Jyvur Entropy's Blog, page 21

Ernie: Part 3

Towards the end of my first date with Ernie, I started trying to get him to kiss me. Only, like I said, I was actually shy with a guy for the first time in my life. He brought me to the Boston Commons and we sat on a bench across from a pond. I shimmied in close to him and he put his arm around me. It gave me a lot of butterflies. I waited for him to kiss me, but he didn’t.

My friends kept texting me while we were in the Commons, asking if I wanted to meet up with the group for dinner before we started the drive back. They wanted me to bring my new guy. I didn’t respond right away and Ethel ended up calling me, worried maybe something had happened. I walked away and took the call.

“I need some more time with this guy,” I told her. “I’ll meet up with you guys after you all eat.”

Ernie and I hung out for a few more hours. Then we met up with my friends. Ernie came with us to the train station where we needed to catch a train to bring us back to the parking garage where Chris had parked. Dave and his two friends I didn’t know had already left to go back to their car. It was Chris, Erica, Ethel, Ernie, and I in this train station.

“Okay,” I told my friends. “I’m gonna say goodbye to Ernie now.”

I stared at them pointedly.

Chris understood what I meant right away.

He walked a few paces away and tactfully pretended to be very interested in something on his phone. Erica and Ethel now.

I stared at them.

“Go ahead,” Erica said. “Say goodbye to him. We have a long drive back.”

I narrowed my eyes at them both, cleared my throat, and stepped in really close to Ernie.

Erica gave me a weird look, but Ethel went “Ohh, right! Sorry. We’ll be over here.”

Ethel took Erica’s arm and pulled her away.

Then I took Ernie’s hands and stepped in even closer to him. My eyes were exactly level with his. I decided I really liked that we were the exact same height. I’d never kissed somebody that wasn’t either shorter or taller. I’d never kissed somebody that was exactly the same height as me.

I blinked at him. I wiggled my eyebrows.

And then he kissed me. He had very soft lips and he was a VERY good kisser. Out of all the men I ever kissed, Ernie kissed me better than any of them. He moved his lips in exactly the right way. He put his hand behind my neck, pulling me in closer to him. It was the sort of kiss where your knees turn to mush and you have to hold onto the guy so you don’t get dizzy and fall.

Here is a bit that Ernie wanted to add to the post:

“I remember after I was walking back home, I felt very light, like I was walking on clouds. Then I called my friends and told them I met this lady and she was great. I figured people usually kiss at the end of the date and I should kiss you so it was a real date. You seemed like you wanted to be kissed. And then I went to do it and you leaned in. I was trying to do it in the park, but you weren’t looking at me.”

On the drive back, I told my friends, “I really haven’t been doing too much talking to other guys since I started talking to Ernie. But I’ve been doing a little. Not anymore though. I’m not logging back into Sweet on Geeks. This is the guy I want.”

And Ernie and I started our weird semi-long distance relationship of me going to Boston sometimes and him taking the bus to the next largest city to me and I’d go pick him up. My grandparents had never let a guy spend the night before, but they did with him, since he lived so far away. And my grandmother really liked him. She’d never liked a guy I dated before.

Ernie told me he was autistic the same day that I told him I’m crazy,

After a few weeks, I couldn’t keep it to myself anymore. I told him about my history of mental health problems. I told him about the psychotic break with Donnie Darko. I told him about my years spent on a revolving door in and out of mental hospitals.

When I was done telling him all of that, he said, “That’s okay. Everybody has problems.”

I said, “Problems like that? Those are red flags, guy. You should run.”

He shrugged and said, “You have mental health problems. I’m autistic. We both have problems.”

“Autistic? I have cousins who are autistic. They can’t talk or take care of themselves.”

He just looked at me and said, “I mean, I’m not that autistic.”

So he had Aspergers. He nodded a lot when he was nervous and he hated when plans changed. He had a very calm and steady energy. And he knew exactly how to manage me.

I’ve told him it’s pretty sad that he has to manage his wife like I’m a fucking toddler or something. And he always just says the same thing that he said all those years ago when we were dating. “Everybody has their problems.”

Ernie told me about how when he was a kid, teachers at his school would try to get him to play with the other kids. He told me that he was confused why he should want to play with other kids. He thought playing by himself was more fun.

He told me about how he had to learn how to have conversations.

“I used to tell people if I thought they were talking about something boring. I’d say ‘I don’t care about that.’ But then I figured out, sometimes you listen to people talk about stuff they like, not because you care about it too, but because you like them. You listen to people talk if you like them, because listening makes people happy. That’s stuff everybody else knows on their own; I had to learn it. Once I realized I was hurting people’s feelings, I got better at listening.”

Ernie knew a lot about politics. I didn’t know much, but I didn’t think I was as liberal as him. Ernie was very left-leaning. He identified as a socialist. I was skeptical of his views at first, but after being with him for a few months, I was a socialist too.

If you know me at all now, you might be wondering how I went from that to a Ben Shapiro stan. Well, I just got a little better at forming my own views and not soaking up the views of whatever the people I admire believe.

Also, my slow turn into conservativism began with the writing community. I struggled for a long time, looking at so much of the woke shit and feeling icky about it, feeling like supposed anti-racism was in far too much of an over-lapping Venn Diagram with actual white supremacy for me to believe it actually WAS the good and decent portion of the ideological spectrum. I mean, THAT much of a focus on race can’t be good. I felt that way for years and kept trying to talk myself out of my misgivings.

People tell me I’m brainwashed by Fox News and conservative media outlets.

I didn’t start watching those until after years of being very left-leaning and listening to increasing amounts of bullshit. What turned me against the left was the left.

But all of that hadn’t yet occurred in my character arc.

Back then, I posted on facebook about how evil and racist Republicans were. I posted that conservatives just weren’t good people and they were selfish, not interested in doing the right thing.

Ernie taught me a lot about politics, and he was so smart and knowledgable that I always thought whatever he believed must be right.

But our relationship took a bad turn about a year into us dating. It isn’t Ernie’s fault. It’s my fault.

In the next part of the story, I’m the antagonist again.

I don’t deserve and never have deserved Ernie.

My new goal in life is to become the sort of woman who deserves him. He’s never going to hold me accountable. He’s just too sweet and (for whatever reason) too smitten by me. So, I need to hold myself accountable.

That man really deserves some peace and quiet, and a way better partner than the one he currently has.

Ernie: Part Two

When I told my friends I was going to Boston to meet a guy, they all decided to come with. Not on the date, they’d all go off and do their own thing, make a trip of it, but also then I wouldn’t be alone in a city I didn’t know with some random guy I met on the internet.

Ethel came over my house night before. We became cleavage scientists.

“I need a little cleavage, but not too much.”

“Just wear something modest.”

I sighed. Ethel was the poster child for sheltered-Christian-virgin.

“Can you pretend to be a regular human female for a second? The goal is enough cleavage to make him think about fucking me, but not enough so that it’s obvious I wanted him to see cleavage. Understand?”

“Sort of,” she said slowly. “But if I can tell you what the Bible says about modesty-“

“Please fuckin’ don’t.”

She winced. She always winced when I swore.

“Okay,” she said, looking over my the contents of my closet. “You’re gonna do this anyway. Try a few shirts on.”

Eventually we figured it out. Low cut tank with lots of cleavage BUT with a caveat.

“Put this sweatshirt over it. It’s cute on you. It makes your eyes very green. And with this, you can adjust the zipper throughout the day. Make him think the times cleavage was out was an accident.”

I laughed. “Ethel, for a Christian chick, you’re freaking devious.”

She blushed and shrugged.

“I guess so. But if I were you, I really would just wear one of your t-shirts with flowers on it.”

“Crying out loud.”

“I mean, you actually get the chance to have guys talk to you without them staring at your chest. You could keep yours completely covered if you want. No matter what I do these…” She gestured helplessly down at her massive double-d boobs. “Things are in my way and guys stare at them all the time.”

“Guys stare at my ass all the time.”

She raised her eyebrows. “They can’t do that while they’re talking to you,” she pointed out.

“True. Hey, speaking of ass, you gonna help me with my jeans. I need tight enough to show him I got a great ass, but not so tight I look slutty.”

“Why did I agree to this?”

