Fast forward a year. Maybe a little less. Maybe a little more. Remember how I said Annie was allergic to everything–it wasn’t a joke. She moved out and into a house with some friends from Denver. It was an awesome house. Cold and poorly insulated and collegiate. They had I think 6 people living there I think. It only had three bedrooms. It also was a moldy house.
Annie became very sick and at first she couldn’t figure out why. She would be sick from time to time while living in the apartment with me, but it wasn’t so consistent or so bad as when she lived in this house. After trying everything she could think of she went to a doctor for a scratch test. They tested 50 different things, pollens, molds, things like that. She was allergic to every single one. She concluded that she couldn’t live in the Pacific Northwest. She had to move back to Denver. I remember her telling me and it was like a rock in my stomach but I didn’t let it show much. We were good enough friends–I knew we wouldn’t just lose touch.
At the same time Annie was leaving I had started dating a girl. Beautiful, out of my league looks wise. I have a theory about beautiful women that I might inform you of sometime later. It’s not flattering. Rachel and I would both graduate in June. Rachel was the girl I started dating. I was very upfront about what I wanted with her. I just wanted to have fun. If our relationship became work I wasn’t interested. She didn’t seem to have any kind of problem with that.
I started my own homebrew and would still go to the Eastside Tavern on Thursdays, but it wasn’t the same without Annie. I just didn’t have someone to talk and talk and talk to. Rachel was 20 and didn’t drink anyway. Not only did she not drink but she didn’t want to be around people who were drinking. She felt that alcohol was the opiate of the masses. I’ve always thought the opiate of the masses was T.V.
Fast forward again. Spring rolled around as did our graduation. As good a party as I’d ever been a part of.
Rachel and I had planned to go to South Korea together to teach English. She’d gotten into a very expensive ESL training course. Typically, I hadn’t. I just took a cheap online course, but we both got similar jobs, so I don’t think it was any worse in the end. I also think I was probably a better teacher than she ever was. She just wasn’t real. . . understanding.
I got a job before her and had to leave three months before she would be coming to join me. We’d settled on going to an island called Jeju Island. If you’ve never heard of it before–look it up, it’s amazing. Just google it. Right now. Really. . . Yeah, that’s where I lived.