| Dec. 28th, 2006 @ 04:21 am I just DARE you not to comment... |
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Remnar Soady: I couldn't help myself, eh? The girl's got the tongue of a trout.
Albert Soady: Your mother had the tongue of a trout.
“Escanaba in da Moonlight” (2001)
"Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie
around on lakes. Killing is the first thing we
learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead,
and the tigers would rule the earth."
Valentine Wiggin, “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
I don't know why I'm surprised when folk don't like me.
I've had to deal with this since grammar school. There is something about me that people just can't stand. I've never quite pinned down the problem. I used to be made of for an alternating combination of being fat and ugly. When I got to middle school, it was a fat/ugly/she talks funny combination. I'm an adult now, and while it's not socially acceptable for another adult to call me fat or ugly to my face, they seem to think it's alright to mock my speech.
--Melanie Bennett, 2005-07-03 05:24:00
I wanted to write about Christmas. Not the whole “Spirit of Christmas” or “What Christmas Means to Me” or anything like that. I was just going to talk about the many things and people I met over the last three weeks or so. I got to have Christmas three times this year, oddly enough.
I’ll talk about that, I hope, the next time I’ve got some free writing time at the computer. Tomorrow, I shall go to Millersburg again, so I shant be free then, and Friday is booked already. Gods willing, I shall see Jason, Brian, Jesee, Aaron and Chris all in the same room, with or without one of those huge fucking Subway subs.
But, being that I am who I am, today’s entry shall be taken up by my ex-girlfriend, that is, my most recent ex-girlfriend, Beth.
I’m going to try and get through the entry without calling her a bitch. I will fail. I’m very bitter, and I know she’ll take that as a comfort as she carefully reads and re-reads my words for weakness. Oh, dear readers, it won’t be hard to find weakness in Your Humble Narrator today. In Beth, I am and have always been the weakest of the race.
I fell in love with her less than an hour after the first time I was on the internet on my own computer. That was more than seven years ago, when she was a mere slip of a girl. She was fifteen years old, pretending to be nineteen on mIRC. I was on mIRC specifically to find someone exactly like her. Mind, the fact that she was fifteen, which I eventually learned, was a real pain in the ass, though it gave us a great opportunity to learn more about each other, since I was damn sure not going to meet her in real life until AFTER her eighteenth birthday.
I was dating a girl in real life at the time. Her name is Michelle, and she reads my journal from time to time and bitches at me for the things I write. I really like that. It’s not the bitching that I like, it’s the reading. I’m the most egotistical bastard I have ever met, and the fact that she reads enough of my journal to bitch about it makes me smile. She’ll bitch about this, I’m sure. Michelle and I had a rocky relationship, and had just broken up and gotten back together when I acquired both a computer and an internet connection from a guy named Aaron who is NOT the Aaron that I normally speak about. For the sake of better understanding, and not for the purpose of masking his identity, I shall call him “Hammer.”
Hammer hooked me up with a Compaq, and told me all about the girl he found on the internet. Michelle and I had barely been back together, and I convinced myself that it was unlikely that we’d stay together. Right now, I can’t even remember what was behind most of our fighting. I know that we’d broken up because she’d gone and spent Thanksgiving with her fiancé and, as far as I recall, she’d slept with him. There was some sort of loophole where we weren’t actually dating, I think. I will freely admit that my recollections of that November and December are shaky at best, so don’t judge me so harshly, Michelle, if I’m off on some key points. I’d be happy to stand corrected if you’d let me know why we weren’t together for awhile there.
Nonetheless, I was online looking for a girl, though not one as far away as Hammer’s lover in New Zealand, when I came across artful_wench. We HATED each other from the beginning, but couldn’t stay away from each other. We’d battle as well as two people could on mIRC, getting each other banned from certain rooms. I’d post poetry, and she’d say nice things about it, though I never shared much that I thought was any good myself.
We started a “relationship” online. We’d talk for hours and hours on Yahoo Messenger before we graduated to letters and phone calls. My phone bill got quite high, and I had to get a post office box when Michelle moved in. Myself, I didn’t consider these things to be cheating. This was a long time ago, all things considered, and I might have a different opinion of whether or not they’d be cheating by my standards if I found myself in that situation today.