The next morning, Chris showed up at my house with Ethel and Erica already in the car. I know what this sounds like. But no, Chris wasn’t driving this chick he was pining for over three hours to go on a date with another guy. I wasn’t the object of his affections anymore. I mean, he looked back over at me eventually. But at this point in time, he was onto Ethel. And they really would have been so cute, if she’d liked him back. They both had red hair and freckles. She was taller than him by like 5 inches. That would have been cute as hell. I love couples where the woman is taller. She was actually quieter than him and when the two of them hung out together, she let him take the lead and decide what they’d do. They were both laid-back and calm. But Ethel didn’t feel that way about him. None of us knew that yet though. So I knew Chris was going to be using his day in the city with Ethel to shoot his shot. Dave and two of his friends were coming along too, taking a different car. Chris was going to try his damndest to pawn Erica off on that group and convince Ethel to go off with him to do their own thing.

Why Ethel and not Erica? They were identical twins after all. Erica was….exhuberant. Let’s say that. She was very loud, very tom-boyish. Like to the point that her fundamentalist Christian parents were always trying to reign her in, pointing out passages in the Bible to get her to be more feminine.

The weirdest thing that Erica ever said to me was one night was I hanging out with her down in her basement. It was getting very late. Erica and I were both night owls. Everyone else in her house, including Ethel, was asleep. We got into this pretty serious conversation about Christianity and we were talking about our differences: she was Christian her whole life and I was coming into it later. I confessed the hardest part of Christianity seemed to be the no sex before marriage thing.

I said, “I’d like to be as nice and innocent as you guys are, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to do no sex before marriage AND no masturbating. Like how does everybody deal with being so horny all the time?”

And Erica sat there, looking like she was trying to figure something out, and then she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been horny.”

“Um, what?“

This woman was 21 years old. There was no way…

“Erica, do you know what the word ‘horny’ means?”

I had to double-check. This was a girl who had needed the word “slut” explained to her. Deadass needed someone to tell her what a slut was at 20 years old. When I say sheltered, I mean sheltered. Rural New Hampshire fundamentalist Christians does sheltered at a whole other level.

“It means you feel like having sex.”

“Wow, you do know what it means.”

“Right.”

“Maybe you don’t get it though. Horny doesn’t just mean have sex, it also means you want to masturbate. You never got a feeling between your legs like you had to start pressing or rubbing? Like a tickling kind of itch almost? Like a weird pressure?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Tell the truth, you’ve never played around down there?”

“No.”

“Like even as a kid. Never humped a couch cushion to a Disney movie?”

She burst out laughing. “Is that a thing people do?”

“It’s a thing I did.”

“Not me. I’ve never been horny. Maybe I’ll feel that way one day when I get married.”

That conversation fucked me up so much. Who doesn’t feel horny? I’m told even asexual people feel horny. What sort of human just doesn’t know what horny feels like? That conversation happened 10 years ago and I’m still fucked up about it. Wherever Erica is I hope she became a scientist like she wanted. She’s sure to get a fuckload done if she never ever feels horny.

Did her twin sister ever feel horny? I have no idea. Because Ethel was incredibly demure and ladylike. Erica was as close to being crass as a sheltered Christian girl could be. Ethel would never have been caught dead talking about something as intimate as that. They were super different women.

Well, the four of us drove to Boston. We got Dunkin Donuts on the way. We played music. We laughed and talked. It was one of many road trips I took when I was part of that clique. We drove to a Christian music festival called ‘SoulFest.’ We drove hours up north to visit lakes and camp sites. We drove all the way to keene and danced to live music in ‘The Starving Artist.’

I miss having friends. Irl friends. I miss having adventures like that.

But then when people try to make friends with me, I panic and push them away. I have a cousin who lives barely 20 minutes away. Here I am, now living in an entirely different state than the one I grew up in, and one of my paternal cousins ended up moving to the same exact city. Everyone else on the paternal side of my family still lives n New Jersey. But not her. She sends me a Christmas card every year. She texts me sometimes. She asks me to hang out, meet up for dinner, come over to see her pet rabbits.

I make excuses. Or I ignore her completely.

Why do I keep doing that?

I am so fucking lonely and sad so much of the time.

And then people want to get close to me and I feel incredibly uncomfortable and I won’t let it happen.

I hang out with coworkers. I hang out with casual acquaintances. The people who try to actually connect, I don’t let them, and I wasn’t always like this.

Back then, with Chris and Erica and Ethel, I wasn’t like this. I cared about them. I loved them. I let myself relax around them. I miss that feeling a lot.

I don’t know what I think is going to happen if I ease up and try to make friends again. I feel like something bad will happen. I have no idea what that something bad is. I feel like everything will fall apart. I don’t know why I feel like this.

Well, I had a group back then. And my group went with me to meet Ernie for the first time.

Ernie said he would meet me outside of the red line station. Chris knew his way around Boston, because he and his brother went to anime Boston every year. Chris found parking and showed us how to navigate the train system.

We waited outside the train station. It was warm out. I’d worn my leopard print jacket over my cute sweatshirt, because I knew it would make me easy to spot. “I’ll be wearing my leopard print jacket,” I told Ernie. “And I’ll have dinosaur barrettes in my hair.”

It had been a fun morning. I was in a big city. We’d driven for hours, but the drive had been fun. When you live in rural New Hampshire, a drive into Boston is a big deal. I lived on a dirt road. There was a cliff twenty yards from my back door and if I parked in the patch of lawn that was my parking spot (my grandparents only had a two car garage) and there was a bear outside, I’d have to honk the horn so my Nan could turn the floodlights on. Almost every time it snowed, the power went out for at least a couple of days and when the well water ran out, Nan would would drive me down the road to the pond and send me out onto the ice with a Home Depot bucket, so that we could get enough to flush the toilet.

Fucking hell, rural New Hampshire be ruinin’ my vibe. Every time I try to explain why something was a certain way because rural New Hampshire, I end up on some as-I-lay-dying other shit. Let me just throw in a PeePaw and call it a day. I don’t know what to tell you. I promise I ain’t trying to be Faulkner. I didn’t mean for this to be so damn folksy. But I lived on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere from mid-high school until I was 24. This is why a day in Boston might as well have been a trip to the moon.

I was already feeling really happy. I knew I looked cute. My friends were with me.

And then there was this guy standing not too far away and when I looked at him, he waved. He hurried over.

He handed me a bunch of books. It was so weird. I liked it so much.

“These are for you. I thought you’d like to read them.”

I said goodbye to my friends and left with Ernie for the date he’d planned.

Er…about it being a date.

He took me to the Science Museum. He’d asked me to hang out. That was a date right? Why was I suddenly a complete social retard.

I felt incredibly shy with him. I never had that reaction to a guy before. I still talked a lot. Like I said, I never shut up. Happy, mad, sad, nervous: just a constant stream of pointless chatter.

I talked to Ernie a lot. He took me to the museum and I was still trying to figure out if it was a date (duh, it was a date, wtf you idiot). He bought both tickets. I didn’t like guys paying on dates and even it was one, I wanted to pay for myself. But our day had just started and I wasn’t going to tell him to knock something off and make him feel bad. Also, I had a clue now. This was a date.

We walked around the museum. There were these musical steps and I ran up and down them a bunch of times. I did a weird little dance and spun around. Ernie just stood there and laughed. Some guys like you more if you act really silly. Ernie is one of those guys. I like acting silly to make him laugh.

He took me around to see all the dinosaurs and fossils.

“Oh, look at what I bought for today.”

I zipped my sweatshirt down enough for him to see the massive dinosaur necklace I’d bought at Hot Topic.

“Neat,” he said. “It looks good on you.”

I couldn’t tell if he checked out my boobs or not, but-if you couldn’t tell by my subtlety-that was the point of that move.

After we were done looking at the exhibits, we went to get lunch at the food court. We hadn’t been sitting there long when I asked, “Hey, is this a date?”

And he said, “If you want it to be.”

I didn’t look at him. He made me feel really shy that first date.

“I want it to be.”

“Okay,” he said. “Cool.”

He was quiet and nice and when he did talk the stuff he said was really interesting. He already had his Bachelor’s degree. He worked in a museum and wanted to one day do something important for a history museum. He was 24. Only a couple of years older than me. He’d just come back from Europe where he and his sister did all kinds of interesting things in Germany.

He was short. I don’t know why I expected him to be taller, and I guess I was at a point in my life where I was in the mood for a tall dude. I was a little disappointed by his height. But then, as we were walking to the next place, a plaza not far from the museum, he stepped down off the curb before I did and I was looking down at the top of his head, and my gosh, was it cute. I decided I liked that he was short. But of course, I didn’t say that. You can’t really compliment a guy for being short, not on the first date anyway.

