Today is the 14th of October.
Fourteen Octobers ago, I was a sophomore in college.

Put simply, fall of sophomore year was a warm steaming barrel of shit. Honestly. It was just a big pile of manure.

I spent the second half of freshman year, and the summer following, basically between a rock and a hard place. The rock was High School Guy, the hard place was Upperclassman Guy. HSG was a year younger, dreamy and smart, an incurable poetry-writing romantic, with chin-length blond hair. Johnny Depp would play him in the movie, or possibly Orlando Bloom. HSG represents the kind of starry-eyed infatuation that everyone should experience in their youth. UG was two years older, whip-smart, funny, easy-going, and self-assured to a fault—he knew I had a boyfriend back home but pursued me with zeal nonetheless. UG is the kind of guy that parents absolutely go nuts for. My dad adored him from the first time they met. Vince Vaughn would play him, I think.

Actually, here’s all you need to know:
HSG was a guitarist.
UG was a drummer.
Anyone who’s ever gotten mixed up with either knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Now, for any of you out there thinking, Oh yeah, two people nuts over you and vying for your love, what a tragedy! Here’s the world’s smallest violinist playing the world’s saddest song, just for you… I would’ve thought the same, until I let both of them go during the Semester of Shit. It just got too horrible. HSG did the honorable thing and retreated into the background, which almost made me feel worse—in fact, we kept in touch on-again, off-again, throughout the fall, which was probably stupid, but then again, I was young and stupid.

UG, for his part, started stalking me.

Well, I suppose you could say he harassed me, because he seemed to know just how far he could go without getting nailed for stalking. I lived on the first floor at the time. My desk was right by the window, which we often kept open in the cool of October, and sometimes he’d just pop up outside the window. He followed me around incessantly. Everywhere I went, he popped up. Pop, pop, pop. Whenever he saw me talking to another guy—and this was often, since Rice was about 60% male at the time and most of my friends were guys—he wrote harassing notes and made snide, disgusting comments. During one of my on-again times with HSG, he and I were talking on the phone and UG, knowing I was in my room talking to him, called incessantly, every few minutes, for the hour HSG and I were on the phone. Call waiting still makes me jump a little.

I spent most of the Semester of Shit feeling jittery and nervous, but I never felt truly unsafe. Part of that may have been naivete on my part—I felt insulated by the fishbowl in which we lived, figuring that there was nothing he could do to me that wouldn’t be witnessed by tons of people, many of whom would have kicked his ass in return. This is not to say that my friends were a bunch of ass-kickers, but they were loyal guys through and through.

I feel bad for what they went through though. I was good friends with several of his roommates, and it must have been hell for them. I remember one time a whole bunch of us were hanging out at their place while he was off somewhere. I am sure I had been invited there; no way would I have gone without being specifically asked to come, given the situation. He came back earlier than expected, and I took my leave—it was his room after all, and I didn’t want to be around him. Rather than join the party, however, UG decided to leave and follow me down the stairs, probably to accuse me of trying to hook up with one of them, or hey! all of them! I heard later that his roommate, Mild-Mannered Barefoot Guy, punched the wall in fury: “WHY doesn’t he just leave her alone?” MMBG remains the one who, if I could have an older brother, I’d want it to be him.

I should have backed off from all of them, I guess, but dammit, why should I give them up, I wasn’t the one acting like a child, I hadn’t done anything wrong… had I?

It’s that little question, did I do something to deserve this?, that makes harassment and stalking so insidious. One starts to doubt oneself, one’s grasp on reality, everything. Like I said, I was never really afraid for my safety, yet still it was hell. Whenever I hear about someone being stalked, I want to weep for them, because what I went through was just a taste of it, and it was awful enough.

How did it end?

UG finally lost interest in following me around and started dating another woman. They got married soon after graduation, and divorced eleven months later. I hear he’s an attorney now, married to a doctor, living in a swanky suburb in a southern city.

HSG faded away. He lives in Cool Texas City and has a decent job and still plays music for fun. He has never married.

As for me, the coffeehouse on campus became my refuge during the Semester of Shit. For some reason UG never followed me there. I’d typically go with Guy Pal and this other guy, a computer science major, sweet, introverted and totally harmless. That was R.

GP, R and I would often close down the place, and walk back to our dorm. R and I often ended up talking in my room, late into the night. It was just easy. I honestly didn’t think anything of it (although you should have heard the trash UG was talking). One night R and I were studying in the study loft. The loft was a long attic room, and he was at a table on one side of a dividing wall, I was reading on the sofa on the other side. Suddenly, he appeared. I guess he kinda popped up, but it didn’t make me nervous. He sat down and said… well, I can’t remember what he said, but the gist was that he liked me, a lot, and just wanted me to know that.

It wasn’t dreamy guitar poetry, but it wasn’t self-assured zeal beating against my brain either.
It was just quiet and nice.

A few weeks later I heard a beautiful instrumental piece, a song that I didn’t know the words to—I now know it is from the musical Godspell, and it says,
“All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.”

R played it for me,
on the piano.
And that’s how it ended for me.