Later, Beth insisted that she didn’t know about Michelle. I don’t know how that could possibly be. I mentioned quite often that I was having sex with a girl in real life. I think it was the fact that we were engaged that had hurt Beth deeply enough that she somehow forgot that I was seeing someone “IRL”. I don’t know. I set the date of the engagement for Beth’s 18th birthday because I had no intention of actually marrying Michelle. Michelle had been engaged to a nice guy named Jaime (or Jamie, I don’t remember) when I met her. She told me almost immediately that she never planned to marry him. I decided on that day that I wanted to get engaged to her and then not marry her. It didn’t take long for me to get her cheating on her fiancé. But, this is not the entry where I talk about all that to great detail. I just mention it so that my readers will be aware that I was never going to marry Michelle, and that I picked that date NOT to hurt Beth, but to clue her in to the fact that Michelle was my stand-in until Beth herself was old enough for me to date legally.
Beth called my house on my birthday, and Michelle answered. Beth and I had lots of fights after that, and were constantly going through patches where we stopped talking to each other. Often, I’d get information about her from her friend, Shehan, or a lovely young girl who will likely hate me forever, by name of Julia.
Michelle and I broke up long before Beth turned 18, and I dated other girls, and had sex with girls I didn’t date (sorry Dad) and life went on.
After Beth turned 18, she came for a visit, and we had some very nice times. I believe Beth refers to something about “your hot gypsy sex” in her recent entry. Then, she went back to Tennessee and we dated online again, with plans for her to move to Pennsylvania as soon as she could. We got in a fight over the date of the move, and she broke up with me. This gave her another chance to do drugs and have sex with a girl and another guy, so she was quite happy at it, but then she came back to me. She came to visit again, a little less tight but non-the-worse for wear, all things considered, though she now had a second tattoo. It represented the fact that we were supposed to be apart, or something like that. Lizards, as if they were more suited to her back than to Geiko and Budweiser.
But, I digress…
We ended up living together with my friend Aaron, and this is the Aaron that is still my friend here in Elizabethtown, not the afore-mentioned Hammer. There was no room for three people to be living there, and it was really hard going for awhile. The sex was great, though. Since Aaron wasn’t getting any of the sex, it was nowhere near as fun for him. Eventually, though, I forced Beth to grow up just enough to rent a one-room dealie nearby. That lasted an obscenely short period of time, until I got someone to take my place as Aaron’s roommate. Beth and I got a place, and lived for a year together in Pennsylvania.
The place wasn’t great, but it was good. The neighbor, Patti, was a lush who would bitch about how horrible men were and how much Beth should leave me. Beth really hated her. My former beloved was miserable pretty much all of the time, and talked about how nice it would be to be back in Tennessee and such.
So, we moved to Tennessee, back to her hometown of Tullahoma. I got a job working with her father and for her grandfather. I quite liked that. I enjoyed working with Richard quite a bit. We’d go over to her parents’ house almost every day, and that was nice, too. We’d watch “Law and Order”, “Fear Factor” and other, random television programs, often in each others arms. I have confessed in the past that one of my favorite parts about having a girlfriend is the cuddling. I like to hold someone in my arms and watch a movie or a television program, and just listen to their heart. It’s almost the only thing I want in the world, gentle readers…
Almost…
So, after a period of time, we stopped doing that. I don’t know why, exactly. It got to the point that I realized Beth wasn’t going to be any happier in Tennessee than she was in Pennsylvania. Her parents and grandparents gave us money and food and furniture and anything else they had to give, but it just didn’t seem to be enough to make my former beloved any happier than when we were shoe-horned into a two-bedroom apartment with Aaron.
I eventually assumed she couldn’t be happy without the drugs she’d been taking since before I ever met her. I didn’t let her take drugs when we dated. That makes me “controlling”, I’m told, but only by Beth.
I can’t wait to hear her bitch about that one. If she’s got any idea how to play this little game of hers, she won’t comment anywhere I can read it, because that will just prove she reads my journal still, though she can’t help but comment. If she comments on her site, I should, in theory, not be able to read it, as long as she takes both me and my roommate, Chris, off of her “friends” list.
I’m not sure which is the lesser of two evils. My bet, right now, is that she’ll pretend to ignore anything I write, to try and make me think she hasn’t read it. Of course, she has no idea what’s going on with me, other than what I care to share here. She DOES know that I read her latest entry, since it’s what sparked me to write this. I’ll post it at the end for those of you not on her “friends” list.
Now, where was I?
Right, Tennessee.
She went through a few jobs, and never seemed to bring in as much money as she spent. I got a job at Wal-Mart when her grandfather decided to stop employing her father. I’m aware of why that was, but I’m not going to spill the beans. I like her father very much, actually. I might have been in love with Beth, but I liked her father more than I liked her on our best day.