We sat in a courtyard outside. It was very sunny and warm outside. The more we talked, the more impressed I was by him. He knew a lot of stuff. He was very smart and worldly. He spoke another language. He knew a lot about history and politics. He had plans for his life. And the more I learned about him, the more I felt like, what is he doing here with me?

I had a weird panicking feeling. This guy was too good for me and there was no point getting attached to him.

I’d dated a good man before. I’d dated Dennis and our relationship ending was really hard. I spent so long angry at him for not loving me enough to grow up, not while he was with me at least. Then I spent so long missing him and wondering if I’d ever have that feeling again.

I didn’t want to have it again. In that moment, I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to lose it again.

Holy fuck, that sounds cliche. Look, all I can say is I was okay in my life then…okay, not really. I was constantly dizzy and tired from how little I was eating and my grandfather kept trying to pick fights with me and I wanted to be out of his house and out on my own, but couldn’t figure out how to make that happen. Still, believe it or not, I was better off than I’d been in a long time. That judge had shot my grandfather down for trying to have me declared permanently disabled. I was doing well in school. I was close to getting my associate’s degree. It sure took me long enough. I deadass got a two year degree on a five year plan. I felt hopeful. I wasn’t sad all the time. I was stressed and anxious a lot of the time. But I wasn’t sad or angry, and whatever the thing with the food was, I’d get past it. I didn’t know why I couldn’t eat. I didn’t know why I never felt hungry. I knew I could get past it though. I was struggling still, but I didn’t feel out of control for once. I didn’t feel like I was spinning around and around waiting for somebody to catch me, spiraling further out of control if anyone nudged me even a little. I didn’t feel that way.

I had recovered from losing Dennis. But I couldn’t stand the thought of trying to recover from something like that again.

I know he was silly. But he was a good man. I know I said I can’t always tell the difference between good men and bad men; I know for sure with him: he was a pain in the ass, he was immature, he was irresponsible, he was stubborn. And he was good. He was as good as he could have been at that point in his life. And losing somebody really good is hard. Losing somebody who sees you is hard.

So I felt all of this on my first date with Ernie. I thought: this is exactly what I wanted, a good man like Dennis, but one who is mature and responsible and I can rely on.

And I was terrified. He would figure out I wasn’t worth anything and he would leave and I’d have go through all of what I’d felt with losing Dennis all over again. But maybe worse. Because this would be something different. I knew that right away. This would be a more adult sort of love. This would be more steady and mature than what I’d had with Dennis. And that meant it would hurt more when me being me ruined it.

I launched into destruct mode.

I started spouting off every awful thing about me I could think of. I know I didn’t tell him about my mental health struggles, but I definitely divulged many other unflattering things.

And he sat there and watched me laundry list my faults and sins and every few minutes, I’d stop and go, “You probably don’t like me now” or “You must be done with this date, huh?”

And he kept just slightly shaking his head and saying stuff like, “No, I still like you” and “I’m not done. I like you a lot.”

He’s still not done and I’ve never figured out why.

And these are cute things he texted me while I was at work today and he was reading about himself on this blog.

And that’s the man who was silly enough to marry me and I don’t deserve him even a little. But maybe I can be a little better, so this guy can finally have some peace and quiet

Ernie: Part One

I told my writer friends I feel like I’m writing my villain origin story. I have somewhat of a reputation in the indie writing community for being a cunt or a generally difficult person. And I’m over here like, “come my friends, let’s dive back into the lore…”

But in all seriousness, I want to try to be a little nicer to people. I’m wondering if the reason why I’m so mean might be because I’m so uncomfortable forming bonds with people.

I wasn’t always like that. I didn’t always stalk people online and form attachments to people who’ve never interacted with me. I didn’t always panic and make excuses when people asked me to hang out or push them away when they tried to bond with me.

You guys want to know something very weird? This might be the first time I’ve admitted this. I created a writer’s discord last spring, because I realized I was spending too much time lurking on a fucking [redacted] forum and getting my social needs…met? not really, I don’t know, I was watching them and getting to know them by watching and it made me feel close to this group. I realized that the whole thing was weird and knew I’d never really be able to part of that group. And I realized it was very VERY off to be getting some kind of social-emotional fulfillment out of watching this group of people that I couldn’t ever be a part of.

And I thought, where the fuck can I get whatever I’m getting here? What can I do to replicate this in a healthier way?

I went and created my own little community and aside from some weirdness that came about from letting people from outside the writing community join, it’s been really great.

There was a time when I wouldn’t even make online friends, or if I did I wouldn’t allow myself to actually care about them. And it’s been years since I had irl friends.

In my late twenties, I stopped making friends. And I started watching people online and imagining some kind of bond with them.

I didn’t do that in my early 20s. This is a semi-recent problem. Although, looking back, I can see the seeds of that behavior early on. It just didn’t really burst into existence until recently.

But let me just keep going in a linear way for now. I’m skipping some stuff. The stuff that either isn’t that important or I’m just not ready to talk about it yet.

So, I guess the next important thing that happened was meeting Ernie. I feel like he’s gonna fucking hate the name Ernie.

I’ll tell you right now, since I am still married to Ernie, he’s the only person who is actually getting a say in which parts are told. There are some parts that he doesn’t want told. So I won’t tell them, but just imagine a lot of cut scenes where I give the poor man a massive headache and make his life difficult. I’ve told him the only reason he puts up with me is because he’s the type of man who sees a woman who needs saving, and he’ll make any excuse to stick around and try to save her from her own stupidity. And he responds by saying, “You have a good heart. You do the best you can.” And it’s nice that he thinks that. But a lot of the time, I wish someone better than me had snagged him. I’ll keep trying to be a better person, because he deserves an awesome partner. I’m not that.

Like the scene with Chris carrying me drunk through the woods? So duplicate that, only I’m 26 and it’s not the woods, it’s downtown of a major city. And the man corraling me is autistic and shy and doesn’t know what to do and instead of laughing, I’m sobbing. Full on ugly-crying and off-my-ass drunk because I had a rough conversation with my mom. All while he tries his damndest to get me on the bus and people stare. I hope downtown Major City enjoyed the show. It wasn’t my best work, but it was a noteworthy part of my oeuvre.

So there is more of that and worse, but most of it has to stay cut scenes. Just keep that in mind while I tell this part. I don’t want anyone to find me more sympathetic than I actually am.

Well, I met Ernie on a site called Sweet on Geeks.

I wanted so badly to meet another man like Dennis. It had been almost 2 years since we’d broken up and I’d heard through the grapevine that he was dating someone new. Of course I was jealous. He was my first love. He wasn’t my first boyfriend. He wasn’t my first kiss or any of that. But he was the first time that I felt like a man really saw me and cared about me. He was the first time I felt completely safe with a man, like I didn’t have to be on guard with him or worry about what he’d do next. So, yeah, I heard he’d finally started dating again. I was crushed. I didn’t go bother him. I did, however, type into google things like “where to meet nerdy men?” “where to meet anime nerd men?” Eventually, I found this site called Sweet on Geeks and it isn’t around anymore. There’s an equivalent site, but I’m told it’s pretty dead.

The big problem that I had trying to meet men on Sweet on Geeks was that I saw a lot of myself in these men. A lot became very clingy way too quickly. I understood it then. Being on the receiving end of that was alarming. I was afraid to proceed with any of the men who became so overwhelmingly attached after only one or two conversations. I didn’t want the responsibility of caring for somebody that fragile. So yes, I get it. I get why guys were mean when I got clingy after one hookup. It’s alarming.

Others were okay and it just didn’t go anywhere.

A couple tried to neg me. Those dudes got the Blocked-No-Response treatment.

I received a far more manageable number of messages on Sweet on Geeks. Since I didn’t get that many, I sent messages out myself.

That’s how I met Ernie. And he was kind enough to go back in his emails and find the very first message I ever sent him. I had sent him a friend request and I think my email was on my profile. He sent me an email. I won’t include his first message, because he is shy. Please know his email is far FAR less retarded than my response.

He actually used capital letters and he was far less painfully cringe.

This was 22-year-old me, responding to men on online dating sites.

God, it’s bad.

If I wasn’t such a whore for good content, and if y’all weren’t blowing my stats up binging this series…I’m finally about to beat July 2020 for best views ever and I’m here for it.

Alright….why in the world did that man respond to that pretentious hyper-active fever dream of an email?

God, I read that and want to fight 22-year-old me, like a lot. What a snotty, self-important fuck. And would it kill me to throw in some capital letters? Why the fuck does this have such rawr-I’m-random-early-2000s-emo-girl energy?

Fuck, I can’t with that bitch.

