There are a lot of things I regret pertaining to my time in the furry fandom. For a long time – several years now – I occasionally wonder what my biggest regret actually is. Lord knows I’ve screwed up monumentally on countless things but all the times I made an attempt to itemize them like some sick and twisted Top 10 video I always found myself gravitating toward a specific topic, a person. Her name is Katie and she was my first proper crush. We went to school together, all twelve years of it, and I never had the nerve to tell her my feelings.
I first met Katie at the tail end of 2000, just before the turn of the millennium. I was a shameless Pokemon nerd and she watched anime religiously. I watched a little bit of anime myself and she thought video games were cool, neither of us were huge fans of what the other was interested in but we had enough crossover that we got along fine. Katie was one of two best friends of a mutual friend of ours and one day we all just sort of decided to have lunch together in the cafeteria. I don’t quite remember the circumstances but Brianna, the aforementioned mutual friend, introduced us to each other. I was probably eating a Pizza Lunchable that day because at that point in time in my life I basically lived off of those things.
I don’t know if “love at first sight” is a thing that really exists but I certainly felt something approaching that when we met. At that age not a single one of us looked conventionally “normal”, I was average-looking and pasty with a disinterest in all things physical and Katie pretty much looked exactly like the type of person you’d see hanging around the then-burgeoning manga section at Barnes & Noble. She was my height, had shoulder length blonde hair, seemed to always wear checkered or plaid patterned button up blouses, and always had on a pair of glasses with really large mottled brown and amber frames. I remember her always being a little self-conscious about her teeth since they were not perfect and every time she’d laugh she’d always cover her mouth because of it, but I never really thought she looked bad. It was nothing a set of braces couldn’t fix after a few months of wearing them. (She eventually did wear braces for one year when we were in high school and it fixed everything.) I don’t think I had the words to describe it at that time in my life because prior to meeting Katie these kinds of feelings had never really registered to me, but I was in love with her.
The end of that year I asked out my crush… who was not Katie. It was Brianna, our mutual friend. That made Brianna my first “girlfriend” because we would go on dates together and I’d ask her to the school dance where she and I would do that awkward and slow side-to-side shuffling thing that every student did with their dates back then. I didn’t ask Katie to the movies because I just felt like she’d turn me down and hearing her say “no” would’ve crushed me. The first date Brianna and I went on was to see was Rugrats in Paris at the local cinema. For the life of me I cannot remember a single thing about that movie now that a quarter of a century has passed. I do, however, remember that the movie theater had one of those “play until you win” crane games filled with candy and I was absolutely terrible at them. Even with unlimited plays Brianna still insisted she take my spot to show me how it was done. She won something on the first try, a pack of what I assume were off-brand Sweet Tarts that I distinctly remember tasting exactly like the blue kind of Crest kids’ toothpaste. So, bad in other words.
Things between Brianna and I weren’t meant to last. She was a good many firsts for me, but getting things right on my first try with dating wasn’t on the scorecard. We split up before the summer of 2002 now that we were in high school. I was actually a year ahead of Katie so there was an entire year where I didn’t get to see her very often because I was at the high school while she was still finishing up 8th grade at the middle school. We had each other’s email addresses though and kept in touch through MSN Messenger but back then internet access was sporadic and expensive where I lived so nobody was ever really online much.
As I started my sophomore year of high school Katie was entering as a freshman. There were so many students that the administration split everyone into two lunch periods and they did this stupid thing were odd and even numbered years were grouped together so 9th and 11th graders shared one lunch period and 10th and 12th graders shared the other, in other words we didn’t get to have lunch together at any point during high school. To make matters worse pretty much every class you take in high school escalates across the four years like how English is just done as “I – IV” on your class schedules and mathematics and history were divided up in a similar fashion. We’d only ever meet during elective classes, which didn’t happen often.
