I went to college in Olympia Washington and lived on campus in an apartment-style dorm, so there was six people in our apartment. Lydia, this girl, she wasn't there the first quarter. She came in January when one of our other roommates had moved out, and we just kind of immediately clicked and became friends. She was from Seattle and was still in a relationship with a guy that she had been with for four years and during those first few months of her being in Olympia she was deciding that she was wanting to break up with him.



The school that we went to, and Olympia in general, had a lot of weirdos and queers and hippies and she was a cheerleader in high school and came from a very straight laced envrionment. She was going through this big personal transformation, breaking up with her boyfriend of four years and finding herself in a new environment. I was going through a less dramatic transformation, but a transformation nontheless--shaving my head, smoking too much weed and revolutionizing my thinking.



We had this friendship going and she was breaking up with her boyfriend, it just organically evolved into a romantic relationship. I don't really know, it felt magical and easy because it had happened so organically. It felt freeing because I had never felt as comfortable with myself as I did with her, I was learning how to be whatever I was and let our relationship be whatever it was. I think the fact that we had such a strong friendship and started out living in the same apartment made it so easy. We spent so much time together, just hanging out, cooking, baking, talking...



At the end of the school year, in June, we moved into separate places, still in Olympia, and our relationship became more difficult. We would argue more over little things. I missed the ease of our friends-turned-lovers relationship and began to wonder what had happened to the magic of it. She said she wanted to be in an open relationship. I tried to be cool with that, and thought I was. She started seeing someone else, a guy, pretty seriously, and it got too hard for me.



We tripped mushrooms one night and talked for a long time and came to the conclusion that we couldn't be romantic anymore but that we still wanted to be friends. We were both still in the midst of personal transformation, and we needed to change and grow in different ways. We did stay friends. We took our space and kept in touch and we still do a little bit (she has a baby now!)



I don't look at our relationship as a negative thing at all. I got a lot out of it and remember the lessons I learned. It was a very freeing relationship for me and I'm very thankful for that. I have no hard feelings. We were young, it was great, it was an important relationship in my life and then we moved on. I still think she's great and we don't talk a lot, but we still facebook every once in awhile.



We both grew up in suburbia with the image of who we were supposed to be and who we were supposed to be in relationships with and how we were supposed to look, and at that time we were both learning, and we learned together, that that was bullshit. I had always been very self-conscious and had body-image issues and we would have "naked cake time". We would just hang out and eat cake. Naked. And this was the first time where I was like "this is awesome! I can just be!" Both this relationship and she helped me become more comfortable with myself and my sexuality, begin to find the parts of myself buried underneath what I thought should be, and accepted that I didn't need to fit into society's image.



Kaite