A 32-Bit Cafe Event
By Ellie Patrick
Tell us about your journey this year. What were the highlights and memories you made along the way? What did you learn and experience? Were there any goals you set and achieved? What has it made you want to achieve for the new year?
2024 was an unprecedented rollercoaster. Everything changed so much and so many times, it's hard to even recall what things were like before it. Though in some ways it feels like I ended almost back where I started. This year I experienced some of the best moments in recent memory, but also some of the worst.
The year started out pretty well. Our winter break extended through the entirety of January, and I was living on campus for most of break. We were technically working, but we had a campus job so there wasn't much work to do during the break. We got to spend a lot of time with our then boyfriend, who was also living on campus. This was also when we first started exploring witchcraft. We had an altar set up in our dorm room, and had a little daily ritual we would do every morning.
February was also pretty good, I think. We're polyamorous, so at the time we had another partner as well. She had graduated the previous Spring, but we still saw her pretty regularly throughout most of Fall semester. However, in late Fall, she had started a new job, and she stopped being nearly as available. Despite this, we got to see her three times in February, once for Lunar New Year, once for Valentine's Day, and once at the end of the month when she went with us to get our ears pierced. We didn't know it then, but that would be the last time we would see her until the end of the semester.
Our depression started getting really bad in March, so that month is kind of a blur. The only thing that stood out was that was we found out that due to a weird rule at our school, we were in our last allowed semester, and that we needed to petition for an additional semester to finish (we had been planning on another two semesters to finish).
We ended up with very last minute plans to go with some friends to see the solar eclipse. Other than that, I don't remember much of that month either.
This is when things started getting eventful. At the beginning of the month, we unexpectedly started dating another person, and then a week later the semester ended and they moved back home several states away. We also moved into our first apartment with our boyfriend. At the end of the month we took a family vacation to Kentucky for a week.
A week or two after we got back from Kentucky, our new partner came up to visit us for a week and we went to Pride. About a week after they left, we went to a different Pride event with our other partner (the one we hadn't really seen since February).
This month was a bit all over the place. We broke up with the boyfriend that we live with; it was probably a long time coming. Then we went down to visit our new partner for a week.
Towards the beginning of August, our roommate was working at a summer camp, so we had the apartment to ourselves for most of two weeks. It was our first time really living alone like that for an extended period of time, and it gave us a sense of freedom we hadn't felt before. This is when we started this website, actually. At the end of the month, our new partner moved back to school, and we were basically inseperable.
September was really good, but it turned out to be the last good month of the year. The highlight was a weekend trip we took with our partner to an isolated cabin the weekend of our four month anniversary.
Everything went to Hell in October. Our partner had a relapse in their epilepsy for the first time in a decade, and in the span of two weeks, we went with them to the ER three times. Their mom was able to come up to help take care of them the first week, but after that, we ended up becoming basically their sole caregiver for a month. That level of stress nearly broke us and ended up being a death sentence for our relationship.
At the beginning of November, they asked for a break, and a week later broke up with us. That breakup ended up becoming an emotional rollercoaster that dragged throughout the rest of the month and into December.
In December, we finally tied up the last loose ends with that relationship, and spent the rest of the month trying to pick up the pieces of our life. Most of our friends at school were also their friends, so we were kind of cut off from a lot of them. We also kind of realized that we probably weren't dating our other partner anymore either, since neither of us had made much attempt to talk to each other in a while, and when we had reached out and said we were going through a tough time, she wasn't really available. We started trying to rebuild friendships from highschool, and started using an app to try to create new friendships. We did graduate in the end.
What's getting you through these cold, dark (or if you're in the Southern Hemisphere these hot, entirely too bright) months. What is the lighthouse guiding you to shore through the tumultuous waves of life?
Honestly at this point, there's not much of a light in the darkness for us. Nearly everything we built over the past few years feels like it's fallen apart. Before this last semester, we thought we knew pretty much what our life would look like after graduation. We had partners by our side, a job lined up, and a place to call our own. Now we've lost the partners, the job fell through, we still have the apartment, but no way to pay rent after we run out of savings in a couple months. We're stumbling, lost in the dark, but it's not as scary as I thought it would be. It's kind of a relief to leave things behind and start fresh.