“Soul Ties”–College Memoirs: Life at Roanoke–October 1994, Part 2

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on March 20, 2014April 5, 2023

We’d always cheer if a glass got broken in Bossard: It was done during my freshman, sophomore, and junior years.

I didn’t usually cheer myself, just laughed at the cheering; maybe I clapped sometimes, I don’t remember. I think I broke one myself, once.

The sad thing was, senior year, almost nobody cheered the broken glasses! You’d hear the faintest “yay,” probably from a senior jock or somebody, but nothing from anyone else.

It seemed as if the freshmen didn’t know the traditions and didn’t care. It was sad and wrong!

(Of course, in 1998 I discovered a Roanoke jock on a S– BBS, and he told me that people did cheer the broken glasses again, and the tradition had continued. This was good to know.)

One day that semester, my friends and I went to Sonlight Books in S–, and we saw my old suitemate Tom there! He cried out when he saw me, grinned, and chatted with me for a few minutes.

He was with a woman, I didn’t know who–sister? girlfriend? wife? I kind of hoped she wasn’t his girlfriend (or wife), because here was a Christian guy who most likely wouldn’t treat me wrong.

After the way he’d changed, with the way he’d turned into this dynamic Christian, and the things he’d said and done before and after Peter broke up with me, I didn’t think he would treat me bad in any way.

But I didn’t know if I’d meet him again, or if I was really that interested. It was still too soon after the breakup.

By the way, I never did see him again. A websearch reveals that he got married, though it doesn’t say when.

After all this time, we finally got a peephole on our apartment door! Now we could know if the person knocking–no, banging–no, slamming his/her fist against the door and scaring us all to heck was a crazed Zeta, or just our friend Mike, or even Astrid–she was known to do that, too. (By the way, we found that amusing.)

Now that we had our PEEP-hole, after having ordered it so long ago (that was Roanoke maintenance for you), Tara liked to say, “We have our PEEP-hole!” And we now liked to say, “Let’s look out the PEEP-hole! and see who it is!” (We got this from here: )

A Sharon-ism, or something Sharon liked to say: “Schubert” instead of the sh– word. It was amusing and unique, and much more colorful and creative than a cuss word.

Once, Jennifer and Sharon played a game on Pearl’s computer. It had a kid who went through all the usual game levels and trials, and shot things, a game which seemed to be related to the game Phil had bought that summer with a kid who made a spaceship in his backyard and flew to Mars. Once you got to a certain level on Pearl’s game, a homicidal Energizer Bunny tried to kill you.

Pearl said Jennifer and Sharon used to play it together all the time junior year. Two people could play it at once, and they’d sing, “Kill the rabbit, kill the RABbit, kill the RABbit!”–yet another Bugs Bunny thing.

Once I made a remark about the electricity and water going off every year. Charles said, “Say what?” Actually, this turned out to be the only year besides maybe freshman year that the pump didn’t go out. Sure, make a liar out of me….

One night, Mike and maybe one or two others called up the Psychic Hotline for kicks. He hung up and told us they asked for his birthdate. “If they’re psychic, they shoulda known my birthday!” he cried.

****

Friends and family told me Phil was psychotic and not good for me.

I asked God to please restore my soul, make me whole again, to return the part of my soul that Phil had received through sex with me, and return to him the part of his soul that I had. I couldn’t deal with this connection, this joining, any more.

I wrote in a diary, “Part of my soul is gone, and I have part of my ex’s soul; without him around, I can’t reconnect with the part of my soul that’s gone. There’s just an emptiness there, a feeling of being torn.”

This is a teaching in some churches, called “soul ties,” that with each person you have sex with, you exchange parts of your soul.

(This is not a teaching of the church I grew up in; I learned about it through The 700 Club.)

So to feel whole again and no longer connected to people you slept with before legal marriage, you must pray for your soul to be restored:

Obviously the two didn’t get married, but something spiritual “happened” when they were joined physically in the act of sex. They were “joined”; their souls were “tied.” …
Dangers of unholy soul ties
Unholy soul ties can be ‘demonic bridges’ between one person to the next. For example, if you were to have extra-marital sex with somebody who was involved in the occult and had horrible fears of demons, and was afraid of her own shadow..
you could end up with the same kind of tormenting spirits as she has, and be just as fearful (although you could have been afraid of nothing before sleeping with her!). This is because you are not only opening yourself up to a curse for sexual sin, but also a soul tie with a person who is tormented by demons. —Sex Outside Marriage

Once again, I took down Phil’s pictures and mementos, and put stuffed rabbit Benny back in the closet. I hated putting him in there, since it wasn’t his fault and I’ve always tended to anthropomorphize stuffed animals. But I just couldn’t look at him without crying.

