Rachel says: Okay, I closed the site down. Are you happy now?
Jane says: Thank God! You know I rely on you to have a life for me, right? My life is diapers, Dora the Explorer, and CD48. So you’re not allowed to get married and have kids.
Rachel says: Fine! I’ll just keep dating twenty-four-year-olds then.
At about six, I started to wrap up for the day. I felt good about how productive I’d been. Each day, the fog of sadness lifted a little more. Because of that, I could actually focus on my job. I found that I now could make helpful suggestions about the stuff I was editing rather than just moving commas around. I no longer had a heart attack every time a technical writer popped in to ask me a question, thinking, “He’s going to find out how ignorant I really am!”
Best of all, I often forgot to dwell on Loser’s presence right down the hall. It was true that after our recent close encounter, I’d gone back to keeping my door closed. Yeah, I’d bragged in my blog about how I was going to look him in the eye, but that had been a burst of false bravado. I had no desire to see him. It was amazing, actually, how much protection that door seemed to offer me. With it as a barrier between me and my memories, I could now actually do my spectacularly dull but fabulously high-paying job. I’d invested it with magical powers. As long as you are closed, O Door, I shall not be visited by ye olde ghost of Loser!
Now that I was feeling better, I wanted to work harder, and in order to do that, I needed to clear off my desk, both literally and figuratively. So all week, I’d been setting up files and organizing bookshelves. Ordering office supplies that I should have gotten a long time ago. Before I left tonight, I was going to clean the top two drawers of my desk and put some posters up. The office would look so much better with a little color in it.
But I didn’t get very far on my organizational spree because I had a desk drawer that, unlike my door, was not secure. I oh-so-innocently went to open it, preparing to get rid of any unnecessary crap that might be lurking. And what should happen? Memories poured out of it like a horde of English soccer hooligans, yelling obscenities, brandishing beer bottles, and hell-bent on trampling me.
Wednesday, October 16, 2002
10:57 PM Breakup Babe
It was about 6:00 tonight when I found the card. When I pulled it out of the back of my drawer, I looked at it for a second, confused. “ToR.,” it said on the front. I didn’t even recognize the handwriting at first. Then, when I did, my heart started to pound. I had an irrational thought. Was it a letter from Loser that I somehow hadn’t seen? A letter expressing regret? Asking if we could get back together?
No, it couldn’t be. Not if I had already stuffed it into my drawer. Could it? When I pulled it out of the envelope with trembling fingers, I saw it was the birthday card that went along with the necklace he’d given me. Written in late May. After he’d cheated on me, but before he’d dumped me. During his ultranice lover-boy phase.
Dear R.,
Happy birthday to my beautiful darling. I love you very much.
L.
Christ. I started to cry immediately, spontaneously. Sometimes it took me a while to work up to it, but this time the memories cut like a scalpel—deep, clean, and to the bone. I stumbled over to the door and closed it. Damn it. I thought I was done with these office breakdowns!
I sat down at my desk and stared at the card. Tears fell onto it. I thought back to my birthday, how happy I’d felt. Everything was going my way. New job. Happy relationship. I remembered how Loser and I had gone into the cafeteria and he’d given me my gift because he couldn’t wait until that night, when we were going out to celebrate. He’d been so sweet and affectionate. “You look so cute today!” he’d told me. He told me that almost every day, but I never got sick of it.
“Tear it up and throw it away,” said Sensible Girl firmly, marching into my office. Even in my grief, I was shocked to see that she was wearing a T-shirt that said “Feel the excitement—Empire!” Had she dug it out of my Goodwill bag? “Come on!” she wheedled, her tone a little more urgent now. She looked around my office apprehensively. “What do you need that thing sitting around for? It was all a lie! The message in there—a LIE.”
I picked it up. Prepared to tear it up.
