Stopped on My Behalf
Last night was a fucking living nightmare. I hated the fact that I hurt somebody, I hated the fact that the hurt came from a completely selfishly ignorant place, and I hated that I felt so compelled to apologize for it profusely. I was so conflicted by the time I got home that I got in touch with my friendly ex and began explaining everything to her. She lent her usual listening ear, then laid out some horrifyingly existential things she was going through. Her crisis easily trumped my bullshit I put myself through over the last 12 hours. The right thing to do was to go and offer a person to vent at as she’s done the same for me a lot, especially lately. Her and I spent a couple hours in the early afternoon and I made myself available for her to emotionally vomit into my shirt while I tried to hold her hair back a little bit. Honestly, this was pretty great. She’s a really fabulous human. It actually made me feel pretty good about my judge of character so that got me thinking about my not-so-friendly ex and what we went through just hours prior. Communicating so clearly and wonderfully with the friendly ex gave me confidence to go out and express myself, apologize for not previously expressing my boundaries and intent, and get each other’s real fucking intent out in the open.
I head over to meet the not-so-friendly ex at her place while she gets ready for her day. The resoundingly shitty thing about the whole situation is that she was fine just being pissed at me and probably never discussing this again. This turned me off so fucking much when her attitude towards me identifying a boundary came up. We manage to talk when she gets out of the shower for a little bit and she flat out forces, “Well, what the fuck do you want to talk about? Talk!” Cool. That sets a mood of communication. My whole concept of identify intent and seeing if maybe we work at getting back together, seeing how she viewed everything, et al just went right out the fucking window. She actually grossed me out in that moment, like pure emotional disgust. Her face actually changed in front of my eyes like some shitty mid-90’s psychological thriller. She’s not an attractive person to me whatsoever anymore. But she did come across to me as somebody that needed help and to have some sort of “win” in the moment. All I could do was apologize for my behavior and for not expressing that sooner. This just enraged her further and she started spitting out half sentences and thoughts around “we’re doing dinner and dating or casual fucking or getting back together or just being friends or whatever the fuck” and I could tell I was flustering her. This isn’t want I wanted to do, and that sucked. So I took to my demure side, offered to simply be there for her so maybe her thoughts can come out more slowly and cogently. Eventually she spat out, “you fell right the fuck to sleep last night [not correct] and I had to see dating app notifications going off all night. I don’t shove my Tinder in your face, do ???”
That was when I checked out. I literally was helpless to do anything about this while I was sleeping. Why was she paying attention, why does that piss her off? Fuck her and her entitlement without any communication. Like a fucking toddler throwing a goddamn fit.
Well, that didn’t work. But something great that happened for me was seeing her face physically change. She’s pretty self-obsessed. I had noticed on our recent dates that she can only hold onto anything I talk about for a few seconds before just phasing out. I will sit and listen to her talk for 15 minutes without pause, contribute, ask qualifying questions, however, when I try to discuss some stressful or funny thing that happened to me that day, she’s bored after just a few moments and will actually sometimes literally say, “huh?” Like, what in the fuck? All of this started coming at me while we were talking and she was berating me for having boundaries and acting like I’m not dating her — because we aren’t a couple.
She eventually blames her anger on being hungry and asks me to go get lunch with her so I agree. We go to one of her favorite places, a Mongolian BBQ place. I’m looking at all the ingredients to make a bowl and thinking, “goddamn. This isn’t going to make me feel good.” But I fumbled to put a bowl together anyway. We take our seats and have a relatively cordial lunch. Dull, but cordial. I was able to see all these horrible things from our relationship just… sitting there. I cannot explain it. Her face was still distorted and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake it.
I don’t like hurting people whatsoever. It sucks I hurt her feelings, but I think I am over her in the sense of ever considering her seriously as a partner and that feels really fucking good. Best of luck to her, pretty sure she won’t ever want to be friends with me again. She doesn’t handle embarrassment well. We were supposed to go to a Drag Show tomorrow, however I highly doubt that’ll happen and so be it. I have enough work I put off that I need to spend some time and get caught up anyway.