THE TWO ELIZABETHS
When I was young, my parents were religious. My dad still is, I'm not quite as sure about my mom. They met at a church, and when I was a kid we went to the Alliance church in town every Sunday. It was a ritual which I was used to just by being brought up with it.
Another such ritual were our yearly visits to Fair Havens. This tradition stretches back to when my dad would go with his family to the same family resort in Beaverton, Ontario and spend a week by the lake or on the soccer field. My cousins would go the week before us, the week of my birthday. The next weeks in mid-July were among the best of my childhood.
There was another family who stayed in the cabin beside ours. The Billers. In their clan were two boys and two girls, the elder pair being a few years older than I was. The younger girl's birthday was days before mine, and the brother was two years behind us.
We quickly turned into friends between the bible studies and the soccer practices. Bryce, the brother, amazed me with how nimble he was; we used to compete in climbing the evergreens in front of our cabins, seeing who could get higher. I've always loved to compete (or rather, hated to lose), so I won most of those contests. The ones I didn't were ones where the sister, Elizabeth joined us.
Like I said before, she was my age. Blonde, like her brother and built as leanly as any of us were. Sad, green eyes. She excelled at climbing and swimming and soccer. She was just as competitive as I was, maybe even more. We pushed each other to our limits.
When I was 10, she became my first crush, and suddenly I lost my words whenever I came near her. For 50 weeks of the year we were strangers, and she was the only thing I could think about. When I saw her again, none of the phrases or the jokes I thought up to tell her came out the right way. I was awkward, lanky and 11 years old.
For the next two years the pattern repeated, and when I was 14 my parents ended my torture by putting to an end our annual trips. This was in 2008, and my dad was working in the automotive industry. We opted instead to do yearly roadtrips, during which we saw every State you can reach by car, and the same for every Canadian province.
The years that followed were the worst of my life.
The longing never ended. Things like that, bad memories and regrets, they don't go away. Nightly it seemed I would dream of us at the dock swimming in tandem for the distant shore, silently daring the other to see who would swim farther.
In the end it was me, and I drowned.
When I was 16 and depressed I found reddit, because that's what happens when someone who needs a place to voice his true self goes when he's too shy to express those feelings elsewhere. There's a reason I have almost 800,000 comment karma, and it's a sadder a reason than most people assume (though they usually assume something pretty sad).
Most of my time was spent on askreddit, replying to other people so that I could feel that people liked and respected what I had to say. Here I had the voice which went unheard by Elizabeth back at Fair Havens. Here people couldn't see or judge me and therefore I felt free to say whatever I wanted. Which is why when a thread came up in April of 2013 which said "When was the last time you cried," I ended up friends with a suicidal girl.
Her last reason for crying was because she had been about to do something really stupid. Mine was a lot less powerful a reason. I simply thought of a girl I used to know, and how nice it would be to have a friend again.
She said she would be my friend. My best friend. She lived just a ways across the border, but through skype that distance went away. We found out the first time we tried a video call that my audio didn't work, so we were never able to talk. The text chat was fine with us, though. We stayed up and talked for hours every night. Until 8 in the morning during the summer. We made plans for me to meet her when my family roadtripped to Chicago. She even helped me find Elizabeth after a half-decade of longing dreams.
Things with her never worked out. She didn't feel the same way I did. There was too much distance between us. Besides that, I couldn't even think of the right thing to say because I was so sure that she wanted the conversation to end.
Ellie and I were fine without her, though. We had a dedicated skypechat for people on reddit who we liked to talk to, and we all became friends there, though none of us were the same age or from nearly the same place. On the internet, distances don't matter. Until they start to grow.
I'm not sure when it first happened. I don't even think of it as a happening, maybe a slow progression to an inevitable fate. We started talking less as we each talked to the group more. Our friendship had started out monogamous, but soon there were others competing for our time and I probably didn't measure up to them as well. In my desperation, I'd try to rekindle something between us. I joked about something which I wasn't supposed to, and that was the end.
Our friendship was over.
This happened all over the course of about four months from April until the beginning of August. I spent 10 weeks as a child with Elizabeth, and with Ellie I had around 20. For a few weeks after I tried to talk to her, and fix what I'd broken, but as is typical for me, the arguments just made our divide larger.
For the last year and a half I've been trying my best to get past the second Elizabeth. I'm not sure how, though, since it took the second for me to get past the first.
Either way, this is my life story so far. The two girls who ruined me.