called him "an idiot sexually." (Incidentally, the Catholic church is also against certain other things he wanted to do, things he insisted I do even though I didn't want to.)

Phil had always been "hygienically challenged." I guess that, in between his showers and tooth brushings, my nose got used to it, just like a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water. One day soon after the final separation, he told me he'd just showered and shaved (I liked him with a beard) so he'd be more attractive to women. But once he got Persephone, he didn't keep it up; she would often throw a towel and soap at him, and make him shower in the men's room at Muehlmeier before she'd let him into her room. Anna and I both thought he looked silly without a beard, but Persephone thought he looked scary and scuzzy with one, so she made him shave it.

The marriage had entered the grapevine; Persephone said, "Tell a world, tell a Dirk." She didn't hear about it through Phil. (Not surprising: Why would he tell her he was married to somebody else just days before pursuing her?) Some freshman girl in Muehlmeier said to her, "I'm really not supposed to tell anyone this, BUT....." Persephone said when we married, Phil meant it; when we got back together in late September, he was just using me! I hadn't a clue. After this, I had yet another reason to hate Phil.

So, just walking around the cafeteria, I felt like everybody knew and was judging me. Of course, now that my friends, Phil's friends, and who knew who, knew about the secret marriage, you could say that we met another important criteria of marriage: common knowledge that we were married. (There are those who say a marriage isn't valid unless it's public--discounting even a legal elopement or Romeo and Juliet's marriage.)

On the 18th, Dad was to pick me up to take me home. He wasn't supposed to arrive until about 6pm, so I asked Mike to study with me for Intro to Christianity. Can you believe we had a test on the 28th, the first day of class after Thanksgiving Break? When Mike showed up, he brought a high school friend, Brent.

I hoped to finally type up much of my novel/Senior Writing Project on the computer while at home for Thanksgiving. I planned to do some major typing then and over Christmas. I hadn't been able to get enough chapters to Counselor Dude because I forgot my Jerisland discs (3 1/2 discs, which the young people call old-fashioned, but we called newfangled). I couldn't type up the files for the first few weeks. I was also still writing the novel. Counselor Dude understood; he said we'd get the project done a little late, especially since he still would have to read it and it was big, but I would get a grade.

Writing the last chapters during the fall semester was burdensome and melancholy at times, but at the same time it was a way to get away from the Phil-situation. I could escape to the island. While reading shelves with Sharon, not only did I find some interesting books on marriage and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but also Darwin's book on coral atolls. This was the book mentioned by Collier's Encyclopedia in the article "Atoll," which I mentioned in the February 1994 chapter. I also used my Botany books to find the identities of the trees and plants, which the article only called by their scientific names, and which weren't in any other books I could find.

Some songs from the time: "Vaseline" by Stone Temple Pilots; "Verse Chorus Verse" by Nirvana; "Love is Deeper Than Touch," a Christian song from the summer by Andy Landis; "Over You" by David Meece; Gary Chapman's "Heal Me," which I could identify with. (Check out these lyrics. And that was long before the well-publicized divorce from Amy Grant!)

On Sunday, November 27, my parents and I returned to Roanoke. On my way out the door, I stopped at the top of the basement stairs and looked down to my little kitty Hazel, who sat and stared at me from the foot of the stairs. (We now used the door there as a main door instead of the back door, because my parents put a new carpet in the family room and didn't want it to get dirty.) I got a feeling I'd never see her again. Was I going to die from sadness or in a car crash that day? Back at school, I mentioned the feeling to Sharon; she said maybe Hazel was going to die. As it turned out, Hazel and I both lived to see each other on Christmas Break, but after that, I never saw her again. She died of an undetermined illness which made her bald and skinny, possibly diabetes. (She did love those Twinkies, after all.)