👩🏼‍🎤 Of Punks and Preps 👱🏻‍♂️

💔 Robby, Part Two

The second half of the first chapter of The Crush Chronicles (a book in progress).

This is memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated. Image generated by Wix

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If you have not read the first part of this story, you may read it here:

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Would you rather listen to the narration?

You can do so here:

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Most kids in my senior class were planning on attending college in Texas. Still an Air Force Brat with no desire to move away from my parents, I followed my mom and dad to South Dakota when my dad received his orders. I had researched other schools in areas that we had previously lived and deemed desirable, including schools in Utah and Hawaii, but not Texas. Ultimately, the need to stay close to home with my parents and two cats won out.

I had a gap semester, but not on purpose. My uncle was struggling with stage four malignant melanoma, and my mom and I were planning on visiting him and his family in Honolulu that fall, so I postponed school. For reasons I cannot recall, the trip was cancelled. I was left with a semester knowing that all of my fellow alumni had started their college adventures, yet I was left behind, isolated in this new state, having to start over socially once again, except this time it was made more difficult because I didn’t have school to thrust me amongst my peers.

I filled the time instead by getting my first job as a cashier at Kmart, trying to put any jealousy I felt aside as I imagined what new lives all the college freshman were creating for themselves in the cozy autumn of their campuses. Maybe my fellow staffers were joining the college newspaper. Perhaps my old theatre buds were auditioning for plays and studying Shakespeare. Robby was probably already slaying his double major.

By spring semester, though, I was officially a college student myself, taking remote classes at the Air Force base where my father was stationed.

Eventually yearning for a “traditional” college experience, I stopped enrolling in remote classes and began attending school at the state university, enduring a 45-minute daily drive to and from campus because I did not want to live in the dorms, and probably couldn’t afford to even if I did. I didn’t mind the commute, as long as I had a mixed CD to keep me company.

With the distance and the normal coping methods needed when plucked away from everything you’ve grown to know and love, Robby became the mist of a memory, preserved only in the pages of my diary and that 287-page book that was worked so tirelessly on by myself and the staff.

Turning the pages of that volume and rereading the thoughtful notes that classmates addressed to me, I stumble across Robby’s message. I run my fingers over his signature, and I can feel where his pen pressed into the page, forever leaving his mark. The passage tickles my lips into a grin as space and time spin me backwards to the last days in May of 2003.

Many signers referenced my then upcoming move to South Dakota, but he didn’t. He may not have even known. His messy yet legible scrawl reads:

Listen to the corresponding podcast episode:

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