I think I did a pretty good job pretending I liked her mother, but I know that her grandparents were never fooled for a minute.
But, let’s get back to Wal-Mart. I had a good time at Wal-Mart, and I got to spend a good deal of time blowing off steam about my relationship with Beth. Malinda, in particular, was always so glad to hear about our fights in all the details I could give her. Beth began to grow suspicious that Malinda and I were more than friends, so Malinda and I had a fight, and we didn’t speak to each other for awhile. Yes, readers, it was that easy.
Sadly enough, it’s always that easy.
Of course, Malinda married one of my only friends living in Tennessee, so even if I could have convinced her that I had something to offer her, I wouldn’t have. I would never have done that to Scott, even if I had thought I had stood a chance. I’m pretty sure that I never did, but that’s neither here nor there…
Beth and I struggled on, and there were even times where we had enough money to make her happy for a couple of days at a time. We’d go to Chattanooga, see the aquarium and maybe Rock City, do some drinking and spend way too much for a meal. On days like that, she was fine. Then she’d get depressed, and have to buy a set of dishes we’d never need, or yet ANOTHER selection from Bath and Body Works to pile on the floor of the closet. I believe she was up to 51 pair of shoes.
Do recall that we were barely paying our bills. She threw a party in June and we had to have our internet and cable cut to cover it. Yes, you read that correctly.
She’d buy plane tickets to go see Charles in Pennsylvania, or grow ill and have to take four or five days off work at a time often enough that we never had any bank account. From the point of view of a student of Humanity, she was fascinating. I could write more than one book about what I learned just from this one little girl. I won’t. I could, though.
Eventually, I said “fuck it” and started making what we call “exit plans.” I began to bring boxes home from Wal-Mart and packing the non-essential goods. I started selling off the VHS tapes and copying anything on the hard drive to more portable media, in case she caught on and smashed the computer. I was going to start pocketing twenty dollar bills at every opportunity, but I decided that it would be more interesting if I just let the money issue sort itself out. Surviving is the easiest thing I do.
Instead of money, I started buying food. I stockpiled food so that I’d have a bunch of cans and other items available for a later date.
I was never worried that Beth would put much thought into why I was packing my stuff. Instinctively, we both knew that we’d part ways eventually. For those of you in a relationship right now, allow me to give you the number one SURE-FIRE way to tell if you are in a STABLE relationship or not. Go to where your books and movies are located in the house. Now, go to where your boyfriend, girlfriend, roommate, lover, or spouse keeps theirs. If they’re not co-mingled with yours, then at least one of you is planning to end the relationship at some point.
I don’t think Beth and I ever discussed WHY our movies had to be in two separate places, and our books, though near each other, were never on the same shelves as each others’ books. We just knew.
Saved money on an engagement ring, it did.
So, I packed up my stuff slowly over the course of several months. I was going to wait until tax time, where I’d get a lump sum of money, and offer to leave her to her devices. I wasn’t going to sneak away in the night. I was going to pay the next month’s rent, and move to Maryland or Texas. I wanted to move to Canada, but Debbie didn’t seem interested in talking to me, and I wasn’t going to move up there without an “in” girl.
However, sometime around Halloween, Beth was given tickets to see Charles again in Pennsylvania. I spent the week frantically preparing for a move. It takes me FOREVER to pack, because I have so much goddamned stuff. I threw away a TON of things I felt were not worth my time, and started searching through her stuff for anything that was mine and found its way into her possession without my knowledge.
She got back from her trip to PA with Charles, and wouldn’t even touch me. I had spent the week hearing her mother constantly bitch about her, though Beth denies the possibility that this could be true. I lie so very often.
We had a fight, and Beth said something along the lines of “Forget it. We’ll just fuck and everything will be fine.”
That’s pretty much the description of the last four years of our relationship in a nutshell. That day, I said “The damn we will.”
We didn’t fuck, readers. I know I’ve got family reading this, and they don’t want to hear any more about my sex life than possible (Sorry, ‘nell) but I’m bearing witness to the events of my life here. You’ll just have to deal.
It wasn’t long after that we broke up. We tried, half-heartedly, to stay friends and roommates. We ended up having a fight where she threatened to physically attack me, and I informed her that the police would take her away, and her cats would go to the pound and await the gas chamber. Since I was never going to be able to hit her back if she started swinging, it was all I could think to say. We were never allowed to have the cats in the house in the first place, I reminded her, and if we had a fight that involved the landlord, she’d probably have to give them up.
