Unconditional

feeling love without expectation

The fall after I turned 21, I was kind of a mess.

I had recently moved back home after living for the past year in a rented house across the river with a bunch of roommates in college. I wasn’t able to go back to that school that year as a result of annoying and long-winded financial reasons, and I was pretty upset about it. To make matters worse, a week after I moved back home, my boyfriend of a couple years and I broke up and I wasn't handling it well at all. Meanwhile, my boss at the longest job I’d ever had at the photo lab decided to move me clear across town to a different store that I didn’t like with people I didn’t know in an area I hated driving to. Feeling somewhat very defeated after this series of unfortunate events, I was mostly marinating in my misery with cheap booze and expensive cigarettes I couldn’t afford, writing melodramatic poetry, and immersing myself in music. Music and taking pictures of people playing it made up the bulk of my social activities.

it was the time of depressed emo MySpace selfies with 3 megapixel digital cameras

On the weekdays after work, I was usually drunk on my favorite crude cocktail at the time of Southern Comfort and orange juice, chain-smoking my menthol American Spirits, listening to some emo band or Damien Rice or Jeff Buckley or some other sadgirl shit on repeat, writing in my LiveJournal and chatting with people on AOL Instant Messenger. One of my newer friends to chat with was Peter. He found me on LiveJournal and MySpace after we met at a show he was playing in.

Daniel, my recent ex, was a musician and had introduced me to the local music scene in the city. I quickly developed favorites and, with my newfound free time after our breakup, started seeing these bands live as often as I could, usually one or two shows a weekend. I was always broke, but I managed this anyway by getting access to most shows for free after I started taking photos for some of the bands.

Most convenient of all, I was the manager of a photo lab during the day; this was the 35mm era and shit could get expensive, especially when you were also digitizing them, but I made good use out of my massive employee discount.

Anyway, Peter was the drummer in one of the bands I saw often, and he and I became friends pretty quickly.

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Peter came over to my house one night and he brought a Radiohead album and a bottle of Riesling with him. We sat on my bedroom floor, leaning back against the bed, and we drank our wine and listened to the album from beginning to end, occasionally remarking on a part of a song but otherwise just kind of looking ahead, absorbing the music.

Sometimes I got up to smoke a cigarette by the open window next to the bed and he'd join me, sitting next to me while I smoked, occasionally taking a drag. He was affectionate, leaning against me or putting his arm around me. I welcomed it; innocent affection like that felt nice in my post-Daniel depressive state, and I liked Peter a lot. He was becoming a good friend. We talked about how no one made music a centerpiece anymore like we had just done, how it's become background noise instead of something to really appreciate and focus on.

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Having recently read many of those old LiveJournal entries from that time period and seeing how emotionally unhinged I was literally at all times back then, istg I have no idea how he liked me as much as he did. He was a few years older than me, smart, and he still read books, responsible for getting me to read both The Handmaid's Tale and Pillars of the Earth, the latter remaining my favorite book series to this day. He was responsible and mature, like an actual adult. He had a good job that he went to college to learn how to do, he kept his cell phone turned on by paying the bill on time, and he owned a townhouse.

With his girlfriend.