this time last year….

Last year, my three best friends and I rented an apartment in the Mainstrasse Village in Northern Kentucky. We called it “The Summer Haus.” We proceeded to have the best summer of our lives, going out, partying, meeting countless VERY interesting people, throwing caution to the wind and morals out the window. What better way to celebrate the memory of last summer than to reflect on it this summer?

So this time last year: Well, two nights ago, I was having a blast. I was out with the girls, drinking 151 and coke at Delta Haus, our favorite bar (which is now Up and Over…lame.) All of a sudden, Crystal pushed this girl towards me and told me that she was Bender’s sister. Joe, or Bender as we called him for most of the summer, was a bouncer at one of the bars. He pretty much identified himself as a Summer Haus hating asshole from the very beginning of the summer. But one night, he decided he wanted to be friends and started coming over and sometimes spending the night.

So here is his sister, asking if I was Pontius, the one who has been “talking” to her brother. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, or why he was telling his sister anything about me. So I just said that he had come over a few times, we had talked, and that was it. End of conversation.

The next night, after the bars had closed, Angela and I were going on one of our late night Mainstrasse walk-and-talks. Bender was clearing tables on the deck, so I stopped to say hi. I should have taken the advice of How I Met Your Mother: “After 2AM, nothing good happens.” Me saying hello turned into us screaming at each other. Apparently his sister…was actually his girlfriend (not his sister at all. He wasn’t dating his sister. Just to clear that up) and she had apparently come up to me to get information out of me.

Here’s the weird thing: I didn’t GIVE her any information. I talked to her for probably less than one minute. But he showed me text messages from her, and he said she knew everything that we had said and done. This creeps me out because to this day, I don’t know how she knows anything, save climbing up the fire escape and actually watching and listening.

Well, after a few minutes of yelling, he said he never wanted to see me again or something and I went home and it was over. He proceeded to tell all the bars that I was underage and pretty much became a blemish on the rest of my summer. Our only interactions involved us being rude to each other, yelling at each other, and occasionally me trying to drunkenly apologize for something I hadn’t done.

The afternoon after the initial fight, another bouncer from Bender’s bar, Jake, called me and asked me to come meet him at Delta. I went over there, we hung out for a bit and he ended up coming over after work almost every night for the rest of the summer (in a platonic way. Which needs to be clarified when it comes to the Summer Haus). We became great friends, and to this day I love him to death and consider him one of my best guy friends in the world.

Fast forward to a year later: Jake and I are still great friends and we get to hang out whenever I am in town. Joe (Bender) and I are back on good terms, thanks almost solely to Jake who helped me a lot to fix things. The fight with Bender remains to be one of the only fights I have had with a friend (except Tank, who ironically also used to be a bouncer at the same bar. Weird…). I miss both of those boys, but the most important part which was almost absent from this story: I miss the girls.

The girls accepted Bender and let him come over even when I was pretty much the only one who wanted him to come over. They stood by me for the rest of the summer after the fight, maintaining that he was an asshole but also bearing with me and the fact that I wanted to patch things up into a friendship with him. They have been 100% behind me in everything I do, even if they didn’t believe it was the best thing themselves, they supported me.

So what did I learn this time last summer? Jealous girlfriends are crazy, men are crazier, and I have the privilege of calling the three greatest girls on the planet my best friends and fellow Summer Haus Girls.