This was back when I was still majoring in Human Services, because hospice had shown me I liked old people. What else did this man learn about me? I guess music was my life? Because THAT is sooo unique…criminey.

Well, for God knows what reason, Ernie read this and decided, “Yep, gimme some of dat” and after a few more messages, he asked if he could call me.

Chris, Erica, and Ethel were hanging out at my house when he called. I went outside to take the call. I liked his voice. Not too deep, not too high-pitched. That’s the best kind of male voice.

He told me a few things about him. He spoke German. He’d actually just come back from Germany not too long ago. He loved history. This was all before he went back to school for his Computer Science degree, and he was still hoping to be a Museum Curator one day.

I walked up and down the walkway outside. I grinned and listened to him talk. He did just the right amount of talking and just the right amount of listening.

I talked to him about dinosaurs. I made jokes about velociraptors living in the woods of New Hampshire. I don’t fucking remember the joke, but I’ll bet it was just as stupid as you’re probably imagining.

I talked about everything I did for hospice and interning at the adult day center. I talked about why old people were cool.

I hung up and went inside and told my friends, “I think I met a really nice guy.”

And then I sat back down to watch the anime that Chris had brought over and I drank an Ensure. Because I was trying to get over an eating disorder.

That’s right, I met Ernie, the man who was silly enough to marry me, while I was trying to tackle an eating disorder. When I stopped yelling and screaming and just all around going off constantly, that’s when the eating issues started. I didn’t fight my grandfather anymore. He yelled. He threatened. He’d already taken legal action to try and take away my right to make decisions for myself. More than once he tried to badger me into signing paperwork to give him “power of attorney.” I held my ground. I wouldn’t sign anything.

When I met Ernie, I was maybe 85 pounds. I looked like Eugenia Cooney. Looking at old pictures from that time period, my elbows were disgusting. Like these bulbous things protruding from these little stick arms.

And Ernie walked up to me in the middle of downtown, in the major city where he lived at the time, and he handed me a stack of science fiction novels and said, “I thought you’d like to read these.”

I liked him right away.

He nodded a lot and didn’t make great eye contact. For once in my life, I felt shy with a guy. He didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at him.

He didn’t kiss me until the very end of the date and when he did, it was like Wooowww.

Photo by Zichuan Han on Pexels.com

Well the picture is blurry, but that’s me on my 4th or 5th date with Ernie. And my gosh those elbows are grossing me out.

Anyway, if you ever accidentally just stop eating for so long that you’re in the danger zone like that, I can’t recommend Ensures enough. Your stomach starts to hurt when you eat if you go long enough without eating. Ensures are very easy to digest.

But then here’s me after I was dating Ernie for 6 months.

And I guess that’s not a good shot of my elbows, but trust me they looked a lot better.

(and there are frogs on me, because Ernie kept flicking them at me, then he cracked himself up laughing and took a picture).

Keep Being the Crazy One

Now, I know you’ve heard a lot about a lot of guys, but don’t think that I didn’t take any time off just to chill and work on myself. I did. I decided that what I’d been trying wasn’t working. I had an idea of how to help myself.

Despite my grandparents’ objections, I stopped going to therapy and I only kept seeing my psychiatrist long enough to get weaned off all the meds. Coming off all of those was HORRIBLE. And my grandfather always seemed like he was trying to capitalize on how emotionally-turbulent and sick I was during these months.

One night, he got up in my face and snapped at me, “You’re up all night again. It’s because you need to get on medication. You need to be on that medication!”

I was trying something new. I tried keeping calm and walking away. It didn’t work.

“There you go! Walking away like a coward!”

And I kept my voice level and said, “I’m trying not to fight with you. There’s too much fighting in this family.”

For some reason, that really set him off. He got really close to me, pointing in my face and screaming, and I recognized my old self trying to come out. I was scared. When I’m scared, I’m all fight. My heart was going really fast and I was shaking, but I just stayed still.

My grandmother got in between us and then he was shouting at her.

I tried to stay calm. I said, “I’m going to walk away since everyone is upset.” I was parroting weird conflict resolution shit I learned in therapy. I didn’t know what else to do.

I wish I could tell you why me trying to walk away and be calm set him off. I was trying to do better. I was trying to be better. I’d always reacted big and loud and screaming and violent to my family. I wanted to try being calm. like Carly.

My grandmother turned and then she was screaming at me too. I was goading my grandfather. I was starting a problem.

I tried not to cry. “I’m being calm. I’m trying to be calm. I’m walking away before there is a fight.”

“Get out of my way, Patty!” And he pushed her and she hit the ground and she yelled, because she hit the kitchen floor really hard.

I shut my eyes and took a step back. This was all happening because my grandfather had gotten in my face and for once, I tried not to yell back.

“Look at what you’re doing! Look at what you do to this family!”

He came toward me again and my grandmother grabbed him around the legs. He stumbled, but caught himself. Then he grabbed her under the arms and dragged her out of the kitchen, with her screaming the whole time. She screamed at me “Look at what you do to us! Look at what you to everyone! Stop it, Jennifer!”

And I stood there shaking. Because for the first time, I WAS seriously trying to stop it.

I was trying to stop it and it felt like my family wanted me to keep going.

Like they were saying, “You have to keep being the crazy one,” when I just didn’t want to anymore.

My grandfather started hitting and shoving me again. I was 22 and he hadn’t done this since I was 14.

This time, I didn’t react. I didn’t.

It was so hard, but I didn’t.

I was very emotional, coming off the meds, but I understood something now. For whatever reason, anything I did would be weaponized against me and might even make my grandfather hurt my grandmother again. Then they would BOTH blame me. I hated it, but I’d realized something. I had to get out.

I’m crazy. I’m not saying I’m not. But my family makes me crazier.

I came off the meds and once I did, my head….it felt so clear. You ever wake up from a really good night’s sleep after a few nights of not getting any sleep, it was like that by a thousand times more.

The tremor left my hands. My hands and arms had been constantly shaking for years. I could sleep, and my eyes didn’t pop open in my sleep anymore.

When I had weird ideas, I knew it. I didn’t stop having weird ideas. But I was able to say, “Knock it off, bitch. That isn’t real.”

There was more that happened when I tried to get better.

I saved a lot of money and then my grandfather tried to say I was incompetent and get it signed over to him.

The judge said, “She has a full time job and goes to school full time and hasn’t been hospitalized in two years. And you think she should be declared permanently disabled? Sir, you might be the one with a mental health problem.”

It was so vindicating.

She looked at me and said, “Miss Smith, if I were you, I’d get out of that house as soon as I could. Run, don’t walk, out that door.”

I’d be out soon. I loved my grandmother, but I couldn’t do it any longer. I don’t know why, but my family needed me to stay messy. And I was ready to try and clean myself up.

I had one emotional moment. I ranted on facebook about how awful it was living with somebody who would shove me and hit me sometimes. How he’d just started it up after years of not touching me, and how I felt like he was only doing it, because I was trying to leave. I never mentioned that I was talking about my grandfather.

I got three concerned messages from men. All casual acquaintances.

They all thought I was being shoved and hit by a boyfriend.

“I just took the post down. It was stupid to write about it on facebook.”

“You took it down, but I saw it. He’s trash. Leave him.”

“It’s my grandfather.”

They all had the same kind of reaction to that. It was something like, “Oh, nevermind then.”

I wondered how it being a relative changed anything.

It was like once they knew it wasn’t a guy who was fucking me, they didn’t care. Like they wanted to save me from some asshole putting their dick in me, so they could put their dick in me instead.

But I said, “I shouldn’t have posted it. I was talking about my grandfather.”

And they all went away.

Blocked. No Response.

After the whole thing with Dave, I made a set of rules for myself.

No fucking until I’d been dating the guy for six months.

No bullshit. I was not giving ANYBODY the benefit of the doubt. EVER again. No benefit. All doubt. You weird me out, get the fuck gone. I was so tired of good intentions and trying to guess and he-didn’t mean-it. And while I’m aware that other damaged souls extended this way of thinking to me, I couldn’t deal with one more Joe. I couldn’t deal with one more Dave. I couldn’t deal with more John. One day my head would really pop off and maybe I wouldn’t be able to put it back on. If I couldn’t have someone like Dennis, someone who treated me like I was real and never ever hurt me on purpose (albeit maybe a version of him that could actually help me shoulder some of the responsibilities of a life together) then I didn’t want anyone. I’d be alone.

In fact, I planned to be alone. I started saving my money. I started considering the possibility of getting a female roommate and moving to that city where my community college was.

Alone is better than constant bullshit.

I was single for quite some time.