She went nuclear, readers. She grabbed an obscenely small amount of her belongings, and took the cats home to mother. Her mother was pissed off, to be sure, but not at poor Bethy. No, she blamed ME, the Great Satan, for whatever it is Beth told her I did. I actually cried when I had to put Amsterdam in the pet carrier, since he didn’t want Beth touching him.
She returned him not long after. Amsterdam has become an extension of myself. I put up with Beth because she’s good in bed. Amsterdam, not having any human genitalia, had absolutely no use for her whatsoever. Mind you, the fact that she, a supposed animal lover, returned him to me so quickly is proof positive that she never REALLY believed that I would hurt any of the cats in the first place. I mentioned this to her, but I never got any satisfaction out of it. I suppose she just assumed I’d outsmart her every time I tried since I’d done it so often in the past. I didn’t even get an argument out of her on the subject.
Well, I lived alone with Amsterdam for a month, though I had Final Fantasy XII to keep me company, and thus I didn’t really notice Beth wasn’t around. I didn’t attempt to find another girlfriend, even for temporary needs. In fact, I actually turned down sex with a few girls, at least one of whom had been eagerly awaiting my break up with Beth. All of my friends were really thrilled that I was free, and I went out to dinner on like four occasions that month. I spent Thanksgiving with Scott and Malinda, which was nice. I think I told my father I was alone on Thanksgiving, but I had meant that night, though I did get to eat lunch with friends.
No need to belabor, though.
I had a really fun month, though I spent ENTIRELY too much money. I went through almost every inch of the house, searching for things that were mine or things that were neither Beth’s nor mine alone but might prove useful to me. I took the microwave, though Chris had one already, and the blender, though I’m never going to use it. I took some things so I could give them as gifts up here, and all the food I could. I left her some frozen dinners, vegetarian, even, but only because I thought she’d be too paranoid to eat them. She was looking for syringe holes in the last few things I gave her to eat. I have no doubt she’ll deny that, but she didn’t just do it, she mentioned that that was what she was doing. She’s safe doing that, readers; because I had long ago promised I would never have her committed.
I’m very good at keeping my promises. Hey, I’m up to seven pages. I could write about Beth all day and night, but the story’s coming to an end.
Beth and I stayed in contact during my month alone (plus Amsterdam) in the cold, cold house half-full of my boxed-up belongings. We tried to have some sort of Warsaw pact between us, though it was clear we couldn’t even be anything resembling friends.
By moving day, I was ready to kill her if she got anywhere near me. Three of the people who helped me move were friends of mine who hated Beth more than I ever could, I think. I spent most of the time trying to convince them not to do horrible things to the house or her stuff. Mind you, I don’t get any credit for that. I’m just glad that, as far as I know, nothing bad happened. Mind you, the house was a MESS when we left. We even left fast food wrappers lying about, though I just assumed her mother would clean the place for her. Only once while living in Tennessee, Beth had agreed to do the dishes in the house. When I came home from work, I had found that she’d gotten her mother to do them for her. That day I decided that I wanted to stick her with two sinks full of the dirtiest dishes I could produce when the time came. And I most certainly did.
The house, as messy as it was, could easily have been made right during a weekend’s worth of cleaning, though it pleases me to no end to imagine how the place must look as I write this.
I wonder if she’s checked under the couch, yet.
With as rough a relationship as I just survived, it’s the little victories that keep me going. I could list them here, but I have no real need to. Just writing this with a wide smile on my face seems to be enough for me.
I escaped Beth and Tennessee less than a month ago, but it seems like FOREVER since I was a part of that world. I don’t know if that’s just because so very much has happened to me since I’ve gotten up here, or because I had disconnected from her in advance, or what. I am just grateful.
It took me a very long time to learn how to be grateful.
I know that most of you might not be able to understand that last sentence as I wrote it. Not because you’re not intelligent people. If you can use the internet well enough to find my website, and if you read seven pages to get to that sentence, you’re intelligent enough of a person. It’s just that the average citizen of this messed up planet seems to assume that every man, woman, and child has the same set of feelings that they do. Which is very odd, because that means that they think that people like Hitler and Rasputin and Courtney Love did the horrible things they did with all the same emotions that they, themselves possess.
Not all of us have a full set of them, readers. Ask my mother, and she’ll tell you that I was an ungrateful bastard for a very long time.
And my smile grows wider.
