It was February 11th. All day with her at work, the eye-gazing. She walks past me and brushes her wonderful ass against my dick. She keeps saying shit to me when only I can hear, such as, “I really want to kiss you right now,” or, “I have the sudden desire to be choked.”
While I’m mopping the stockroom, she comes back to gather sauces. I finally just up and ask her: “So are we going to hang out sometime soon?”
“Sure,” she said, but there was an odd energy change and she said it while intentionally diverting her eyes to the sauce packets. “When? I can’t today because… ”
And she let the words hang.
“Well, there’s clearly something you don’t want to tell me,” I said. “Come on. Out with it.”
“I’m hanging out with my boyfriend.”
“Goddamn it,” I said, perhaps a bit too dramatically.
“It’s okay,” she assured me. “We’re open.”
I asked her what she was doing this weekend, and I said to just let me know.
I forget what she said to me, but it was one dirty thing to many. I walked towards her down,the stick isle and she backed up, then put her hands on my chest.
“You have to be patient,” she said. “We need to keep building up this sexual tension, so when it finally happens…”
“Just don’t be teasing me.”
“You don’t like being teased?”
“No, I do,” I clarified, “so long as there’s… an end result.”
“There will be.”
“Promise?”
She held out her pinkie. I held out mine.
Some time later, I had just finished taking out the trash and was approaching the front doors, where she was smoking, waiting for her ride to pick her up. As I was passing by her, she said, “No hug?”
I told her, no, I’ll definitely give you a hug. After doing so, I apologized for earlier, and she said she liked it. That she liked aggression. That she also liked pain. And that she liked pleasuring people.
It was around then that her ride pulled up. I didn’t know whether it was her mother or someone else, but she shook my hand this time, which seemed odd.
It was an odd week in general. It was as if I were on an amazing trip all week, then that trip took a descent into hell at around 3 AM on Valentines Day and didn’t let up in the least until perhaps 8 PM on February 18th.
Thursday came, which was the last day of my work week, and she didn’t work that day. She still hadn’t gotten back to me about hanging out, but I wasn’t about to be pushy, particularly given her request for patience. I also hadn’t realized that Valentine’s Day was that weekend, so perhaps she was spending it with her boyfriend. It still would’ve been nice if she had said something in any case. As sad and pathetic as it may sound, I’d been fixated on this girl all week, unable to shake my mind loose of her.
I got home and elected not to drink, instead making it my intent to eat, get high, and watch Netflix before finally getting some sleep. Finally, I was distracted. The energy that had been packed tight inside me all week finally began to ease up a bit. As I was watching Netflix a few minutes before three in the morning — fucking Valentine’s Day — I heard the “ding” announcing I had gotten a Facebook message. It was from Kara. She had sent me a thumbs up. Confused, I went to respond, but it wouldn’t let me. And it felt as if the energy that had kept me charged up all week, that had kept me tense and on edge, suddenly withdrew from me and in its place was a cold, hard, impenetrable wall.
I checked my friend’s list on Facebook and she was just gone. I couldn’t find her on a mutual friends list, either. Did she delete her profile right after sending me a thumbs up? Did I do something wrong, something to hurt her? Fuck. Is she okay? I keep thinking maybe that something devastating happened to her. After a little research, though, it became fairly clear that she had blocked me. I had no way of knowing why, either, at least until Sunday, if indeed she worked that day, as I was, of course, blocked and didn’t have her phone number.
Since I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I decided I should just write down the list of possibilities in my head. Though I didn’t actually write the list until the following Tuesday, all the following scenarios were circling in my head from the initial evening. There were six probabilities, so far as I could discern:
– I actually did something bad I’m unaware of.
– Someone lied to her about me and she believed them.
– Her boyfriend didn’t like me or their relationship wasn’t as “open” as she claimed and when he did find out about me, he didn’t like it. It could have been him that picked her up that last day I saw her, when she gave me the hand shake, and that might have tipped him off.