“Wait!” Needy Girl burst into the office, tripping over a pair of pink, high-heeled Mary Janes that she was wearing with a short, flouncy black skirt (hadn’t I seen Drew Barrymore wearing the same outfit in a recent issue of Cosmo?). “It wasn’t ALL a lie! He DID love you. You know that! And now you’re just going to obliterate all traces of him?” She pushed Sensible Girl out of the way and came to a halt in front of my desk, panting.
Sensible Girl did not take kindly to being shoved. With a fury that had clearly been building in her for months now, she strode up to Needy Girl, grabbed her by the shoulders, and whirled her around so they were face-to-face. “YOU,” she said, “are a menace!” Needy Girl put her hand to her own throat in surprise. She whimpered something unintelligible.
“Why should she keep that card around? Just to torture herself? She needs to move on and that is THAT!”
I could tell Sensible Girl wanted to slap Needy Girl, but she settled for gripping her shoulders and glaring at her. “Furthermore, the way for her to move on is NOT to date a hundred million guys but to face her own fears about being alone and get just a little bit grounded.” Needy Girl started to shake. “So I wish you would just CHILL OUT!” She released Needy Girl, who stumbled backward to the wall, then slid down it.
“Look who needs to chill out,” said Needy Girl, but there was no bite to her words. She started to sob. Big, heavy, wet sobs, her head on her knees.
“Crap,” muttered Sensible Girl. She knew that once Needy Girl started crying, it was all over. She looked at me, forehead creased with worry, then over at Needy Girl. Sensible Girl looked close to breaking down herself.
My own tears abated briefly during the showdown, but now they came back full force. What a pathetic trio we made! I stuffed the card back into the drawer from whence it had come. Then, all organizational urges destroyed, I gathered my stuff together and prepared to leave the office as fast as I could.
I knew, without a doubt, that Loser was down the hall at this very minute. He never left earlier than seven. There was no possible way I could stay another second, knowing he was so close, yet so f*cking far away. For that matter, I wondered, how the hell could I even work here another day?
When I left, I slammed my office door as hard as I could. The sound rang through the hallways like a shot.
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Oh, how miserable! I have also made the mistake of dating at work and then breaking up. Just walking down the hall became a nightmare. I ended up quitting that job. You are a stronger woman than me!
CandyCane | Homepage | 10/17/02 | 9:05 A.M.
I say go to the spa! It will help you feel better—at least temporarily. My problem is that I can’t seem to be happy with or without a guy. If I’m alone I want to find someone. If I’m dating someone, there’s always some drama involved. Is it too much to ask that I could just be happy on my own without having to worry about men?
Little Princess | Homepage | 10/17/02 | 4:59 P.M.
You should definitely throw it away, and sooner rather than later. I’ve made the mistake of keeping things around like that. They stop you from moving on even if you don’t realize it.
Jake | 10/18/02 | 12:34 A.M.
Chapter Fourteen
Thursday, October 17, 2002
1:39 PM Breakup Babe
General Celexa paid me a visit this morning. I woke up after a night of bad Loser-related dreams wondering if I could even make it in to work today. It’s just so f*cking unfair that I have to work down the hall from him! How can I be expected to do it?! How have I been doing it?
As I lay in bed, trying to summon the energy to call in sick, I wondered if perhaps my boss would let me work at home on a semipermanent basis
. It seemed all my coworkers “worked at home” half the time anyway, which, I was sure, meant working two hours out of the day and then doing whatever it was people who lived on the east side of Lake Washington did the rest of the time. Cleaned their toilets? F*cked the gardener?
But, all of a sudden, there was General C., looking frighteningly awake in his fatigues and combat gear. “Snap out of it!” he said. “Haven’t we been through this before?”
I pulled the covers over my head. He pulled them off.
“Sit up. NOW! And look me in the eye!”
Like a sulky five-year-old, I did as I was told, embarrassed to be caught sleeping in an extralarge U.C. Berkeley sweatshirt, ratty pajama bottoms, and wool socks. Not that General C. was any beacon of style himself. But still.
His voice boomed through my apartment. “You are not going to sit around and wallow, repeat NOT. You are going to go to work and suck it up. So what if that worm works down the hall! I hate to remind you of this, but you need this job, sister. Big-time! What are you gonna do if you lose it; go live at home with your mommy?”
