Saints Row always fills in a little part of me that Grand Theft Auto never seems to fill. Despite not having as great of a story nor fundamentally sound as Rockstar's flagship sandbox game, SR always had the additional fun with its sheer nuttiness in how to customize your character, the wide variety of music, and its always-offensive crude humor that keeps reminding myself that I'm nowhere above the age of 14. That fun keeps drawing me back to it when I should devote some real time into other games.
But maybe, it's a sign that shows that I haven't been having enough fun in other parts of my life if I have to enjoy throwing myself into a semi and getting thrown up into the air and onto a moving car to have fun.
Don't get me wrong; most of my personal life is just fine with a steady daytime job while doing some writing on the side, steadily building my writing career. Earlier this year, things were really set up great for me. I was living with a girl that I loved and hung out with great new friends that she met. It was the first real relationship I was in since having to deal with the realization that I wouldn't be with a girl I loved for nearly 10 years.
Little did I know that toward the end, I did the same thing to this girl (we'll call her Wilma) that made my previous love (we'll call her Betty) never want to be with me in the same room again. Ultimately, I pushed them away.
This one was a little more subtle than the previous - and handled sightly better. Betty selfishly jumped on another guy and called it a day. Wilma just reached her breaking point and left after we lived together for nearly 10 months.
Everything was against us. We lived together at the beginning of our relationship, and we spent nearly the last four months growing tired of each other. Little did I know the actual reason why it happened, because guys are always stupid. I believed Wilma just wanted to hang out with her new friends when instead I was the reason why she wanted to just hang out with them. I focused more on my work and video games, and the little dates we had and the romance faltered mightily.
The beginning spark always goes away, but ours never recovered. Now I fall in financial debt because I budgeted for her living in my apartment, and now I have to come up with that extra money per month. I went into a panic and did anything I could to try and get her back when I realized how the relationship fell apart. But Wilma was so far gone, there wasn't any way to win her back.
There's not going to be, because strangely enough, girls may like to watch that Disney shit of a guy finally winning a girl over, but that doesn't happen in real life. When something gets turned off by someone, that relationship is over; it takes both to want it back for anything to happen, even in the back of their mind.
As I moved along through my emotional period of weeks after she moved out, I finally realized why I wanted Wilma back. It wasn't for her, it was to have that comfortable life back even when I wasn't happy. Because I bought shit that made me happy with the extra money when we lived together.
No wonder she felt like just another thing that I bought. Like a "property" of mine.
Now who's the selfish one? Looking at her social media profiles earlier this month, I realized how much happier she's been with people that she wants to be with. Of course it makes me sad, I want to be one of those people with her because I miss her personality and still love her. It's the classic "you don't know what you had until it's gone."
With that newfound spark, I realized that it was just for one person. I suffocated her into a life that she didn't want. It was a whole sense of irony when compared to my relationship with Betty, but that's a different story for a day that I'll never tell publicly. There's simply no more reaction of anger or sadness when seeing her. Too much time has passed.
Those feelings are still fresh with Wilma, and it still hurts at times. If I wasn't so selfish and blind myself I feel like I could have fixed it, especially when she told me that she still loved me the day she left.
But that feeling was certainly not there when we last hung out. It was a much colder feeling as she packed her stuff away in a truck compared to staring at her for hours in my bed after I took her to dinner 10 months prior.
The whole relationship passed so quickly that it feels like it never happened. Yet, when I look back, I still get those feels, man. It's not just all anger like I had with Betty, it was sadness that I was dumb enough to not see it.
That's when I realized that Wilma was my first real heartbreak.
Betty was a girl that was on my mind for the better part of nine years, but there was never anything real between us. That was all lust because she was everything I was physically attracted to, and she never developed any real feelings for me because I was someone that she always fell back on when things didn't work with a guy. Maybe Wilma was the first girl that I loved outside of my mom and my sisters. Who knows.
But I know damn well I never had heartbreak for Betty like I thought I did; I was just always pissed for nine years that we never had anything together. Maybe instead of thinking of her as a bitch, perhaps I can look in the mirror and stop lying to myself about it.
And I shouldn't lie to myself about how things went down with Wilma either. Feel bad that in the last two weeks of the relationship I finally figured it out but it was well too late to do anything about it? Want to tell people that if I just had one more chance that things could be different?
Geezus, it's time for me to grow the fuck up and finally deal with some heartbreak. Stuff that I put on myself and need to deal with and learn from. Don't let it carry over to another relationship that will happen in the future.
I wanted to take Wilma to dinner this weekend to explain to her all of this, but she never responded. That's probably a good thing. Having the ability to write it all down, read it, then have it all make sense is probably better therapy for this guy instead of trying to explain it half-assedly to a girl that really doesn't give a shit.
After time passes, I'll have the same feelings toward Wilma as I do Betty. Nothing. Because everyone gets over it.
Finally, I think I stepped forward a little bit closer to my real age of 25. Now it's time to go back and throw myself into another semi in Saints Row.
[Image credit: Flickr]