When I was in 10th grade I took a dance class in lieu of the standard physical education class. I feel like most high school-aged boys would’ve probably shied away from that because that comes with the same stigma as being a male cheerleader – i.e. “this person is definitely gay” – but it didn’t really register to me much because, as an aside, I was able to skirt most of the harassment I should’ve gotten in school because years prior I beat up the first person who crossed me. I’m guessing everyone else who would’ve otherwise been a dick to me internalized that as an unintended message that Louis had zero qualms kicking your teeth in if you fucked with him. So nobody jeered at me and called me a faggot because I was a male student taking what was otherwise an overwhelmingly female-dominated class. There were two other guys in the class and I definitely got gay vibes from one of them and the other I could never get a good read on. Seemed the “gentle giant” type, because he was literally about half a foot taller than everyone else.
Katie had the same dance class however so we got to spend some time together. Though, I was still the odd one out because she mostly wanted to keep to her circle of friends who were all girls and me being there was kind of strange, but I definitely understood why. The class instructor was a cool teacher, I remember toward the end of the year after we’d all done the annual standardized tests and were just basically killing time until summer vacation she let one of the students bring in a PlayStation 2 with a couple of the Dance Dance Revolution games and two of the crinkly foam dance pads that went with it. Katie was not a big gamer but one of the few games she was really into was DDR. I was absolutely terrible at it but I remember spending a stupid amount of money at the nearest arcade on their DDR machine so I could get as good as I could at it as fast as possible in an effort to “impress” her before the end of the year. I don’t think I succeeded in that goal but she and I did get to play many rounds of the two player mode. She beat me every single time but I didn’t care, I just enjoyed being able to do something fun with her.
I was an art nerd all throughout high school. Katie was too. There were several art offerings at our school that started with a standard “Art” class that was numbered I – IV and in that class you got to do a little bit of everything. After that the path ahead split apart with options for classes like ceramic sculpture, drawing, and painting. All of them went up to a third year level but before you could sign up for any of them you had to at least take the first general Art class, presumably in your freshman year. Katie and I both did that, but we were a year apart so when she was taking her first year of Art I was mucking about making things out of clay in the sculpture class. I liked it, and I wanted to step up to Ceramics II the next year, but Katie said she was planning on continuing with the first year of the Drawing class after summer break. I changed my class registration so that I too would be in the Drawing I class, abandoning sculpture even though I really liked it.
My junior year of high school was noted with the release of the PSP handheld game system. I was old enough to work now and my first proper job was at the local GameStop that had just opened. I got a meager discount (10%) on most things from the store so when the PSP shipped I bought one before it even made it to the sales floor. With it I picked up a couple of games and one of those swanky MemoryPro Duo flash sticks that could hold a whopping 64 MB of stuff. 64 MB wasn’t a lot of space and factored out to about 18 or so songs (downloaded from KaZaA, of course). I loaded up a few of my favorites and would cycle them out every so often. I brought the PSP to school a few times and I remember the day after I got it I had it out in class and Katie, sitting across from me at the art desk, asked if she could see it because it was the cool new thing.
Of course I handed her the system. I didn’t buy it to impress her or anything but if she – someone who wasn’t super into video games – wanted to see the new VIDEO GAME thing that at least signaled to me that she had some kind of interest in something I liked. I didn’t have a game running on it so she thumbed through the contents of the music folder and noticed that I had “Policy of Truth” and “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode in there. Katie gasped and asked if I liked the band. I said I did and thought those songs were cool. She said she absolutely loved Depeche Mode and thought it was “really cool” that I liked them too and also picked two of their songs to put on the console because everyone else only had one song since there was so little space on the memory stick.
In that moment the validation from her felt amazing. I had no idea she liked Depeche Mode or anything, I just liked those two songs. I felt the closest to her that I ever had, like we had a real bonding moment over that shared appreciation of music. The drawing class was the first one of the day and I always looked forward to seeing Katie every morning. Being able to sit with her at the table and just talk about whatever was the highlight of my day, every day. Even with my buffoon of a best friend also sitting at the table with us never shutting up about Dragon Ball Z and Tekken every morning was special to me. After a couple of months Katie and I started trading doodles and sketches on each other’s notebooks if one of us got up to go somewhere and left our things at the desk as a silly surprise to find later in the day. Katie had a knack for drawing what she called “stick figure dragons” all over my stuff because she knew I was enamored with dragons. They were basically a little potato shape with some stubby arms and legs with a long neck and a few swooshes for wings.