These three possibilities made me wonder: am I somehow the bad guy in her book? Whether it’s something I said or did or something that someone else claimed that I said or did, am I just another villain in her story? That might explain the lack of explanation (though not the fact that there was a fucking thumbs up in its place), which seemed rather cruel to me. There were other possibilities, however:
– She accidentally did it while drunk or high and is afraid to talk to me because she thinks she pissed me off and is too anxious to talk to me about it.
– There is some epic miscommunication she overreacted to.
– She’s a psychopath aiming to fuck with my emotions and this was all some twisted game of hers from the get-go.
The following night, Moe came over. We had some beers and talked for the length of a work shift, as we typically do, and I told him all about it. He was, in fact, the first person I thought to tell about it, as I value his opinion — and, not to sound like a sexist asshole, but he’s also a man. Every time so far as I can remember that I’ve confided in a woman about another woman they are quickly relegated to being a slut, a whore, not worth my time, and I’m told that I deserve better. I feel they’re way too nice to me and far too mean to the female in question. It was always the same way every time (well, the two times) I got a girlfriend in high school: she was hated, as if on impulse. Despite the fact that the people involved typically like me, any vagina-bearing being I’m intimately associated with seems to get tainted by their association with me. I went to my brother-from-another-mother not only because he is a guy quite wise in the ways of relations with womankind, but because he’s a rather objective fellow. My intentions were to first speak to him, then mention it in a letter to my dear friend Terra, and then perhaps Rose. At any rate, after talking to him about it, I actually felt a lot better.
When I came in on Sunday, she wasn’t there. Checking the schedule like a goddamned creeper, I saw that I wouldn’t be working with her until Tuesday. I was at once frustrated by the wait and relieved by it. The rest of the day went rather smoothly. I didn’t dwell that much, at least in memory. After I got home, I considered calling off Tuesday to avoid the tension that I somehow felt certain would erupt, but decided that such an act would be childish and foolish. I had to bear the awkwardness. I had to manage it. To deal with this.
And I did, in my estimation, and for the most part admirably well — even though they called her into work on Monday, which meant I had to work with her a day earlier.
Imagine that someone pissed you off, or you think you pissed them off, but you have to be around them. It’s awkward, and you’re still angry, or you feel certain that they’re angry, and so the epic War of Silence begins. It’s that game of selective avoidance, of pretending a particular someone isn’t even there. You don’t talk to them or make eye contact. You don’t reference them in conversation, at least when they’re around. You both try to show the other that your cold shoulder is colder than their own and no one wants to be the one who breaks the silence, as it shows weakness. No one wants to be the one who caves.
I know this style of war all too well. My mother and I waged war like this constantly throughout my childhood.
This was what Kara and I seemed to be doing on Monday, and it inspired a shitstorm of chaos in my head, heart, and loins. I wasn’t prepared. She left without saying anything to me, without so much as looking my way, and I returned it all in kind.
Last week: sex vibes and teasing galore. This week: pretending I don’t exist. It still seemed like such a cruel, unjustified shift from blazing hot to absolute zero. And all without explanation.
I was more prepared the following day: Tuesday. I handled myself well yet again, though it stung more than ever. I tried to play it off as if I didn’t care, but the question as to what this was all about continued to plague me. I finally wrote down the list of possibilities as to what was going on, though I had nothing to go on with respect to what scenario was more likely. I was beginning to feel I’d never know the answers to any of these questions, and I kept telling myself to just accept that, to accept it all as it was and move on, but it continued to eat away at me.
Whatever the answer turned out to be with respect to what had become a plaguing, dick-twisting, mind-bending, heart-wrenching mystery, it had never been clearer to me that my emotions are as childish as they come. My inner child runs rampant in me. At least in some respect I had to own up to the fact that I had no one but myself to blame for this. I felt too connected to her too intensely far too fucking quickly — and that alone should have been a red flag. And there were other red flags. Red flags in abundance that I didn’t want to acknowledge because I still felt that I really liked the girl — which was stupid, as I didn’t really even know her, and what I seemed to be learning about her throgh experience wasn’t at all that promising. It was really hard not to look at all of this, even in light of the missing data, and not conclude that I was not just some hairbrained idiot caught up in a tsunami of sexually-charged emotions that effectively blinded me largely due to my self-imposed isolation and circumstantial abstinence.
