The other column

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I have followed in your footsteps.

On a winter weekend in the first grade, my mother flew across the country for a business trip, leaving my dad to watch me in our New Jersey home, which I thought was haunted because the radiators rattled.

Waking up in the middle of the night possessed by an unrelenting urge to empty my 6-year-old bladder all over my Little Mermaid sheets, I leaped out of my bed and scuttled down the hallway, turning on every light along the way and leaving the bathroom door wide open. Nothing deters a bogey like an open door.

In my drowsy state, I remember overhearing murmurs and stifled laughter and then squinting up through the blinding bathroom blaze to see a stark naked woman in my parents' bedroom doorway.

Years later, I wouldn't be sure if I really saw the woman, though she wouldn't have been the last infidelity, and I certainly wouldn't have thought that 6-year-old girl, chubby like the Michelin Man with tangled hair and chapped lips, would be in that woman's place 14 years later. Although, with my pink pony panties down at my ankles, I guess we had more in common than I thought.

Enter the Emu.

We met at work this summer. He was a 25-year-old hypochondriac with a photocopier fetish, an admitted Peter Pan complex and an obsession with his urination schedule. Nervous about an upcoming drug test and physical, he kept me regularly updated on his daily water, vitamin and false hope intake.

In short, ladies, quite the catch.

Unfortunately, he was also a catch with a catch-a girlfriend.

But regardless, the Emu and I bonded over our shared love of words and shared interest in the ridiculous and unnecessary trouble in which I tend to find myself, like my summer run-in with S, my stalker.

I met S only a few weeks after I met the Emu. I was sitting in a Starbucks on my laptop when S, a 50-something-year-old with the teeth and smell of someone 150, tapped me on the shoulder and began to tell me about his encounter with the fattest man in Britain.

That isn't the sort of story you can ignore or interrupt with a phone call to the police, so I allowed him to continue the tale and shower me with his caffeine-imbued spit.

Eventually S left, only to return later to purchase me a bottle of water, which was sweet, and later again to give me a picture of himself, which was creepy.

I'd made a friend. Yes.

And as new friends do, S asked me for my full name, cell phone number and home address, and as I've been through kindergarten and learned how to deal with strangers... I gave them to him.

In the coming weeks, S would mail me two collages and leave me countless voice messages until one day I looked up from my laptop at Starbucks to see him sitting across from and staring straight at me.

"I guess I asked for it, but I didn't realize he'd actually stalk me," I'd tell the Emu later to complain and entertain.

But the tables would turn, and somehow the stalkee became the stalker.

Three months of hours-long phone calls, passion on the PATH trains and secret stairway rendezvouses later, I demanded respect as a friend, woman and human being, and when the Emu gave it to me in the form of ending the affair, I failed everything the Spice Girls and their girl power taught me in the third grade, by begging him to take me back.

Here I would sarcastically point out that I've never been prouder, but things got even better with my showing up at his flat two hours away by train, attractively half-drunk on rage, repeatedly calling his phone on speed dial, missing the last train home and spending the night on a bench.

Definition of crazy: me.

It was a wake-up call, or at least the conductor prodding me awake the next morning was.

The story doesn't end there, but real life rarely fits neatly into a narrative even if, like stories, it teaches us lessons. The lesson here was about moving on, looking forward, forgiving others and forgiving myself. The lesson was realizing even the "others" of any relationship deserve another chance.

And the lesson was keeping my contact information safe and secure and not talking to strangers. You know, the basics.

Lysa Chen is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Friday.

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