Detox

I am an addict. Pure and simple. I don’t pop pills, I don’t drink copious and unsafe amounts of alcohol, I would be so lucky to have such a simple and run of the mill addiction. Instead I’m hopelessly devoted to my own misery. I have an innate and inescapable need to be miserable because I know of no other way to validate my existence. Before I met Nicole I spent twenty-one years being miserable and then she came along and I clung to the happiness I had when I was with her to such an extent that I willed myself to ignore the horrific treatment I endured at her hands. I was so blinded to the utterly disgusting treatment that I actually indoctrinated myself into believing that I was happy.

But the fairy tale ended. She moved away and I was left alone, or I should have been. Now here’s where I break one of my own rules. I’ve tried being civil and courteous to the mystery woman mentioned so often in previous posts so much so that I’ve refused to name her and taken great strides to avoid doing so. However as she is far too busy to even acknowledge my texts, phone calls, or anything else, I see no reason to continue the charade of niceties. So I’m taking off the kid gloves and whatever will be, will be.

To truly tell the story properly we need to turn the clocks back a bit longer than just Nicole. All the way back to 2003. In August of that year I embarked upon my first real relationship and I couldn’t have been happier. Despite warnings against it I blindly moved forward and tried to revel in what I had finally attained. Well what I couldn’t see but everyone else could was that the relationship was a bit one sided in terms of treatment. To her credit I won’t name her, and I certainly don’t hold a grudge. Neither one of us really knew what we were doing. But when it ended in April of 2004 I was crushed, my entire world had come crashing down in a singular instant, and the topper was that she broke up with me via email. Classy I know.

So as most people know I mired away in my hell and spent the next year and a half pining away for something that wasn’t going to happen but still hoping that we could reconcile and return to what we had. In hindsight I can see that in truth I was just feeding an addiction. So when the time finally came that I achieved the closure I needed on it and I was able to move on I first dabbled briefly with a girl named Rose. Things went reasonably well for about two weeks, we met a party where she asked to borrow someone’s pants and ever eager to be wild and crazy in those days I jumped at the chance. So she borrowed my pants, and we bonded, and things kind of moved for a bit. Then she got flakey and the initial attraction broke down. So I took my leave and let it go.

Then came Erica. A truly pointed thorn in my side. She was pretty and coveted by many but in all honesty she was the ultimate tease. The clincher came when she called me one afternoon to proudly tell me that she had slept with my best friend. I took the news in stride and bore no ill will to him as she had been pushing my patience quite far the entire time I’d known her. So again I was ignorant of how badly I was feeding my addiction and I simply moved on.

My next foray came when a mutual friend introduced me to a girl that I was quite taken with and she seemed at least reasonably open to the idea. So we talked, we flirted, we even went out once. The entire time I doted, I analyzed, and I put myself out time and again to make her happy. Then suddenly she just disappeared. No phone calls, no texts, no emails, no IM, just dead silence. So I figured she’d gotten bored and moved on. A week later, I wound up slovenly drunk at a party held in my honor and by the end of the night I had attached myself to girl that couldn’t have been more trouble if she tried. She fervently sought out a firm relationship with an intensity that would have scared a rabid wombat but I foolishly tried to play the middle ground. The first girl returned after her absence and acted as though nothing were wrong.

I did what is still considered both the smartest and the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I told girl #1 about my dealings with girl #2 and asked for some time to get things straight because I had assumed the worse during girl #1’s absence. This action was met with unrivalled hostility and almost cost me two friendships in the process. By the time the dust settled I had no one, I was miserable, and I was fairly jaded.

Four months went by and the misery of my job kept me contented until I met Kristen. As loathe as I am to admit it, she first caught my attention when I noticed her picture on a friend’s MySpace. I made friends with her and figured nothing would come of it. She came into the store I worked at and made every man’s jaw drop as she walked in.

For the next four months I did everything I could to win her affection and make her notice me. Everything from text messages in the morning to dropping whatever I was doing to meet her every beck and call. Finally at the advice of a friend I gathered my courage and told her how I felt. She was flattered but explained that she just didn’t see me that way. So crestfallen I retreated again but very briefly. A quick slew of interests came and went in a span of only a handful of months. Lisa, Kathleen, Kat, Neha, Stacey, Allyson, and Samantha all between September and December. While I didn’t sleep with any of them, there was more than casual flirting and a couple dates.

Now we come to the meat of our story. 2007 promised many things for me. The first year of me being 21, new job prospects, and a consolidation of friendships as well as what was to be a degree. Six days into the year everything fell apart. I met Nicole at the Brass when I showed up wearing a Halloween costume and the night began the whirlwind romance. Nicole got married we kept seeing each other and I could never bring myself to just walk away. She was feeding my addiction in a very sick and morbid way. So for two and a half years I pined away hoping for something more and hoping that if I suffered just long enough I’d be blessed enough to have her for my own. But I suffered needlessly and all to feed an addiction.

When the bubble burst and she told me she was moving I wasn’t just crestfallen, I was heartbroken. I couldn’t imagine a worse fate. I’ve seen things in my life too damning and horrific to describe in any kind of detail, but the only thing that truly struck a bolt of fear into my heart was the notion of losing her. I had lost myself to what I had become while I was with her and the only thing that mattered was seeing her. The irony is that by the end, I was so filled with scorn and maliciousness that I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever loved her, and in truth I questioned if I ever really had loved her. The last time I saw her she looked nothing like she had the first night we met. She hadn’t aged gracefully, and the stress of us had ravaged her once gorgeous features. Her eyes had become deep and sunken, her face was wrinkled and weathered from too much smoking, and her smile had gone from beautifully radiant to slightly dull and uninviting. She held me close but her fingers felt like white-hot pokers digging into my flesh and searing my skin.

The final time I saw her I tried to seduce her, she managed to ressit but not without a considerable effort. I remained cold and callous through most of her visit but I broke my composure when she told me that she wanted me to take a chance and let in someone else should I ever find someone that I could love. She basically was asking me to invalidate every admission and expression of love I’d ever made to her by being willing to just accept a replacement. I wept freely and accepted that she was leaving. The trick to this is that only a matter of hours later I’d be hanging out with my new interest, Jessica. While she sported a steely and cold demeanor that made me think her interest in me was less than I’d been led to believe, the night went off reasonably well. The next two weeks continued well enough with our mutual interest seeming to grow and deepen.

Fast forward a month and she’s not returning my calls, ignoring my texts, and seems to have disappeared. I still don’t know why she decided to go bat shit crazy and begin ignoring me. Oh well, her loss. I tried being cordial and courteous but I got nothing in return. She couldn’t even be bothered to adhere to the offer of friendship that she put out. I know she’ll read this and I’ll end up with a massive backlash of some kind about how I don’t know everything, or how I’m wrong, or something to effect of me being out of line, but it’s hard to be factual when I know nothing. And since this is more or less my own private domain I can say what I want so long as there’s no defamation of character.

Suffice to say that I’ve reached my crossroads and while this piece, unlike all the others, has not been written in a single sitting, I have in fact found my catharsis and survived my detox. So I’m better. I’ve bled out what needed to be bled out, I’ve reached level ground again emotionally and I’m ready to move on with life. I’d like to extend big thanks to Aurora for listening to my whiny ass, give big hugs to Nikki for constantly telling me I deserve better and can have better, and anyone else that endured my ramblings during any ordeal mentioned above.