|
|
3:45PM - Wednseday December 17, 2003 I felt bad doing it, and I cried about it for days. She was friends with the Boy, too, and in fact we met him together. He was sitting at the table with some people we knew one night when we went out to the Marquee, drunk out of his tree and very charming. Heh, we all know how that ended up, eh? What really sucks is that we had so much in common when we met, and I think I always had kind of a crush on her. She had more piercings than me, more tattoos than me, more experience with BDSM... She was always just more. We went out for coffee every Sunday night at the Mokka, two punk girls sipping cafe au lait and knitting and snarking, teasing the wait staff. Sometimes I really miss her. What I don't miss is how everything always had to be done HER way. How we always had to go to her apartment because she didn't like mine. I didn't miss the near-constant bitterness, it really wore me down after a while. Once she was hanging her head off the edge of her sofa, and it looked like she was smiling, and then I said to the Boy, "She's not smiling--she's just upside down!" Funny at the time, but sadly true. The final days were rough. I'd torn all the ligaments in my left ankle at the beginning of July, about three and a half years ago, I guess. This meant I couldn't be in the bellydance show on Labour Day weekend, so I was stage-managing. I was also working forty hours a week at the toy factory. She asked if I could house and bird-sit while she went home to Toronto for a week, and I said sure, why not? The Boy came with me, I thought it would be fun, almost like playing house, or something. Boy was I wrong. The Boy ate something crappy and was sick the entire week. Besides stage-managing a show, working forty hours, and parrot-coddling, I had no money and barely kept us fed that week, and also, I was moving at the end of August. She went away the last week of August. The Boy was useless. I packed up all my stuff that was at her apartment the day she was due home and went to work, and left him responsible for the cleaning up. Well, he apparently did a crappy job. And who did she complain to? Me. And in front of another one of her friends. It was humiliating. She acted like it was a privilege for me to stay in her apartment, away from the comforts and privacy of my own home, and that I'd abused it. Her parrot didn't go insane from loneliness, did it? I played with and sang to that bird every day. All she had were complaints. I don't think she had any real idea how big a deal it was for me to have to do all this, still on crutches. I was a roiling mass of resentment and anger and hurt. The final straw came when she made some crack about me whining over email. I wrote her back and told her I didn't have to take that abuse, and that's the last thing I ever said to her. She wrote me a response that I couldn't look at for weeks--it fucking haunted my inbox for what felt like forever. She didn't apologize, she rationalized, 'explained,' just like she always did. It didn't matter to her that my feelings were hurt. It was a clean break, or as clean as I could make it. I just couldn't deal with her anymore. I was spiralling into a big depression, I was going through a lot of changes--job, life, you name it, it was in flux. I felt like I had to get away. I had no problem with the Boy still being friends with her, I just couldn't do it anymore. That winter was one of the worst winters of my life, and I missed having the conversations we used to, I missed having coffee every Sunday night. There was a lot of her I missed, and still do. But I still can't talk to her when I see her on the street, and I don't think I ever will be able to.
|