I hung my head. The thought had crossed my mind just last night. Bereft of a boyfriend and a job, I’d move back to my childhood home in suburban, upscale Palo Alto. Sleep under the Little Orphan Annie comforter my mother had forced upon me when I was eleven. Surrounded by high school yearbooks filled with pictures of me with an ’80s-style mullet, I would have no social life and probably no s*x. I would not be able to produce creatively because of my agonizing boredom. Consequently I would end up living with my mother for the rest of my life and dying an old maid with the Little Orphan Annie comforter as my shroud.
“No,” I said, barely enunciating the word.
“Say it again: I am not going to live at home with my mommy! Louder this time!”
“I am not going to—”
“LOUDER!”
“I am not going to live at home with my mommy!”
“That’s better!”
Now, half a day later, with the help of several Americanos, support from you, my gentle readers, and General C.’s pep talk, I’m back in the office with most of my old gumption.
Not only that, thanks to the advice of reader Jake, I ripped up that Loser birthday card today—the one in which he called me his beautiful f*cking darling, the one he wrote after he cheated on me—and threw it away.
And it felt…sad.
I immediately wondered What have I done? and wanted to gather up those tiny pieces and tape them back together. I hope they emptied my trash at work last night so I don’t have to sit there with those fragments haunting me.
Funny how the thought of that now bothers me more than the thought that Loser is a mere twenty feet away all day long, day in, day out (thank you, General C.!). Mostly now I think about spilling coffee on him—by ACCIDENT of course—next time we pass each other in the hall. I haven’t had a sighting in three weeks now—praise be!—but Judgment Day is coming.
I was blogging at work again. I figured I deserved it. For one, I’d been to work by the nearly unheard of hour of 9:30 A.M., after thinking that I wasn’t going to make it in—today or ever. Second, I’d torn up that stupid birthday card immediately upon arrival. Third, I’d attended an editorial meeting that morning, during which the following comment had come out of my mouth:
“But if it’s a Boolean property, doesn’t that mean that the return value has to be either ‘true’ or ‘false,’ and that ‘true’ or ‘false’ has to be tagged as a constant or keyword depending on which programming language it’s in?”
The editors, en masse, had turned and looked at me with something resembling shock. I was a bit shocked, too, if truth be told. I’d been sitting in meetings for four months now, barely saying a word, or if I did, commenting mainly on safe topics like grammar. Now it was as if I was toddler and these were my first words. Except instead of saying “Mama!” I’d said something like, “Mom, what do you think of the idea that if there is no normative or unitary concept of ‘woman,’ feminism can’t exist as a movement?”
I could have justified not doing any more work all day after that little comment, but, in fact, immediately after that meeting, I’d strapped myself into the straitjacket with only a modicum of struggle and plodded my way through at least twenty pages of technical mumbo jumbo.
It was time for a little break. One in which I could disembowel Loser to my heart’s delight.
Every time I roam the halls (more freely now, less furtively), I try to have a hot beverage in hand so that when the moment comes that he rounds the corner, and I round the corner, then OOPS, it goes all over his tighty-whitey-sheathed crotch, ideally causing permanent damage.
“SORRY!!” I’ll say, smiling and barely breaking stride, as coworkers look on and he yelps over the coffee-stained mess that is his manhood (a strong word for what he’s packin’).
I chuckled, yet again, at my own wit. How many times had I read through my old journals, skimming through the boring boy-related drivel, only to stumble upon comic gems and think, “Damn, I wish I could publish this paragraph somewhere!” Thanks to Blogger, my dream had come true—to a certain degree. Now if only someone other than me would publish my witticisms.
Meanwhile, I felt just the teensiest bit guilty for gratuitously insulting Loser this way. It was true that he didn’t have the largest member in the history of mankind, but it had satisfied me just fine when we were together. So this wasn’t exactly fair, was it? He was probably never going to read this, but what if he did?