I realize exactly how r/femaledatingstrategy this sounds. I’ve been pretty vocal anti-FDS. But I’ve also been pretty vocal that they give a lot of good advice. Mixed with a lot of bad advice. And I think they genuinely dislike men. I do not dislike men. I dislike my own ability to differentiate between good men and bad men. I dislike how pathetic bad men make me. Men, as a whole, are great. Many of them are good. Many of them were weirdly protective of me and tried to help me when I didn’t want to be helped. So a lot of this is going to sound FDS-adjacent. But I’ll repeat: they have good points and common sense advice. They also have a lot of stupid advice and are absolute cunts.

I was single for a long time because trying to meet men started to go like this.

“Hey gorgeous, I always think brunettes are kind of sexy.”

BLOCKED. NO RESPONSE.

“You up?”

BLOCKED. NO RESPONSE.

He weirdly starts talking about sex after we’ve talking a few days?

BLOCKED. NO RESPONSE.

He asks me what I like in the bedroom and we haven’t even met yet?

BLOCKED. NO RESPONSE.

Backhanded veiled insult about my acne?

You can’t neg me. I’m just not that dumb a hoe anymore.

BLOCKED. NO RESPONSE.

“This is kind of embarrassing, but I’m a virgin.”

Ohh…this is cute. Inexperienced guys are so-

“So I might get pretty horny and want to fuck right away.”

BLOCKED. NO RESPONSE.

And this all felt, so good. It felt so good to have boundaries. It felt so good to know what I wasn’t going to put up with. Not only that, but I didn’t even have to try and explain it to them. I didn’t need to justify myself.

I had realized that I didn’t owe anybody anything, and I could choose to walk away from anyone who treated me in a way that made me feel bad.

It didn’t matter about good intentions. It didn’t. It was amazing to figure this out.

People could have good intentions, but make me feel bad, and I could walk away without trying to teach them how to NOT make me feel bad. It wasn’t my job. Let them next dumb hoe try to teach them.

Block. Ignore. Ghost.

And I never felt bad.

And I still fucking don’t.

If you can’t manage to interact with a woman without making her feel bad *shrugs* then you weren’t compatible with her anyway.

I made myself crazy about good intentions and after I decided I didn’t give a single fuck anymore, it was a lot easier to keep my head on tight.

My grandfather: Part One

I’m going to go back in time and talk a little more about my relationship with my grandparents.

The thing is, I don’t like to keep on about stuff after someone has genuinely apologized. It’s why I haven’t talked too much about anything that happened with my stepdad and it’s why, until now, I haven’t talked too much about the things that happened with my grandfather.

It feels important to include. I find ways not to tell the whole story when I talk about my life. Because he apologized to me a couple of years ago. To me and my grandmother. He wasn’t even on his deathbed. He wrote me the most heartfelt letter I’d ever imagined. I’d spent so long being angry at him, hating him, and he explained why he acted the way he did, without failing to take responsibility. He addressed my feelings. He had spent time reflecting on how his behavior made me feel. He was sorry. So sorry. He said he’d do anything to take it all back.

I was so moved.

This happened when I was 30.

I was important enough for someone to apologize too.

I was home alone when I opened the letter. The wind was knocked out of me. I crumbled to the floor and sobbed holding that piece of paper. I cried really hard for a really long time. The sort of crying where you start hyperventilating and you have to make yourself stop crying before you pass out.

He enclosed this necklace in the letter. It had butterflies in it. It was one of those necklaces that’s like a big round broach on a chain.

Just like the one he broke when he beat the fuck out of me when I was 14.

It was very close to that one.

He didn’t mention that’s why he included it. He didn’t mention any of the times he’d gotten physical with me. I appreciated that he didn’t. I couldn’t believe he remembered that necklace. The fact that my necklace broke while I was on the kitchen floor being kicked by him, it was just one extra little piece of awful. I loved that necklace.

It’s not like I can wear it now. It’s a very young necklace. The sort of thing little girls wear, when you’re in that phase of life where you wish you were allowed to put on eye shadow, but you still choose lip gloss based on which ones are flavored to taste like Skittles or Italian Ice.

I put it in my desk drawer.

It made me feel like I was real. Like I was worth being apologized to. I know I give other people too much power to affect how I feel. I’m working on it, and i’m just saying how it made me feel.

Before I talk about the bad stuff, I want to tell you about who my grandfather was. Well, is. He is still alive. It’s just that as much as that apology meant to me, we won’t ever be close. Anyway, he’s a man who is also carrying around every time he was hurt and every time the world disappointed him. He’s angry because he’s sensitive. He’s a lot like me. I love him. I’ll never spend time with again, but I love him, I see him, and I can tell you he wasn’t always bad to me.

My grandfather loves to play poker. He loves John Wayne, and really, all Westerns. He’s very smart, yet very emotional. He’s very patriotic. He’s Republican. He loves cars. He’s very responsible. Anyone in our family who ever fell down, he was there to pick them up. He’s tall. He’s the only tall person in my immediate family. I think he’s around 6’3. He has light blue eyes and before it went gray, very light brown hair that looked blonde in the sun.

He fell in love with my grandmother when they were teenagers. She didn’t like him back. She thought he was weird and said things that were rude, but then was too weird to know they were rude.

She was fat.

She didn’t think he was trying to marry her. She thought he was trying to get her to “go park somewhere.” That’s how she explained it to me and I knew just what she meant.

He tried to compliment her, while they were eating at the diner they went to. He said, “You have very big shoulders. You could be a quarterback.” He laughed when he said it, but the way he tells it, he wasn’t making fun of her. He wanted to tell her she was pretty but also wanted to make a joke and when he opened his mouth a bunch of words came out and they were all wrong.

She went home from that date and cried while my great aunt held her, and then she ate six donuts, until her sister told her she had to stop or she’d make herself sick.

My grandmother started dating a friend of his instead.

But before he shipped out, being stationed overseas for the first time, he said, “Patty, I love you. I want to marry you. I’m a jerk, but you’re the only girl I’ve got eyes for, and I don’t think I’ll ever have eyes for another girl.”

She told him she’d think about it. Her mother and father, my great-grandparents who’d been born in Ireland and immigrated, first to Canada and then to Boston, right after their first kid was born, they told my Nan, “Marry him. You can’t stay here forever. He’s a solid young man.”

He was a solid young man and my grandmother said yes. But she never loved him. She told me once, although I know she shouldn’t have, that she’d never learned to love him. That she’d always sort of disliked him and resented how much he loved her, when she didn’t feel the same.

I have no idea when he started hitting her. I only know that the first time I saw it, I was 11 and I couldn’t stand the look on my Nan’s face, and I tried to get in-between them, but Carly begged me not to and said I’d make it worse.

My grandmother came back into the kitchen. It happened in the hall right outside the kitchen. She came back in. Her face was red. She blinked back tears and pretended nothing happened. She always pretended nothing happened. She sat down to help me and Carly finish our homework. She was very impatient the rest of the night and she became so annoyed with me that she grabbed my social studies worksheet and filled it out herself.

I never felt the same way about my grandfather after that.

I started picking fights with him.

I started calling him names.

But when this all started, my grandmother started pulling back from me. My nan. Who I loved more than anyone else in the world. Who knew everything about me and always made me feel okay when things weren’t okay.

I didn’t go over her house as often.

“You think you can bring her dance, Helen? I don’t know if I have the energy to have Jennifer spend every weekend with me.”

And I’d always spent the weekends with her. Since I was 6 and moved out of my pink bedroom with ice cream cone wallpaper.

She didn’t want me around anymore. She agreed with my grandfather when he told me to shut my mouth. I was being an obnoxious little shit and I was going to get smacked. “Be quiet before you upset your grandfather! Your grandfather and I! You’re making problems for everybody!”

He did smack me sometimes. He smacked me. He threw me. He pushed me. He towered over and me and yelled down at me.

I thought I was so tough. I’d make him yell at me, not Nan. I’d distract him. I’d make a problem when he started getting upset with Nan.

Except, as an adult looking back, I know that I probably made a horrible situation even worse for her. Carly was right. I made everything worse.

And then I attacked him, when I was 14. I was 5’5. I was around 90 pounds. And I flung my body at my 6’3 built grandfather and attacked him with everything I had.

It didn’t work out for me.

