Dredging up the past

I dragged out my old SuperBeta Hi-Fi deck last night, figuring that the time was ripe to digitize all those old Beta tapes to DVD. Amongst the old tapes of St. Elsewhere, Star Trek: The Next Generation, porn, and Northern Exposure — (wouldn’t Northern Exposure make a good title for a porn movie? — I found a home video of a family vacation from 1992. It was the vacation that marked the beginning of the end for my one and only “long term” relationship to date.
He’s settled on blaming our breakup mostly on my mother, but I tend to spread the blame out a bit further. Part her fault, part his fault, but also very much part my fault.
I was struck when I watched this by a sense of proportion that only comes when you’re 14 years away from the event. I looked at him on the tape, realizing how incredibly handsome he was. Almost every appearance of me on the tape results in hiding from the camera. Jann is flirting with everyone he meets, I’m hiding.
And this is the point. I think at the time I was so obsessed with the fact that I had fallen in love with a gorgeous, smart guy that I completely ignored the fact that I was subtly sabotaging it so that I wouldn’t have to deal with him dumping me because I wasn’t good enough for him.
When I look back at this tape, I realize that I wasn’t ugly and I wasn’t a big blubbery tub of lard; but I guess it had been instilled in my brain for so long that it’s impossible to remove. Even today.
Jann continues to flirt with everyone he meets today, even me on occasions when he forgets that we are no longer supposed to be intimate in that way. And he has plenty of friends, has a good life, and a long-term boyfriend.
I might as well still be back in Ocracoke, hiding from the camera and resenting my boyfriend.

Watch the little snippet of video of my ex Jann and me in Ocracoke, 1992. We were cute. (Requires Quicktime)