I signed up for Drawing II at the end of the school year but as it turns out Katie opted not to take another year of it. I don’t remember the reasons, but I assume it was because there were also opportunities to do advanced studies either for early one-off college credits or low level basic certifications for certain trade skills. Katie wasn’t the welding or computer networking type so I think she actually used her elective hours to try and get a head start on her college English classes. We didn’t share a class together my senior year, and because we were a year apart we also never shared a lunch either. Access to the internet was significantly more affordable now, and had been for a while, so she and I kept in touch via Messenger a lot better than we did at the turn of the millennium. We didn’t get to interact a whole lot but I remember Katie and I had several deep conversations about some very heavy emotional things. As long as I’d known Katie her father was never in the picture, and she finally opened up to me about why that was. I’d never dared breach the subject because I figured something like that was just too personal, but the fact that she was willing to open up about it to me and show that vulnerability meant a lot in how trusted I felt with her. I talked to her about some troubling things I’d been through, such as the person I knew in the furry fandom who was one of my first online friends and later committed suicide (he’s mentioned in Konned: An Origin Story in slightly further detail). We had a connection going, a meaningful one at that.
I want to say “strangely enough” but in the internet age I suppose this isn’t really all that bizarre, but Katie and I never actually traded phone numbers at any point. We didn’t see the need to do so since we had each other’s MSN handles and, by extension, email addresses. I didn’t get Katie’s number until I graduated from high school and she still had one more year to go. We traded numbers and would text on occasion but I think the gesture was more of a formality than anything else; more often than not we still just kept in touch online.
Like all connections made in high school however, Katie and I grew apart as I entered college. She did not attend the same college as I did either, she moved further into the state to a large city to attend art school whereas I studied journalism and public relations but also had a minor in systems administration.
Life… just happened, for lack of a better way of explaining it. I kind of glazed over every dating relationship I had after Brianna, but I continued to date people even while I was in high school. For most of the time I was in high school I had one of those weird “on again, off again” non-committal relationships with one of my friends that I worked on creative endeavors with. For the record, these kinds of “mutually beneficial relationships” never work out, hence the on-and-off nature. We definitely felt some kind of attraction to each other, but I don’t know if it was “love”. Perhaps it was some kind of mutual respect in each other’s talents that we misconstrued as something more than it should’ve been. We went on dates, partook in “romantic things”, and she was my date to the senior prom, but none of it ever really felt like it meant anything. Not in hindsight for sure, but also not even at the time either.
That relationship ended as I segued into university life where I met a very shy and talented artist while working a summer gig as a delivery driver for an art museum. She did secretarial work – also as a summer job – and I found myself interested in her style of art mostly because she either drew wildlife or anthropomorphic characters and was extremely talented at both of them. I later found out she was also an equally talented seamstress and loved to work with her hands making all sorts of things. She barely ever said a word to me when we first met and mostly just acknowledged me as someone else who worked at the art gallery but I would see her multiple times a week every time I’d show up to load things onto the truck and when I’d return to clock out. I always said hello and sometimes I’d ask what she was working on. Eventually she started showing me her drawings and as she opened up to me I took a chance and asked her out.
Our relationship was fulfilling for what it was but it was also extremely complicated. By this point I was an established creator within the furry fandom, she actually loosely knew who I was online before she ever knew me offline. I helped her out with many of the costumes she created and in return for Christmas one year she made me a small plush doll of my dragon avatar. There was an instance where her birthday coincided with a convention that she was planning on attending as a vendor to sell art prints and take in-person commissions and to her I shrugged off the whole thing as a “good luck and have fun this weekend” sorta thing. She thought I didn’t remember her birthday, but I did. What she didn’t know was that I was planning on surprising her on her birthday by driving out of town to that very convention to give her the gifts I got. Turns out she was away from her table when I arrived so the person at the table next to her texted her something like “hey your boyfriend is here I think” and totally ruined the surprise, but the effort was there and it was appreciated.