After she clocked out on Tuesday, I was relieved, but about an hour later she came back in, rushing into the breakroom, where she was crying over something. This presented a problem, and I was immediately wrestling — emotionally, mentally, and even physically, as I kept approaching the break room only to come to my senses and step away. Anyone looking at the security cameras in the store like the corporate version of some techno-savvy voyeur must have been perplexed as absolute fuck watching my dumb ass pacing back and fourth over the course of ten to fifteen minutes.
The issue was this: no matter who it is, my instinct is to rush to them when they’re authentically feeling bad and try to help, but I didn’t want to make shit worse by trying to talk to her. She was clearly avoiding me for some reason, after all, even if that reason eluded me. So I asked Marjie to go check on her and make sure she was okay. She did as I pleaded, as I knew she would, and when she came back, she told me that Kara didn’t have a ride home. There was some issue with Kara’s girlfriend and boyfriend.
The agony of my empathy suddenly gave way to the euphoria of revelation. Yet again one of my central hypotheses met with confirmation: given the right context, everything makes sense.
As Marjie later told me, her boyfriend and girlfriend are very controlling of her, which, she explained to me, was why she refused to talk to Steve or Brodie for a long time — a circumstance I was surprisingly unaware of given how I’m typically the ear for all. As soon as she enlightened me to this, however, I remembered by conversation with Brodie one day, when he told me that Kara and he had gotten into a fight and made up. He seemed to want to give me the details but was wrestling between his urge to do that and his urge to keep a promise to not betray her trust again, which I honored. I told him I respected the privacy, the secrecy, and he shouldn’t feel pressured to tell me anything — and he didn’t.
Though Marjie didn’t mention it specifically, I realized that this newly-acquired information may also serve as a reason for why she accused that guy of rape. And if her boy and girl read my Facebook message, it may explain her blocking me — or them blocking me.
A part of me felt horrible for her and her current circumstance, whatever was going on between her and her boy/girl overlords, but I was otherwise elated. Solving a mystery may not be better than sex, but hot damn is it satisfying nonetheless.
I still wanted confirmation from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, so I decided to confront her on Wednesday. When I came in, she actually met my eyes, which as pathetic as it is I fucking missed, and really hated the fact that I missed. Later, when she was gathering sauce packets in the stock room and I was at the sink, I said, “So are you ever going to talk to me again?”
Her goddamned response: “What do you want to talk about?”
Are you fucking serious?
“I mean in general,” I said.
“Well, I won’t lie to you,” she said, and I held back my urge to interrupt her and declare what a goddamn delightful change that would be. She continued: “I’ve been talking with my boyfriend and girlfriend again.”
‘Talking.’ Very cute. Goddamn adorable. For reals.
“And they don’t like you,” she said as she took the sauce packets out of the stock room on her way to the front counter, and there was some humor involved with a vaguely snotty edge to her tone.
I kind of laughed. “They don’t even know me!”
So that was that. It’s been so long since I’ve actually felt moved by a new girl in my life, and of all the girls it could have been, it had to be someone like this: someone cold and without a sense of guilt, someone devoid of empathy and who clearly can’t think for herself. Very unattractive qualities despite her physical beauty and truly awesome energy.
I was naive to trust again, to have hope again, and to let my emotions and the deep yearnings of my dong cloud my perceptions and warp my judgment. Though only for a short time, I let her become the sun that obscured all other stars with her brilliant light pollution. I strayed from my commitment from the ground level and let her raise me up — just to drop me from on high, as has happened before.
I truly hope I learned my lesson. I hope I never let this happen again.
Chronicles of a Madman. 