Insomnia is a terrible thing. There are two types of insomniacs. There’s the proactive type that will acknowledge that sleep will not come and they get up and do things. Proactive insomniacs can be very productive and get all types of work done at odd hours of the night. The second type is the passive insomniac. That’s me. I just lay there in bed, sometimes with my eyes closed, sometimes with them open, cursing the world and tossing and turning hoping to drift off for a precious 15 minutes even. This happened last night.

Now I’m not dumb enough to think I deserve sleeping pills. I don’t. In fact, I went to counseling for a brief time my senior year of college and after I turned down anti-depressants (I’m fine with anti-depression medication but I was in a funk and didn’t feel I needed to medicate myself better, hence the counseling), the counselor then offered me sleeping pills. I was totally and completely honest with the counselor, the lovely and adorable Marie, and told her that I drink entirely too much to be taking any pills.

And which days do I struggle with insomnia most? Sundays (or Mondays if you have a Sunday Funday). My body is just not used to sleeping without the massive amounts of alcohol consumed over the weekend. So I deal with the occasional restless nights sleep and push onward.

Last night, as I lay awake, I thought of my time with Marie and thought about why I went there in the first place. I will tell you now of my first girl-on-girl heartache.

I was a senior at the time and she was a sophomore. She started off the school year newly single, as her boyfriend had transferred away. The previous year we shared a drunken conversation about her thoughts of bisexuality and we had spent most of the summer keeping in touch on the phone. Our connection deepened in the first week of school and our friends found themselves asking each other what was developing between us.

I, of course, knew I was developing a crush but figured she wasn’t over her ex. We really only had one unofficial conversation about anything more than friendship and it was via text and just an admission that we would make out. But we never did. She would stay the night and we would cuddle. When she didn’t stay the night, I would walk her home. We did everything together for several months.

When I finally broke down and asked for more, she claimed she didn’t know what I was talking about. The feigned ignorance probably hurt the most. Things spiraled out of control from there. We stopped talking entirely. She got really depressed. I started seeing a counselor. Just before my last semester of college started in January, she sent a message telling me she wanted to rebuild our friendship. I thought I was ready and I accepted the offer while trying to withhold hope of anything more.

By that time, I had become much more comfortable with my sexuality and was freely hitting on girls and staking my claim as one of the more notorious lesbians in the Greek system. I brought a girl with me to a frat-sorority function and instantly hit the beirut table. As we were setting up, my long time crush pulled me aside. She claimed her friend was next and I calmly explained to her that no one at the table knew he was in line therefore they had given me the next spot.

She slapped me in the face.

I stared with disbelief and managed a “What?!?”

She responded by asking me if beirut was so important that I had to be an asshole. Then she slapped me again.

This time I managed a “You have got to be kidding me” and then caught her hand as it went up for the intended third slap. I released my grip and walked away.

I always thought she reacted that way because of the girl I had brought with me. I really will never know. A couple months later, she skillfully tried to get me kicked out of my sorority for peer pressuring freshmen. When that didn’t work, she tried to accuse me of prefunking a function – which, of course I had done but so did most of the other greeks attending the event. When it came down to it, she couldn’t kick me out. I held too much social clout at the time and there was no grounds to even give me social probation.

I reacted poorly. I am ashamed to admit it but I signed her up for every free product offering I could find online. I was livid. The simple spam in her college mailbox was harmless enough but she had to know where it came from. She had to know it was a form of revenge.

I tried apologizing several months after graduation. This is what I wrote:

I don’t know if you are bothered sometimes by everything that happened last semester, but I know it still pains me. I’m not entirely sure how we got from point A to point B. It makes absolutely no sense. All I know is that by the end of it all, I convinced myself that I needed to be angry. I’ve held onto it so long that I was blinded by the pettiness.

Being away from college allowed some things to become clearer. As the anger faded, I realized that I still care. I’m writing to you now in the same sort of way you wrote that message to me in January. I’ve missed our friendship and you are important enough to me to know the truth. I care about you and I’m sorry. For every conscious and unconscious way I hurt you. You will always be an important person in my life… in one way or another. Even if this gesture only amounts to the exchange of a cordial smile when I come to visit in the next month, it’ll have been worth it. At least we’d no longer be at point B.

I hope you’re happy and excited for your Junior year.

Love,
Kim

I didn’t receive a good response. She wasn’t away from college and was dealing with a lot of the backlash from the events the previous semester. My outreach was too little too late or just really didn’t matter. We didn’t need to be in each other’s lives in any way.

It took me years to get over her. To get over the whole situation really. Not a single kiss transpired between us but it was the first time I really let myself fall for a girl and it went terribly wrong. Two years after, I woke up to find One Republic’s “Apologize” on repeat because I had a total drunken breakdown about her the night before. That’s when you know things are bad. (This is still joked about among my friends and I cannot hear this song without laughing or being laughed at, depending on who’s around)

Luckily, this is a story of the past. I learned a lot and the whole situation helps to define who I am today. Everyone goes through that first real heartache and we all get through the other side.