I mentioned this relationship was “extremely complicated” however, and I don’t really think it would be right of me to divulge this woman’s personal issues to the world even if I haven’t told you her name. They were always an issue between us when it came to intimacy but sex was never really important to me so I was willing to be patient and try to help her work through matters. This never came to be. I’m not entirely sure what wound up being the thing that killed our relationship but I think me being a very prolific and notable pornographer had something to do with it. She was no stranger to creating adult-oriented content either but I was operating a level much different than she was, I was getting invited out to conventions and whatnot not as a vendor like her but as a guest. I wasn’t a creep or anything but I get the impression she sussed out that some of the people who orbited around me were and I can see that being something she would be much more sensitive to and aware of given what little I’ve mentioned about our interpersonal struggles.
Some time after that relationship I went to get lunch at the local Subway and behind the counter was a girl a couple years younger than me. Short, long red hair, kind of nerdy looking. She recognized me but didn’t draw any attention to it right away. She took my order and she was ringing me up at the register mentioned off hand that she was “sorry to hear about you and so-and-so”. There was nobody else in the restaurant at the time so I asked how she even knew about that because I didn’t know who this person was but she clearly knew me. She was in the same graduating high school class as my most recent ex and while they weren’t friends they did follow each other on Livejournal and after the breakup my ex had made a few depressive entries on her profile there which this person read and – now that I was standing right in front of her – decided to bring up.
The Subway clerk said that she knew me because a while back I’d been in the restaurant with some friends and was being an asshole and tried to mess with her by ordering the “veggie delight” sandwich with double meat. I laughed because that’s absolutely something I would do and I did remember doing exactly that but I had no memory of who I delivered that zinger to. Apparently, it was her. She thought it was funny and it stuck with her and now that I was single again she was interested in dating me. I was hesitant at first but before I said anything I noticed she was wearing an ornate dragon necklace and at the time so was I. Instead, I asked about the necklace and she brought up how much she loves dragons and she was very aware of my “history” with them too. I knew what that meant, I wasn’t stupid, so if I could bag a girlfriend who was also into X-rated dragon fantasy stuff then that sounded like a worthwhile endeavor to pursue. She pressed the paper feed button on the receipt printer to tear off a blank strip of it which she wrote her phone number on and handed to me with my change.
I’ll be straight with you, this girl was something else. I’m really not fond of hearing people “kiss and tell” and brag about their conquests or whatever but I’ll just say that yeah this woman definitely liked dragons, probably more than I do. I guess in a sense she was a “rebound girl” for me but what I did not know at the time was that I was actually a “rebound guy” for her; she’d just gone through a bad breakup of her own. This was never really made aware to me until it was too late, but things were rocky between us the entire time we were briefly together anyways. I had dinner with her family one night and got to meet her parents as well as her older brother who was my age. When that guy walked out of his bedroom to join everyone in the dining room I remember feeling a massive pit in my stomach. Not only was this guy “my age” but I’d already met him before; I went to high school with her brother and I said all kinds of snarky shit to him every chance I got because he signed all of his school assignments with the name of his make believe Yu-Gi-Oh character. I was dating his sister. That was the most awkward dinner of my entire life.
Her ex-boyfriend eventually came back into the picture and gave her the whole “I’m sorry babe I’ve changed now we should get back together” BS and she fell for it because I guess she still had feelings for him so I got kicked to the curb. Out of everyone I’d ever dated this relationship lasted the shortest but I guess it hurt more because she and I just “clicked” on a lot of “bedroom things” and it was the first time that was something I’d experienced. We’d traded several gifts in the months we dated among them being an entire set of the Eragon book series that she gave to me and a giant watercolor painting of our two dragons cuddling that I’d made for her. I don’t know what happened to that painting. All of I have of it are a couple of 15 year old photos I took with the digital camera I had back then. My gut tells me she trashed it or whatever, which is upsetting. For the record, I still have those Eragon books though.