Dave

I met Dave in a Creative Writing class. We were in a critique group together. Like the demonstrative attention-seeking fuck I was am, I wrote about the time I tried to cut my wrists open because I wanted Joe to feel badly for laughing at me. I wanted him to see that I tried very hard not to be crazy, but other people picking at me like he did made it more than I could take. I wrote about this, but I made the suicide attempt sound much more impressive than it was. I’m not kidding when I say I barely needed a band-aid. Hospitalizing me after the fact was probably more to save other people the headache of trying to quiet me down. I don’t think I ever really had the balls to do anything that final.

Well, Dave read my story, asked me if it was true. I said that it was. He didn’t say anything else in class.

It was only a week or so later that I stopped at Taco Bell on the way home from class. Since I still lived in the middle of nowhere, I went to college in the next largest city. On a good day, it took me a little under an hour to get there. Which sounds wild, but I had to drive 25 minutes to get to the grocery store. Long drives are the norm when you live on a dirt road on a mountain.

So most days, I stopped at the Taco Bell down the road from the college on the way home. The only fast food places anywhere close to my house were Wendy’s and the two aforementioned Dunkin Donuts (as long ago as it was, it’s still funny to me how many messages I got on MySpace “Heard you bitches are the reason the good Dunks’ drive-thru is shut down?”). Anyway, I stopped at this Taco Bell and who was behind the register? This guy from my Creative Writing class.

He was fidgety and awkward while he took my order. Then after he gave me my bag of food, he said, “I liked your story because I did the same thing once. Tried to commit suicide.” He said it very loudly and a lot of people looked over at me. I forgave his awkwardness because he was obviously nervous.

“That’s…okay, yeah…I’m sorry.” I genuinely had no idea how to respond, so I said a bunch of random nothings at him. then I left.

We were assigned to new groups in class. My teacher did rounds like that, with different groups for different rounds.

I thought about Dave for a little bit. He was goofy and didn’t seem comfortable in his body, always fidgeting. And you know what? I could vibe with that kind of energy. Also, he had brown eyes.

Wish I knew what is up with the brown eyes thing. Some women only like tall men. Some women only like men with long hair. Some women only like men who play guitar. For me, it’s gotta be brown eyes. I can’t take green or blue eyes. No offense to the light-eyed men of the world. A pair of brown eyes (and the darker the better) is basically all it takes for me to be like…

I’m very attracted to eye color and have never met anybody with as strong an eye color preference as I have. I’d tell you why I’m like that if I knew.

Dave had brown eyes and he was nice to me like once. Criteria filled.

I put on a cute outfit and went down to the Taco Bell.

I laid it on thick. I always laid in on thick when I was irl flirting. I didn’t do this online, but that’s because every online interaction was a stressful interaction and it always felt like I was the one talking slow like nobody-make-any sudden-moves, and the sudden moves was someone pulling their dick out and saying gross, graphic shit to me. I’ve literally had guys tell me this doesn’t sound real. That guys don’t act like that online. But the same guys who said that went on to tell me that if it DID happen, well that’s just female privilege right there and the fact that I even found it upsetting is misandrist.

I’m allowed to find any behavior I want unacceptable. There were a lot of years that I didn’t know this. But I know this now. I find the way men treated me online unacceptable. I find it despicable to be so presumptuous and treat someone like they exist to serve some sexual need for you. If they’d thought of me as a person, they would have moved slowly, sussed out whether I wanted that or not. I am not a feminist, but I’ll admit when they get something right. “Inconveniently sentient” was a phrase a feminist writer used once, referring to odious behavior from men and how they must view women. That phrase resonates with me. They treated me as if I was a body to fuck, but an inconveniently sentient one.

For this reason, I was much more reserved in online interactions. A lot of tense clenching the mouse of the shared computer, staring at the screen like, “Talk to me like a person. Get to know me. Tell me who you are. Don’t start asking about my pussy or telling me where you want to cum. Get to know me. Let me get to know you. Let me see you. Let me fall in love with you.”

In real life though? Well, it’s probably because guys like to be flirted with. So flirting really obviously was always kind of fun, because they always looked so pleased with themselves. Okay, not always. Sometimes they seemed really uncomfortable. I dialed it back and went away when that happened.

I went to Dave’s work, where he was working front counter again and I flirted really obviously. And he neither looked pleased with himself or uncomfortable. He didn’t seem to notice what I was doing. There were no other customers, so I took my time chatting with him. When that led us straight to nowhere, I upped the ante.

“Do you want my number?” I asked him.

“Sure.”

I had already written it on a slip of notebook paper. I was wearing leggings. Yes, the kind that are supposed to be worn under skirts, not as pants. I was shameless. My ass is like my one really attractive feature and I’d hit a point where I was really looking for some dick. Well, love. But also dick. I was lonely and I was horny, but I’d decided it was better than screwing around again. Because it’s not like women even get off in random hookups. I’d figured out by that point that you can’t really get off unless you are loved by the guy. Searching for that special, connected, satisfying feeling inside of things that were cheap and disposable and didn’t even feel good physically was senseless (I know it took me long enough, but I got there eventually).

So like the trashy fuck I was, I pulled my shirt up just enough to reveal the waistband of my leggings. I rolled the waistband down enough to reveal a flash of hip. I pulled the folded piece of paper out from where I had it tucked into the waistband.

Looking back on this…..yeah, I see it now. I see why I had so little interest from decent guys. I wasn’t acting decently myself. And I see why men treated me like I was a thing to fuck. That’s how I treated myself. It’s like I ran an advertising campaign and then acted shocked and appalled when people showed up looking for the weekly deal. All I can say is, it’s difficult being this much of an idiot.

I put the folded paper in his hand. He got it then. He was a dense fuck, but he got it then.

“You want to be friends, right? I already have a girlfriend.”

I was mortified. “Of course,” I laughed. “I just want to be friends, yeah.”

I left with my face flaming.

To my surprise, he started texting me.

And he friend requested me on facebook.

Oh yeah, facebook was the big thing by then. I barely ever went on MySpace anymore.

We started talking a lot. He told me a lot about him. He didn’t really listen. He wasn’t a good listener. Anything I said, he turned it around and found something to say about himself.

Still, I decided he was okay. Just awkward.

I found out his “girlfriend” was a 19-year-old girl from the Phillipines. He had never met her. He had never even talked to her on the phone. they talked only on facebook.

“Oh boy,” I thought. “He’s that kind of stupid, huh?”

Well, I still wanted some of the D. Other than being kind of dumb and being a shitty listener, he was definitely my type. A big anime nerd, and despite not liking anime myself, I always found guys who like anime a lot very sweet and gentle. Especially after Dennis. He had brown eyes. He was very tall. And like I said, I like tall and short guys. I like both. This dude was probably 6’2. I’d never met a nerdy dude who was 6’2. Dave dressed like he only wore clothes his mom picked out for him from k-mart. And I can’t lie, it sort of did it for me.

Well, I wasn’t going to come onto him while he was dating this girl from the Phillipines. He was always posting sappy stuff about how much he loved her and how he couldn’t wait to be with her one day. I didn’t flirt with him after he told me he was taken. I did hold out hope they’d break up and I could shimmy on in there.

Until, he was a little too pent up and got in my DMs one day.

He started talking about how he was a virgin.

He asked me a lot of questions about sex. I mean, I answered them. I thought he was just trying to talk to a friend.

“It really sucks being a 23-year-old virgin,” he said. “I feel like I’m missing out on this thing everybody else has experienced.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be dating someone you might not ever meet,” I replied. “If you weren’t e-dating this Fillipino girl, I bet girls in real life would be interested in you.”

TRANSLATION: I WILL FUCK YOU. IF YOU WEREN’T IN A RELATIONSHIP, I WOULD HAPPILY ACCEPT YOUR DICK.

But my man wanted to have his cake and eat it too.

“I’m in love with Liza. We’ve been talking for over a year.”

“I guess you’ll have to wait until you can meet one day then.”

“Right. I know.”

There were a couple of minutes in between that message and the next one.

“Maybe I could find an experienced girl who would have a friends with benefits kind of thing with me? Then I’d know what I’m doing when I finally meet Liza. Then I wouldn’t feel like a little kid when my friends are talking about sex.”

I saw red. I was livid. There was no way I was gonna let him ask without asking. I was gonna make this motherfucker be direct.

“Dave, you better come right out and ask what it’s obvious you’re trying to.”

I didn’t fly off the handle right away, because I wanted him to say it. I didn’t want him to have an out, where he could deny what he’d meant.

“I’m not asking anything.”

I waited.

He sent a follow up message.

“Unless you’re interested.”

I went off on him. He was trying to cheat on his girlfriend? I was good enough to fuck? I was good enough to hang out with? (He’d already invited me to a party at his house the following week). I wasn’t good enough to date?

