The Anniversary Effect:

The Anniversary Effect.

Something triggered me towards the early end of class mere hours ago, which feel like minutes.

When Randy owned Happy Chang’s, he would go on and on in a manner that felt one-sided and that I have now concluded to have been manipulative. The ecstasy of dialogue with him was such that excitement would transform manically into anxiety over the course of the trek back, even before the last set of traffic lights that segregated that border of Palomar College from the rest of San Marcos, to the North. This was before the government came down, and not alone, on Randy for Health violations.

Today I felt similarly upon departure from my Game Design class. At once there was an ecstasy of passion, to act, to speak, to write. And yet the passion itself barred me from the possibility of doing so with my Human fellows.

At once, therefore, I felt an unprecedented relief from self-imposed social restriction, a return to days of innocence and freedom.

And yet at the same time the thought of talking to that girl seated upon the bench before the New Theatre was put forcibly from my mind by an all-

Consuming craving for solitude within which to address my Soul, God, and the Universe. Even as I changed course and made my way back to her bench time slipped away; no sooner it seems had I found the bench empty than my Father arrived, and I past what might have been her at my left hand side as he pulled up.

I know why I had not sat next to her in writing out my private opera; there yet lingered the fear that she was Nicole Fitz.

I even wonder now if maybe that alone: her semblance to Nicole, as well as the possibility that it was actually her – was my solitary motive for changing course. But the fear is no foolish or customary attempt at self-preservation; it was informed by Meaning. I KNEW, deep down, though not TOO far down, in this moment, that if I found the NEED to sit beside this young woman before she left that it would be out of a longing for her company, for her attention, undivided, and for Encounter. And this would be mutually exclusive with my private passions.

AT the very least, I can say that it would have been risky to try, at first.

I know what triggered me.

It was tonight, three years ago, that I first met Alanna McLeod.

This is why I regret not having spoken to that girl. It was like losing Alanna all over again. Fitz was bad enough. But it was not my fear of losing Fitz that lost me Fitz. Fitz was borne lost. And so was Alanna. We can live life forwards. But we understand it backwards.

Dm.A.A.