2011 was rapidly approaching and if you read my journal entry about The Misunderstood Tale of Herpy then you’ll know this was the point in my life where everything derailed and went to hell. I don’t think I’m ready to fully talk about this period of my life in detail just yet. It’s difficult. I made an attempt to get my life in order in 2012 and just sorta floated through life looking for a reason to keep going. I met a guy and clicked with him and we decided to start dating. We met online through a dating app and he visited a couple of times and ultimately decided to move down to the area. I wasn’t really in a position to bring someone into my apartment as another tenant since I was splitting rent with roommates so the plan was that he’d stay in a one bedroom apartment here in town and when the lease at my current place expired we’d work something out. Also, yes I started dating men after the dragon-obsessed woman dumped me. Not as an act of defiance or anything, I just never really had a gender preference with my dating partners and up to this point they’d all been women. Maybe there were two faggots in that high school dance class after all.
“Things were complicated between us” seems to be a recurring thing in this journal and curiously enough the running gag started as I entered university and took up a more prominent role within the furry fandom. It’s almost like dating people from this community is a bad idea. I have no ill feelings toward the guy I dated, it just didn’t work out. Simple as that. We didn’t even get as far as sharing an apartment between just he and I, it ended before that could ever happen. This particular relationship was dipping into the middle of the 2010’s, the guy in question was a physical (IRL) relationship but in the years leading up to it I’d struck out numerous times getting to know potential partners online because I kept making the mistake of falling in love with people who were similarly as well known as I was and trying to be the one guy who has a meaningful relationship with someone when that person is also getting hounded by a dozen or more other guys is just a recipe for disaster.
In 2016, for some genuinely stupid reason, I made an attempt to get back together with the girl from the art gallery I’d dated at the turn of the decade. The one that ended badly. I guess enough time had passed for the two of us to forget the exact reasons why we hated each other but it didn’t take long for us to remember. We split up again before the end of the year.
That was the last proper “relationship” I’ve been in. I entered my 30’s and it just stopped being important to me. I assumed that things would just never pan out. In the back of my head though, I still think about Katie. I wonder, constantly, how things would’ve been if I’d asked her to see that stupid Rugrats movie instead of Brianna. Not because I didn’t like Brianna or anything, but because I asked her out since I didn’t have the balls to ask Katie. Maybe she would’ve said yes. Maybe she would’ve become my “high school sweetheart”. One of my best friends from my childhood married his high school girlfriend as soon as they graduated. They’ve been married for 20 years now. They have kids. Normal lives. Perhaps that could’ve been me, but I took up writing pornographic stories about dinosaurs and tried dating exclusively from a poisoned pool. I’m almost 40 and I have absolutely nothing to show for my efforts. I really did fuck everything up. It’s sort of all finally sinking in that there aren’t any second chances. No do-overs. It’s no one’s fault but my own, and I accept that.
I’ve gotten multiple new phones over the past two decades and with the first few transitions my contact list didn’t carry over. Katie’s number is not in the phone I have today but I know if I dug through my garage to find my old garbage Samsung Stride flip-phone I could get the number of hers I had from back then assuming the thing still turns on. I have the same phone number I did back then, she probably does too. Most people do. I thought about it, but that seems like a very weird and desperate thing to do. We haven’t talked much since high school, that’s just how it is.
Katie and I are friends on our social media pages but neither of us really use them anymore. A couple of years ago I noticed that she followed me on my new Twitter account after I deleted my old @Dracokon one… which she also had previously followed despite all the TMI shit I posted there prior to deleting it. Since we followed each other I was able to send her a private message and after a couple of days she replied. It was cordial, nothing really personal, but it was something. We talked back and forth, one of us messaging the other every so often. Usually I initiated the conversation though. Once Elon Musk bought the platform and started stripping things out of it and actively making it worse to use Katie abandoned her account and stopped responding to me. Like I said earlier in this journal she’s an art major and Twitter was a big thing for artists, with that in shambles she really had no reason to kick around. Her account on what is now known as “X” is still there but she hasn’t posted in a long time. I sent her a message on Facebook a few months ago but that profile is even more dead than her Twitter/X. She literally only seems to check that account on her birthday to thank everyone for sending her “happy birthday” messages. Maybe when she logs in this year she’ll see what I sent her and we can reconnect again. Part of me still wants to try.
Until next time.