I have become boring. It's probably work consuming my time, and it's probably friends changing and getting married, and my own tenancies to stay indoors, but it's true. I did the math and it has been six years since I was at Western: two years of my life I have spent regretting, not only due to the massive loans that accumulated due to it, but also due to purity rings and lost friendships.

So let me talk about this place that absorbed two years of my life. If a person doesn't write a thing or two down, they are forgotten. I was lying in bed alongside Daniel when I thought to myself: how long has it been since I stayed up late on my laptop? As a single student, whether in a dormitory or not, most nights were spent up late chatting or watching a movie. It's comfortable, now, to simply go to bed at 10:30pm each night to ensure I have enough energy to get through the next day. I thought about a few moments: The moment when a boy I liked told me he wasn't interested in dating after we'd flirted with the concept all summer long. We were on a bench outside the boys' dorm. He had his arm around the back of the bench, but it wasn't touching me. I don't really remember the words exchanged, only that I looked in his eyes before getting up and walking away without looking back, all the way across the other side of the main building to my own dorm where I permanently stained mascara into my pillow. Then, what I recall to be about a week later, when he was dating someone else, I left the devo, or whatever it was, where the younger brother of my now husband told me that he was more slim that I was (not sure what he was trying to prove, but he offended me anyhow) to climb on top of Western. Not in a suicidal way, in an I-want-to-be-alone way, where I stayed and cried for about twenty minutes until the darkness and loneliness was cause enough for me to retreat. The same top of the building that I discovered with Logan, who, on some other, winter occasion, showed me the way up there. And then we jumped off into a large snowbank.

Western was a very small college, and I had a nice tight-knit group of friends there. When I first attended, I was dating a guy named Dan, a guy I pretended not to date until I was finished highschool and then, you know, we made it "official." I'm pretty sure we had already told each other we loved each other. I was 17 and enjoyed being tossed in the snow and the smell of a decent cologne. He also flew me around in a Cessna, would do things like randomly swim in a river, and I guess he had a good sense of humor. We hadn't spent more than a weekend together, ever, because I met him through my sister and he lived in Calgary, but I was pretty sure I'd found the guy I was going to marry.

At the college, I always had my own dorm room. My mom knew I wouldn't be able to last without the privacy; I have always sought out time by myself. Once, before we were going on a road trip to a Bible College in Texas, my alarm didn't go off. So Dan and Brett came to knock on my window at like five in the morning, and I guess my blinds had a serious flaw (I remember fixing them afterward) because they could see in, and I started to whip off my shirt to get dressed. They said they didn't see anything, but Dan was pretty furious about that. He was a pretty furious guy, especially when it came to Brett, who I wound up writing a note to saying we couldn't be friends because it was interfering with my relationship with Dan. Dan who, on our last Valentine's Day as a couple, took us to see the old Corner Gas site, of which I had no interest. By that time he was working night shifts at Tim Hortons and slept a lot, and had moved out of the dorm into a house about as far away as the dorms, where I would ring the doorbell, and the librarian who lived above him got me in trouble for visiting, you know, on my own, as an 18-year-old, so we wouldn't wind up doing something like grinding in a corner or taking naps together. I wound up working the next year in the library, where the librarian and I had some kind of an awkward conversation where I had to apologize for "putting her in a bad spot." My friend Bethany, younger sibling to Brett, would always come to see me in there. She'd bring me a Tim Hortons coffee with three sugars and two creams, and a blueberry bagel with strawberry cream cheese. She'd pass me notes with pictures. When is the last time I ever wrote someone a note?

Anyway, as you know, things with Dan never panned out. That trip where I almost flashed two Christian boys was in about October of the first year I attended, meaning Dan and I had been living in the same city for a bit over two months, and even then we fought nonstop. I cried for hours in that van. I really had no self-esteem. I have a bad lower back, and we were cramped in that van, and I sat in the back between Dan and Brett. Brett, whose mother is a massage therapist, kindly (yeah right, "kindly") massaged my back, which made Dan furious, of course, and he told me we should just break up, which upset me so much that I cried for hours, fogging up the window beside me, hoping no one else would notice. Yeah, I don't get it either, now.

Brett and I had a lot of classes together, this being our first year in college. Brett, Logan and I. There were others: Emilia, Aimee. We were all in the acapella singing group together, and Dan, and Tim, and Jennifer. Ryan too, I think. After Dan and I broke up, which happened to coincide with finals, Dan only had to write one final and he left back to Calgary, after crying and shoving his purity ring at me as though we were married. "I don't want it anymore," he said. Ha, yes, it happened, which made me feel pretty low, then, especially since before he gave it to me, I had been sitting thighs touching to Brett, watching some movie on the couch. Oh, I forgot to tell you that I broke up with Dan largely motivated to date Brett, who it turns out not only had a crush on me, but I also developed a pretty devastating crush on him and his lanky, six-foot-six-inches-tall body, anime drawing skills, and tenor voice.

But now you know that didn't work out either, even after his family snuck me on a family trip into the States where he was custom combining the previous summer. Yeah. A family vacation, and I managed to wiggle my way in there. No wonder the guy ran away. I've always been a little too serious.

I started my second year single (though not by choice), terribly agitated by a new girl who was now flirting with my want-to-be boyfriend -- though it wasn't her who wound up dating Brett, she actually wound up marrying Logan, in secret, that year, after about three months of dating or so. During that time that I was single I think Logan felt a little bad for me. I mean, after I broke up with Dan, wherein I msn messaged him that we had to end things because I realized that I had feelings for Brett, and he stomped over and demanded I come out and he yelled at me at about 7am on a beautiful Saturday morning and it was all "you never loved me," and shoving shoeboxes of "us" things at me and a large, crying man to try to process; so after that ordeal which then led to Brett claiming he didn't want to date (me, it turned out), Logan hung out with me quite a bit. For a few months, we actually became quite close. We went for coffees late at night, after curfew, but in college they don't care so much about that. We watched the stars on a soccer field at the U of R campus. He told me that if I hadn't have been asked to the banquet that he would have asked me (pity?), and we helped some high school girls sneak out late at night one time.

I could go on. Workouts with Cass, the cafeteria. It's like thinking about a breakup, my time at Western. There's so much hurt mixed up with the good things its hard not to lump it all and toss it. I mean, Dan hasn't talked to me since about a month past our breakup, Logan moved away and hasn't talked to me in about five years, things with Brett have been cold pretty well ever since he rejected me (it's still awkward for me to visit with his mom), not to mention other friends who have simply disappeared. Forgetting is a coping mechanism. Like, I don't even know where pictures are from that era. I never put them into a book. They're on some CD-ROM somewhere, unlabelled, undeveloped.

Every once in a while, though, like tonight, I remember. That time I was in the common room, Brett holding my legs in a handstand, competing against Logan for who could do the most pushups. Pretty sure I won.