Well, if he did, maybe he would think twice next time about fucking someone over, especially a writer. Ha.
And now, for the latest *Boy!* *Boy!* *Boy!* updates…
Now that things have gotten hot ’n’ heavy with the Li’l Rockclimbing Spy—who possesses an irresistible combination of nice muscles, soft lips, and macho swagger—my chastity is being put to the test.
In this libertine age, there seems to be such an arbitrary line between going all the way and going part way. I have told myself many times in the past that I was not going to have sex with so-and-so, only to have sex with so-and-so because it seemed silly not to—after all, weren’t we practically doing it anyway?
But that’s a load of crap and I’ve always known it.
So, in keeping with my newly evolved personality, I’ve shown remarkable restraint with LRS. But it ain’t easy. Because after all, I’m only human. I have my needs, you know. And it’s been more than three months since I’ve gotten it nice and reg’lar. That’s too *$@#$! long!
Meanwhile, he’s making his debut to my friends this weekend when we attend a party together. Now, it’s true we’ve only known each other for two weeks. HOWEVER, I have sworn to myself that I will now solicit opinions from my loved ones much earlier in a relationship (oops, did I just call this a relationship?), and not only that, I will listen to these opinions.
Because, if history is any indication, the Li’l Rockclimbing Spy could have a giant horn growing out of his head and I would not see it. A shocking number of people came forth after The Great Unpleasantness to confess what (a) a drip, (b) a self-centered misfit, and (c) an uninteresting asshole they thought Loser was. Qualities, alas, that I, the blindly adoring girlfriend, had never once seen in him myself!
So, the sooner I get this over with, the better. And if they don’t like him, fine. I don’t want to get serious anyway! Because, as Sexy Boy pointed out, I’m still “on the rebound.” (Whatever that means. I guess it means I’m dating twenty-four-year-olds?)
And besides, behind Door #2, there is—da na NAH—The Doctor! The one whom it is hardwired into my genes to fall in love with, mate with, and produce perfect little dark-haired Jewish children who will go to an Ivy League school. Of course there’s a petite fly in the ointment, which is that he hasn’t called me yet.
Mere details, my friends.
He’s just playing it cool so I don’t realize how MADLY IN LOVE WITH ME he is. And when I go off to New York next week and my pl
ane crashes (because, of course, it will!), then he will rue the day he failed to make his love known to me. He will be so consumed with regret, in fact, that he will never be able to love another woman again!
Poor guy.
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Boys are stupid, remember that, Breakup Babe. I just found your site via Li’l Princess and I’ve added a link to you. Chloe | 10/17/02—6:17 P.M.
I would beg to differ with that previous comment, but I’m afraid Chloe’s right—for 95 percent of the male of the species. Present company not always excluded. Good job tearing up the birthday card.
Jake | 10/17/02—10:47 P.M.
Wow, are you dating two guys at once? Good job, B.B.! I want the details—length, width, circumference, everything. Once you get them, of course. No rush.
Delilah | Homepage | 10/18/02—11:31 A.M.
Didn’t you point out once that being a boy magnet had its drawbacks? For example, you always end up dating the wrong guy? I say ditch The Doctor and the guy in Pampers too, and wait for someone really good to come along.
Still Concerned | 10/18/02—9:01 A.M.
Chapter Fifteen
I jerked awake at about 4 A.M. Turbulence. If I did manage to fall asleep on a plane, it was never a very deep sleep because I had to be braced at all times for disaster. Most flights I stared out the window, headphones clamped over my ears, fingers of my left hand crossed. For someone who hated to fly, I sure ended up on a lot of planes.
I gripped my armrests, pressed my nose to the frigid glass, and waited for the next jolt. I knew that flying to New York was a bad idea. I knew it! Even though I’d flown a few times since September 11, this was the first time I’d flown to New York since then, and I couldn’t help but feel uneasy. Remembering all the passengers, who, just like me, might have been afraid to fly, but tried to reassure themselves that it was safe. Flying was really safe.
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