He acted dumb and I hated him for it.

“Whoa, whoa, are you saying you want to date me?”

“Go fuck yourself, Dave.”

And then, feeling especially mean, I sent one final dig.

“Since you can’t find anyone else to do it.”

Weirdly enough, Dave still sort of was my friend after this. The way I dealt with him was to shut off and stop talking to him the second he got in my DMs all pent up.

When we finally stopped talking when I was 25 and he was 27, he still hadn’t met Liza and he still hadn’t had sex.

Absolute fucking dumbass.

I’m not one to talk. I was a dumbass back then too.

But not dumb enough to fuck a guy who was clearly saying “She’s the Madonna. You’re the whore.”

The Christians

So like I said, after Dennis, I went a little wild again. I missed him. He’d been this sweet little patch of sunlight in my life. And shortly after we broke up, Nicki and Zach moved in together-they moved almost three hours way from me. Chris was starting to come around a little bit, but I could sense the vibes, he was still keeping me at a distance.

With no social life, no boyfriend, feeling incredibly lonely and my whole life was working and school, I did what any bipolar dumbass with attachment issues would do. I got back on the internet waving me ‘somebody please love me-I’m stupid and will take all levels of bullshit’ flags around.

Something sort of different happened this round though. Dudes would pop up and start being crass right away. Stuff like “Do you shave your pussy?” and “Do you deep throat?” in message number one, and instead of going along with it, I started blocking. Without even a message. I blocked.

I’m not going to say I did this perfectly. I did a lot better though. There was also a whole big dramatic intervention at one point, and as I try to sort out this whole messy time period in my head, I can’t remember if that intervention happened pre-Dennis or post-Dennis. In any case, it was dramatic and my aunt drove all the way from Massachusetts to be a part of it, so I can’t sort out where that dot falls in the linear timeline, but it seems important to mention.

Other guys were not so easy to block online, because they didn’t pop up in message one being filthy. They’d talk to me for a few messages first. Then they’d start trying to sext.

I cried more than once over this.

Please be like Dennis. Please be sweet and gentle and take your time with me. I’ll have sex with you. I’ll have so much sex with you. But make it sweet and special like he did. Don’t make it so cheap and disposable like this. Treat me like I’m precious, like he did. Please don’t treat me I’m something to fuck and throw away. I can’t stand to be thrown away anymore.

I started to question my decision. I knew, even back then, Dennis had given me something special and rare. And I’d gone and ended it to jump back into this?

Unfortunately, he’d meant what he said. I couldn’t go back after I ended it. He’d blocked my number on his cell phone. Nobody picked up when I called his house phone. Zach called me and had a talk with me. I had to leave him alone. It was done.

“I miss him,” I said.

“He’s working on himself,” Zach told me. “He wants to focus on his life now. I’m sorry. It’s over with him.”

“How does he not even miss me?” I cried.

“Maybe he does,” Zach said. “Maybe it’s not even about you. He has his own issues. He wants to sort them out and he needs to be by himself to do that.”

I stopped trying to go back to him. I missed him so much though.

It was when Zach and Nicki were living so far up north that I jumped back into Christianity, something I’d moved away from ever since cult lady.

I went to a meeting of ‘Campus Crusade for Christ.’ Everybody had all these different labels and I didn’t know what any of them meant: Lutheran, Protestant, Baptist. I knew Catholic. My grandparents were Catholic.

When it was my turn to introduce myself, I said, “I don’t know like…what kind of Christian I am…like everybody else does. I was raised Wiccan. I just get curious about Jesus sometimes. Nobody mind me, but I don’t know half the stuff you’re talking about.”

“Wiccan? What is that?”

I explained it to them. I felt very weird explaining all the woo-woo stuff to a roomful of such buttoned-up people. I mean, all the guys were wearing these dress shirts. Business casual….to go to community college classes. The girls wore blouses and sensible shoes. I’m trying to figure out how to say this without being very r/notliketheothergirls. This is the way it happened though. I was wearing a massive hoodie, ripped jeans, and converse. I didn’t feel out of place sitting in class or down in the dining hall. But in this classroom in the middle of the afternoon surrounded by all these smiling, polished people who looked like something out of a GAP commercial: yes, I felt out of place.

They all wanted to save me.

I know I’ve said before that there were people who wanted to save me. Well, nobody wanted to save me more than the Christians and they wanted to save me in a way that was a tad more…erm…literal.

“Your soul is saved for heaven when you give yourself to God.” They said a lot of things like that to me.

I started hanging out with the Christians all the time. I started believing a lot of the things that they did. I usually start to believe whatever the people around me believe, and I hate that about myself. Am I just some sponge? Am I even a real person? I believe things very strongly, but so much of the time, it’s only because someone else told me that I should.

Recently somebody said something to me that was like, “You think maybe the thing with the [internet community I was paying too much attention to] was sort of like the thing with the Christians? You did repeat a lot of their talking points. You admit you’re easy to influence.”

Well, I don’t know. If I was self-aware, maybe there would be some sort of moral or message here. There isn’t though. There’s just a lot of chaotic nonsense and a lot of other people trying to save me. It’s a bunch of pointless, noisy nonsense.

I was popular with the Christians for the strangest fucking reason. Every single one of them wanted to be the one to really bring me into the fold. If they saved the messy chick, they like…won Christianity or something? I don’t know.

This was unfortunate, for me anyway, when men wanted to win Christianity. More than once I misunderstood their interest in me.

Christian men don’t like messy women in that way. I can’t blame them. Women like me aren’t worth the effort. Mostly the effort of keeping the chaos contained.

It stung though. The times that I tried to “help” them shoot their shot. They were saving their arrows for worthier targets. All they wanted to hit me with was Jesus.

I cleaned up my image. I wore blouses and sensible shoes. I bought a Bible. I bought Christian apologetics books. I went to Bible study several times a week. I prayed and prayed and prayed.

I tried to feel close to God. I tried. I tried.

It was during this time that I met the twins. Erica and Ethel. They had bright red hair. They were the most sheltered human beings I ever met. And after I started hanging out with them, Chris started coming around again. It didn’t take me long to figure out why. Ethel. Chris had set his sights on Ethel.

And now Chris was wearing nicer shirts and Chris had bought himself a Bible.

Then I met a guy named Dave.

That was our new group. Erica, Ethel, Chris, Dave, and me.

Chris had set his sights on Ethel and I had set MY sights on Dave.

It didn’t work out for either of us.

Dennis: Part 9

I was very excited to get an apartment with Dennis. At this point, I’d recently stopped working at the daycare and now I was working at Wendy’s. The daycare didn’t work out because my boss noticed I had a constant tremor in my hands and a lot of the time, the rest of my body too, and she asked me if I was on any medication. I made the mistake of telling the truth. I was on anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. I can’t fault her for talking me into quitting. It was hard at the time, but I understand why I shouldn’t have been working there at that time.

Wendy’s gave me a lot more hours and they paid me more. I’m telling you the truth. I was paid more for taking drive-thru orders than I was to watch a room with five infants every weekday from 3-7pm. I changed them. Gave them snacks. And for hours was the only adult in the room with all of them. Wendy’s paid me more to put on a headset and say “Will that complete your order?”

Don’t take this as a feminist thing. I’m not a feminist. I’m just saying it how it is: when you’re the only girl working in a fast-food restaurant, you have to work drive-thru. That’s just how it is. I would have preferred to work the grill and not deal with customers. But that only happened a couple of times after another girl was hired and she got put on drive-thru. But then she started dating the grill guy and they had a big falling out and she quit and I was back to being the only girl, so drive-thru was mine again.

My classes were in the mornings. Then I would work 2-8 drive-thru. I worked 3-11 on the weekends.

I’d worked there a couple of weeks, when I looked over my paycheck and I realized something. I made enough now to pay half on a modest studio apartment. I could be with Dennis all the time. Come home to him every night. Be a real adult.

I told him that.

“I make enough to pay half on a place like this here in [your town] or we could get a third roommate and a get a place like this in [slightly bigger town]. Whatever you want, Dennis. I have a car and I don’t mind driving.”

He tried to change the subject and I realized what the problem was.

I tried to broach it gently.

“Have you thought about getting a different job? The nursing home doesn’t pay you very much. They also barely schedule you.”

He was very resistant to changing jobs. I couldn’t figure out why. I didn’t want to push him too much. But also, I loved him, I wanted to start a life with him. And to be perfectly honest, the fact that he was older than me freaked me out. At 20, I was used to guys I dated living at home and working shitty jobs. That’s the state of most 20-year-olds. But Dennis was 27. When the situation with the maybe-miscarriage happened, it hit me for the first time: he should be further along in life than I am.