However, I have learned to be grateful, over the last few months. I have learned gratitude in a way that I shall never learn some of the other basic emotions. Humility comes to mind. I don’t know if I can ever be humble. I’ve got an ego the size of all outdoors. It’s hard to be humble when the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life was when an evil bitch broke up with me, and sent me into the loving arms of family and friends whom I never would have been able to appreciate without her help.
See, I called her a bitch. I won’t lie about being bitter. I am very bitter. I don’t think I’ll ever fully get over Beth. There’s a piece of me that never got over Liz. I suppose that the day will come when I meet another girl like the two of them. I only hope that I’ll have the good sense to run away this time.
I’m trying to decide if there’s anything more I need to say about Beth. I want this to be the last entry about her. I’m not promising that I’ll never mention her again. Obviously, if she mentions me in a way that I read or hear about it, I’ll mention her again. If she lets this entry slide without a comment, and never brings me up again, then it’s entirely possible that I’ll never feel the need to write about her again, either. This, as most of the events in our long and complicated relationship were, is up to her to decide.
I’m sure she’ll say that most of what I wrote is untrue. I don’t mind. I would forgive her for such things, if I were any good at forgiveness. I have learned gratitude for the people in my life and for the many gifts that were given to me, either by a God, or by fate or the total randomness of the universe. Forgiveness will be forever beyond my gift, however. I have tried every day for ten years and sixteen days (give or take, depending on when, exactly, the Army gave me Terry’s letter) to forgive Wane and Liz, and still haven’t done so. I thought I had, but I have not.
Yes, I think that makes me petty, by the way. You don’t need to be the first one to point it out. I’m well aware, thank you very much.
So, where am I? I’m living in Elizabethtown with a kindred spirit, and have had some great times with a family I never knew I needed, as well as some moments catching up with the family I grew up with. I’ve been to see my mother, grandmother, and sisters in Millersburg, and even met up with Dean. I’ve bonded with my real father and my stepmother, whom I hadn’t seen since I was three or four, and spent time with three sisters I never knew before this month. I got to go to a family reunion and a handful of Christmas get-togethers, where I met at least fifty people who were all nicer to me than the woman who spent four years pretending she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.
And I even made friends, to the best of my ability, with a pair of Black Labradors. And some people think there are no miracles…
It’s a good life, peeps. I owe an awful lot to Beth. She’s taught me more than I ever taught her. She’ll go on hating me for the rest of her life, and doing and saying whatever she can to convince herself and others that I’m even capable of lying about her. I’d ask you to forgive her that, since I cannot.
I cannot forgive a single one of the thousands of things she did to make my life an emotional hell for most of the last seven years. All I can do is be grateful that, in the end, she let me go.
Thank you, beloved. I am glad to hear that you’re doing so well. I can only assume that you’ve found some cheap drugs or yet another man who will exchange them for the only service you are good at. I will admit to being bitter, even as you won’t admit that I’m being honest as well…
Walk in Light, peeps. Especially you, Beth. There was never any room for you in the shadows, as we both always knew. Live your life, and try very hard not to mention me any more than you have to. I can write so much more than this without telling a single lie, and we both know it. I’m ever-so-willing to let all the rest of the skeletons remain buried. We can never have peace, but there must be part of you that is still sane enough to agree that we could have…silence.
As always, I remain Justin Michael Henninger Grexon (Hey, there, Jenni!) Klinger the First, at least until someone else wants the job…
What follows is, unedited, Artful_wench’s latest journal entry. I won't pretend for one moment that I didn't check several times a day to see when she was going to post that "longer entry" she mentioned having on November 19th. This one was posted last night, when I got home from my latest trip to Treverton.
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12/27/06
You know, my mother sums it up best for me sometimes.
After I broke up with Justin, I was hysterical. She said, "it was just a bad relationship. That's the end of it."
Apparently, my ex-boyfriend doesn't feel the same. I just read some horrible things he wrote about me in his livejournal. I find it droll, really. I'm over it. I'm getting laid. I'm half in love with two different guys...
I guess the older they are, the harder they fall?
All I want to say is that I'm happier than I have been since high school, he's lying about 70% of the events and ideas that occurred, and my mother actually loves me. I guess he's jealous of that, too.
Oh, and you really should leave Charles alone, too. I realize it's embarrassing that you could never measure up to him, even with your hot gypsy sex, but he's never done anything but love me and keep me from ripping your fucking head off.
I hope you enjoy the remainder of your days safe in the bosom of other people that you desperately depend on for godsmacks, rides, money, and sex. You're coming off my friends list just as soon as you read this.
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