Hey Jakey,

You and your daddy just left the house less than an hour ago to go to San Jose for the holiday weekend, and I won't see you again until Tuesday afternoon. I don't know if I can stand it. It was really hard to say bye-bye.

Found out this morning (right after you fell off the bed again, you little shit), that you and daddy will be seeing Marcia sometime on Monday. Daddy told me in a quasi-offhand manner, that kinda told me that he knew he was supposed to tell me about it, but he had been thinking about it and putting it off. That if he didn't let me know somehow that he would be seeing her, and I found out about it, he'd probably be sleeping on the couch for a few days.

Anyway, I told you a while ago that I would eventually tell you about Marcia, and I guess now is as good a time as any. It's too hot outside to do anything, and if I go into town, I'll just spend lots of money that I don't have. So here goes, long version:

Back during my junior year at San Jose State, my best friend there at the time was a guy named Ken. We were both photojournalism majors, and we wound up spending a lot of time together (I wonder how he's doing now... I've Yahoo'ed his name and see that he's working at Hollywood.com as a celebrity photographer. Ironic, since he always made fun of paparazzi back then...). He had a girlfriend that I hardly ever saw him with, but he loved her very much, apparently. It was Marcia. Ken eventually had to go to SoCal to do an internship, and he told me to keep Marcia company, since she didn't have many friends beside Ken. So he left, and the two of us, even though we barely knew each other, made plans to go to the zoo. I guess we got along amazingly well, I really don't remember, but I do know that we wound up spending most of that summer doing stuff together.

The chronology escapes me now, but at some point she broke up with Ken and he wound up moving down south for good. Marcia and I graduated from SJSU, and spent the summer after graduation doing the most amazing road trip around the Southwest desert. I wrote about that before. It was maybe the best summer of my life. It ended when the money ran out.

When we came back, we needed a place to stay. We found a really great little house up in the Santa Cruz mountains, sitting on 15 acres, but needed one more roommate to make it affordable. She worked with this guy at Photo Drive-Up named Rob, who was looking to move out of his mom's house (sigh... yes, I'm talking about your daddy, looking to move out of your grandma's house...). So the three of us got this house together, and we lived in it pretty happily together for about a month. Then things went south, and quickly.

Marcia was dating and totally obsessed with this guy named Noel, whom we had met when he lived in the apartment below me when I lived in downtown San Jose. At this same time, Rob and I had gotten drunk one night and had sex, and were marginally a couple, I guess. When Noel broke things off with Marcia, she went a little crazy. Like suicidally morose and depressed. Somewhere in all this, she decided that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with me. Draw your own conclusions. Was it because she was jealous that I was with Rob? They had been friends before Rob and I ever knew each other. Maybe Rob was her "dick in a jar" that she could no longer get to because of me. Who knows. But at some point, she couldn't even stand to be in a room with me, and I acted accordingly. Poor Rob, who sees himself as every plighted girl's savior, tried to comfort grief-stricken Marcia every way he could, while still trying to maintain some kind of relationship with me.

On my side: the house was making me the most physically ill I've ever been in my life. My allergies to that house and Marcia's fucking cats landed me in the emergency room or urgent care every other week. I was constantly on steroids that were making me paranoid and hard to be around. So Marcia and I hated each other, but Marcia and Rob were still best of friends. Can you see how miserable that would make me? I was in that horrible stage of just falling in love, where nothing else matters and you act stupid. And here was Rob, tending to Marcia like she just might kill herself if he wasn't there 24-7 to hold her hand and be a shoulder to cry on.

This went on for more months than I care to admit to, but I finally convinced Rob that if I didn't move out of that house, I was going to die. Which was true. So he and I moved into the apartment on Dent Avenue, and Marcia moved back in with her parents. They continued to see each other for a little while, but eventually lost touch, until just a few weeks ago. A long time ago, your daddy told me that Marcia had hit on him during one of their get-togethers, but he had turned her away.

Reading all this over, I never quite touch on me and Marcia's relationship. Within the space of a few weeks that summer when Ken left, we became more than best friends. We were like sisters. We were so alike it was wierd. We finished each other's sentences, and spoke in a weird code that other people couldn't understand. We were both obsessive, twisted souls that were lucky enough to have known each other for the incredibly short time that we did. When she turned on me, it was the most hurtful thing that had ever happened to me. I'll never have a friend like her again, and I probably don't want to be that close to anyone like that ever again. Rob is clueless to all of this. He just thinks that the whole thing is jealousy on my part, because he was friends with Marcia while also being my boyfriend. That will always be the bottom line to him: jealousy. No matter how many times over the years that I have tried to explain it to him.

So you can understand my trepidation when Rob says that he's going to meet up with her on Monday. I'm not jealous. But they will get together and re-hash their own versions of the truth, and I will always always be the loser. Marcia has been dead to me these many years (oh how dramatic that sounds...) and I don't want to re-kindle any kind of relationship with her. Rob says "forgive and forget", but I don't want to. I just want to keep pretending that she doesn't exist like I have for the past 12 years. Which is hard, when she and Rob are emailing back and forth every day.

You will meet her on Monday, and she'll be good and she'll be sweet to you, and you'll make friends with her two kids (she married and breeded with that pig that was Noel's best friend. Weird huh? I introduced her to her husband, and she introduced me to mine), and Daddy will want to tell me all about it. If he knows better, which I know he doesn't, he'll keep it to himself, which I've asked him to do. But he won't. I predict a fight between your Daddy and I when he gets back, because his truth is so far from my truth on this matter, and always will be.

So there's a little bit of the story of me, your daddy and this Marcia chick, Jake. Long-winded, and I know you don't care, but there ya have it, anyway!

Love you, and come home soon.