But I didn’t judge him. Not too harshly anyway. It’s not like I was very successful or together either. I’d help him get to the next stage in life along with me.

Except…he wouldn’t go.

I tried nudging him along.

He always had excuses for why he didn’t want to apply to a good job. It usually came back to his code of honor, which I was getting very sick of by that point.

There are few good jobs you can get in rural New Hampshire, not without a skill anyway. Dennis had no college. Dennis knew no trade. I wanted him anyway. I just needed him to help me even a little.

“The ball bearings factory,” I told him. “Starting pay is $12 an hour. That’s really good.” And it was. This was 2009. This was rural New Hampshire. $12 an hour was very good pay.

I don’t remember why he didn’t want to work there. It wasn’t an honorable place to work for some reason or another.

Another piece of this honor code was that he wouldn’t “lie” on a job application. Which really meant he would say the most absurd things on these formal documents in the name of “honesty.”

The few times he got interviews, he was also absurdly honest. If he was asked, “Why do you want to work here?” he would respond with something like “I really don’t. I think I’ll be bored and hate dealing with customers. But the pay is good, so I’ll put up with it for a while.”

And because he was so proud of having so much honor, he’d tell me said those things.

I was starting to become very frustrated with him.

“Don’t you want to live with me? Don’t you want to marry me? Can’t you try even a little?”

He always changed the subject and never really told me why he was acting that way.

I nagged him into applying to Wal-Mart. Aside from working at the ball bearings factory, Wal-Mart was one of the sweetest gigs there was for a person with no degree or skill-set.

I sat with him while he completed the online application. He got to the part that’s like a Myers-Briggs personality test. You know, where they ask you about how you’d handle specific situations?

“No, no!” I told him. “You want the third answer.”

“But that’s not what I’d do.”

I sighed. “Dennis, you won’t get called for an interview if you don’t fill it out right.”

He ignored all of my attempts to give him the right answers. He kept clicking on the “honest” “honorable” answers.

I went over to the couch and put my head in my hands. I didn’t know what to do. I loved him. I loved him so much. But I was seeing him in this brand new way. What we had now was what we would always have. He’d never moved forward in life because he didn’t want to.

I kept trying. I kept prodding. I kept trying to convince him. I love you. We could be together all the time.

I wanted it so much. I wanted it so badly that I found myself applying to second jobs. With a second job, we could do it.

It was when a manager at a convenience store asked me about my availability that it hit me. “I have school in the mornings and I work Wendy’s in the afternoon. On Tues and Thursday I don’t have classes or work, so I’m available all day. And I’m open on the weekends in the mornings.”

I realized that I was going to be working round the clock. Not even one day off. No breaks. All so that Dennis could hold on to this…honor of his….

I know he wasn’t being this way to be cruel. But I also knew I couldn’t do this to be with him.

After that conversation with that manager (who never did offer me the job btw), I viewed my relationship with Dennis differently. This wasn’t my future husband. This was something nice right now.

I started feeling sad whenever I was with him, and when I noticed this, it made me even sadder, because I loved him so deeply and wanted us to have a future so much. But I couldn’t make it happen on my own. I couldn’t drag him into it.

I spent less and less time with him.

He called me one day and asked me what was wrong. Why wasn’t I spending the night anymore? Why hadn’t I called in almost a week?

And I chickened out. I didn’t know how to tell him that I had to end it because I couldn’t rely on him. As much as he always wanted to take care of me emotionally, when it came to the practicalities of life, I couldn’t trust him to help me. I was afraid of a life with a man I couldn’t trust to help me.

“I think I need to focus more on school,” I lied. “I want to break up.”

He cried. He cried so much. And I started crying too. Because I wished it could have been different.

“If you end this, you can never come back to me,” he sobbed. And he’d never talked to me like that before.

“Okay.”

We didn’t talk again until 7 years later. I told him his wedding pictures were beautiful and his baby looked just like him and he thanked me for accepting his friend request and asked if I was still writing.

This is what was supposed to happen. It was hard, but it was what was supposed to happen.

My head popped off again briefly after Dennis. I went back to some of my worst behaviors. But the first time a man talked to me like the way they’d always talked to me, I snapped out of it.

Because Dennis had shown me there was a different way to do this love thing. I stopped taking poor treatment from men and I started working a lot harder on getting my shit together, and as silly and immature as he was back then, I don’t think I would have done it without him.

He wasn’t perfect, but he did love me. And meeting and loving him was a major turning point in my life.

Dennis: Part 8

My grandmother had a very serious conversation with me after the maybe-miscarriage situation.

“Jennifer, with all of the problems you’ve had, with all of the headaches you’ve given us, I’ve never ever threatened to put you out.”

We were in the car. She’d turned down the volume of her Sara McLaughlin CD to lay down the law.

“I raised you when you were little. Your mother was out running around town like a wild woman. She was down at the pier, she was at the club, she was driving her car in her whosit-derby thing.” She got annoyed and waved her hand in the air. “Who was home giving bottles and changing diapers?”

“You,” I said quietly.

“And I know you hate to hear it, but you’re an awful lot like your mother. I hope you get it together. She never did. Your grandfather and I still pay all her bills.”

“I know.”

“You can barely bathe and feed yourself without me getting involved. You think you can take care of a baby?”

I shook my head. She was right. I knew I couldn’t.

“I am telling you this now, so if you get yourself pregnant again-“

“I might not have been pregnant,” I argued. “The tests I took were negative.”

“Where did you buy them?”

I watched all the trees flicking past the car. The drive down the mountain was always so pretty mid-morning.

“Jennifer?”

“The dollar store.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She just sighed. Then she kept talking.

“I’m almost 70. I’m not going to raise another baby. Raising your mother’s unplanned babies didn’t help her out any. I won’t do it for you. If you get pregnant again, you’ll have a choice: put it up for adoption or find another place to live.”

I didn’t say anything at first.

“Jennifer, do you understand me?” her voice was very stern.

“Yes, I understand that.”

“When we get home, check your dresser. Your grandfather and I picked something up for you.”

After we got back from errands, I went to my room. On my dresser there was a massive box of condoms. I didn’t even know they came in such huge containers.

I slept over Dennis’s house that night. We were watching “I am Legend.” We both liked Will Smith movies. He didn’t like “I am Legend” though. He’d already watched it with Zach, but when I said I really wanted to see it, he told me to go ahead and pick it up from Blockbuster.

We were cuddling in his bed like we usually did.

I told him what my grandmother had said.

He kissed the back of my head and he said, “We’ll be more careful. I should have known better. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “It turned out okay. It made me think though. What would have happened if I’d stayed pregnant-I mean, if I really was. If I had a baby, what would have happened?”

“What do you mean? I would have taken care of you.”

And I had to figure out how to word the next part. I needed to say it without making him feel bad.

“Yeah, but…how?”

“How?”

“Yeah, where would we have lived?”

He kissed my hair again and snuggled into me tighter. “You’d have lived here with me.”

Something sort of shifted in my gut. I looked around at his basement and I saw it in a new way. It was full of junk. Always dirty. So many corners were covered in dust. It wasn’t even a finished basement. In the winter, he hooked up two space heaters. He had no bed-frame, just a mattress on the floor. A month prior to this, I’d found a patch of black mold growing on the wall behind his bed. I found it while he was at work. I asked his grandmother if I could take some cleaning supplies. I had two buckets, one filled with soapy warm water and one with bleach. I cleaned it for him, then I went to pick him up from his shift. I told him I’d found mold growing on the wall, but that I’d cleaned it up. It was one of the only times he was annoyed at me. “You don’t have to clean my room,” he said. “I wanted to,” I told him. “That wasn’t healthy.” “It wasn’t bothering me.” “You knew it was back there?” He asked me to please not clean his room again and changed the subject.

This basement was fine enough. It was kind of gross. I didn’t need much back then though. I was easy. But now he was saying this basement was a place you could put a baby in….a baby crib….surrounded by the piles of garbage and junk, with swords on the wall and stacks of dusty anime dvds….

“You couldn’t have a baby in here,” I told him. “We’d have to get our own apartment.”

“Maybe we should do that anyway.”

My eyes widened.

“I already proposed to you. Maybe we should get our own place.”

And I squealed and twisted around to kiss him.

I went to sleep that night still believing he and I would be together forever. But that’s not what happened.

His code of honor really got in the way and in the end, I couldn’t do it all myself. But I’ll tell that part next.