After a while, my friend Steve said Kathy was talking about me one night when I wasn’t at Anime Club. She was talking about my eyes and stuff like that. I wasn’t thinking about her a whole lot like that, but when he said that, it made me start feeling a certain way towards her. It hit me rather suddenly.

A week or so later she wanted to hang out again. We were driving around in my car, and it was raining lightly outside. I decided to tell her how I felt about her.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to hear this…” she said.

Wow! OK. Telling one of my best friends how attractive she thought I was, and then doing an immediate U-turn. It was time for me to do a U-turn too, and head right back to her apartment to drop her off for playing with me. She must’ve known that Steve was going to say something to me about it.

“I’m going to talk to Steve!” she said in despair as she was getting out of the car.

I didn’t see what talking to Steve was going to solve. She’s the one who pulled an up and down violation on me.

Back at Anime Club, we continued to watch more anime series. There was one we watched called “Ping-Pong Club.” It had kind of a raunchy form of humor attached to it. I thought it was hilarious. There would be plenty of cringes and displays of disgust by other members of the club while we were watching. This wasn’t nearly as bad as it got, though. There was a sub-genre of anime called hentai. I had never seen it before, but I was told it involved some tentacles and…well, that’s probably enough about that subject.

Kathy eventually told me that when she was talking about me, she was subconsciously talking about my friend Steve. So she liked him instead of me. Who knows what kind of game she was playing? Maybe she was trying to use me to get closer to him. It was a classic story about wanting someone you can’t have. Steve didn’t see her that way at all, and he just met a girl from Illinois who started coming to Anime Club named Allie. The only problem for me was, once I started to have feelings for someone, I didn’t know how to shut them off.

Kathy and I started to hang out again after I was able to forgive her for faking out on me, but it was never the same. I started to feel strange after every time I was with her. I felt drained, and like my mood had worsened. With some friends you feel revitalized and rejuvenated because you had such a good time. Not with her. Strangely, I also started to have deja vu every time we met. It wasn’t just once in a while. It happened very consistently, when normally, I would only have deja vu around a few times a year.

Kathy eventually told me that she was diagnosed with depression, and she took medication for it, which also messed with her memory. It made sense now why I always felt strange after she left. I was taking on her emotional burden, in addition to my own. I wasn’t in the best position either. My life was hazy with no clear direction. I had no mission other than to survive. I was doing well enough at surviving, but I wasn’t in a position to lift anyone else out of a hole, since I was trying to keep myself from falling into one. Our interactions gave me a sense of heaviness, emotional cloudiness, and I was pretty sure I had met my first emotional vampire.

In late spring of 2000, there was an anime convention in Arlington Heights, Illinois that the Anime Club planned on attending. It wasn’t really my type of event, but I figured I’d come along and participate just for the experience. Our dress theme was from the video game “Final Fantasy 7.” Steve was going as the main character, Squall Leonhart, who was an introverted, emotionally inexpressive individual with a large weapon called a gunblade and had a scar on his forehead due to a sparring session with a rival who also received an identical wound from the clash.

I was going as a villain named Raijin, because I resembled him more than anyone else. He was basically a goofy guy with too much power, and his name in Japanese means “Thunder God.” Kathy went as Quistis Trepe, who was a teacher at a training facility known as Garden that teaches youths like Squall to become elite military. Kathy looked a lot like her character, and her character actually did have some feelings for Squall, just as she had feelings for Steve, but in the game, it transformed into more of a protective, sisterly kind of thing. Lei was the biggest out of all of us at the Anime Club, so he fit perfectly as the character Ward Zabac, who was a protagonist with a blue do rag and used an anchor as a weapon. Megan went as Ultimecia, the main antagonist, and her costume was surprisingly revealing, though not since the character herself wore the same thing. There was something slightly dark about Megan, so the character matched her in a way. The others in the Anime Club found characters they matched with. It seemed like all of us resembled one of the characters, somehow.

At the Anime Convention, there were many little presentations and workshops, and then there was the main event, the cosplay. There were dozens of other groups wearing anime-themed costumes besides our own. We waited patiently for our turn to go on stage, and then we were bombarded by photos. I didn’t do crowds so well, and I felt drained by being seen by so many people at once. Even family gatherings left me feeling drained after a couple of hours. That is the life of an introvert.

We had a couple of hotel rooms we used as a base during the convention. We would be there when we weren’t attending events. Kathy and my friendship transformed into a very toxic situation. It started feeling like I was permanently linked to her, and she was siphoning off my energy. I tried to keep myself as busy as possible so I wouldn’t have to think about her. Steve told me a couple times she came back to the hotel room and asked if I was there. When he told her no, she went away. What was that about? She didn’t even ever ask to hang out at the convention, so what was she doing?

Eventually, it all came to me. I thought it would be cool to meet someone like the anime character Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion. A few months later, I met someone who identified heavily with that character (Kathy). In essence, I got what I wished for, but I didn’t know exactly what I wished for. In that show, Asuka antagonized the main character named Shinji. She bullied him, teased him, and put him down. That’s kind of what Kathy was doing in an emotional way. I realized that I’ll have to be more careful of what I wish for in the future.

In the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, there is a song where the lyrics say, “What is the dream? We have the dream now. What is the dream? We make the dream come true.”

No, thanks. I see what kind of dreams you make come true. I’ll create my own, but that wasn’t going to be easy either. Times were getting darker, and the Grim Reaper and the Warden were on the hunt.