Sometimes I would have him on the bed and whisper to him to tell his daddy to come home, sometimes he would be a comfort to me, but usually I couldn’t bear to have him around.

Peter’s gifts to me no longer bring me grief, and I can have them around if I wish, even smile at them. But memories of Phil are so awful that I cannot stand to have Benny around.

In fact, when we moved in October of 1998, I found and threw out the rose stand of Phil’s first rose to me (Valentine’s Day 1994). Mom has Benny now, and my niece plays with him.

I discovered some loot from Phil: a yellow highlighter I found in my bag, and some erasers he’d given me because he kept losing or ruining mine.

I didn’t remember where the highlighter came from, if he gave it to me or what, but he apparently forgot all about it, and it wasn’t worth giving back (if you want another one you can just buy one), so I didn’t bother.

Normally I’d insist on giving things back, but if he didn’t care enough about the highlighter to ask for it back, I might as well keep it. So I gleefully did, feeling a sort of poetic justice about it.

****

One day my co-worker Megan and I chatted at the desk as we often did, and I said it was supposed to be a Christian college. She said, “Roanoke isn’t a Christian college. If it was, I wouldn’t have come here.”

Which supported the argument of my friends and I, that Roanoke wasn’t as Christian as it claimed.

This wasn’t just a conservative argument, by the way: Astrid and Mike agreed, and they were UCC.

Yet when I made the argument in a paper junior year, the teacher marked up my paper, saying I was wrong.

But it’s false advertising: If you’re looking for a Bible-type college, but get a secular one which calls itself “Christian,” now you’re stuck because you’ve enrolled, gotten financial aid, etc.

The “comfy chair” in the library was the one on the right behind the front desk. Junior year we had that chair, which was padded, and a stool-like metal chair with a tiny back that didn’t lift me up very high on the desk. It was hard to write while sitting on that chair without sitting on one leg, and I felt very short.

In the comfy chair, I still crossed my legs, sat on one leg, or double-crossed my legs–all very comfortable–but it was more for comfort than for height. Senior year, we may have gotten a new, comfier chair and moved the old comfy chair to the left side, which would have been a great improvement. I don’t remember now.

Megan said the person in the comfy chair had to answer the phone, so when I was there, I had to jump up and answer.

She was the rookie freshman and I’d been working there a year already, yet she kept telling me how to do my job. The rest of us had fun giving back the remarks she gave us. The library clerk was really good at that, so I wondered if he disliked her.

Megan said we were supposed to smile and say hi to everyone who came in. So she did, and got after me for not doing it. So I sometimes preferred working with Sharon or James, who I think worked with me that year. They didn’t always say hi, either.

Megan also said I didn’t answer the phone right. When it was on-campus I’d say “Library,” always wishing I could say, “libr’y!” like the British do. It would be much quicker and funnier. When it was off-campus I’d say, “Roanoke College Library.”

Megan said for on-campus I should say who was speaking, and for off-campus I should say that along with, “Hello.” I thought I answered the phone just fine.

****

I went to lunch one day and, while getting my food in the line, Mike’s mom said to me, “Somebody here wants to see you.”

Who could it be? At first I thought it was Phil, come to make up with me. It turned out to be a blonde with short hair, one of Peter’s exes, dressed in the white plastic Food Service apron.

I’d never met any of his other girlfriends before, and I didn’t know how she knew about me. Did Mike’s mom tell her, or did Peter? Hopefully it was Mike’s mom!

Last I knew Peter and I were on good terms, and he said he was wrong to treat me the way he did, but I probably still feared what he’d say to subsequent girlfriends about me, especially after the lies he told Phil and Phil’s mom.

After she explained who she was, she said with a smile, “We both have something against him [Peter]!”

I didn’t say much, being stunned at the situation and not knowing what to say, and wondering how much I really had against Peter anymore. It was…weird. I wondered if she intended to talk to me in the future. But if I ever saw her again, she said nothing.

Index
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year

Summer 1992: