“I know she’s playing with me
But that’s okay cause I got no self esteem…” – lyrics from Offspring’s “Self Esteem”
If you’re tuning in for what happened on Night Two…
#6 eventually gave up on seeing me on our first Skype date and after some interesting preludes to later discussions during the week, we drew Night One to a close.
While there were some tell-tale signs during Night One that perhaps I wasn’t going to get the smooth ride back to 1985 that I’d anticipated, #6 said enough pleasant things to whet my appetite for more.
On night two, # 6 seemed devilishly giddy right from the start of the call. Things also felt scripted, as though there was a
checklist he definitely wanted to address with me once and for all. I wasn’t sure of the contents of this list but over the span of approximately fifteen minutes, it quickly became clear that this was not going to be an evening of us waxing of our romantic good times in the heyday of Run DMC and Ready for the World.
No, this was going to be something different.
It didn’t seem to matter as much to him that I still wasn’t transmitting my screen to him, though I was desperately trying to get things worked out on my end. #6 just wanted to be heard for what can only be described as his dramatic reading of just about every lyric of Offspring’s “Self Esteem”. His tragic-comedy was complete with an example for each verse as it linked back to our doomed relationship. As with any retelling of a couple’s past, somethings bore elements of truth while others seems to point to a humorous break with reality.
I winced and squirmed as he painstakingly obliterated my record as his ex. No need to protest: he’d wrapped me up and tied me with a bow as a low-budget ‘Robin Givens of the 1980’s’. I admit that I was probably ‘high maintenance,’ but his account was other-worldly. I lost several, feeble attempts to try to counter his hellish recollections of our love TKO. I think my favorite tale was the alleged pea-soup-spitting, head spinning, gravity defying levitation I purportedly performed at a mall outside a now-defunct women’s clothing store called Brooks. He even remembered the part where I allegedly refused to get in the car with him and instead called his best friend to pick me up – his same best friend who later tried to sweet talk me out of my stuffed Tazmanian Devil animal that I took to college with me.
What a wonderful stroll down memory lane.
A strange, sinking feeling came over me as I watched him wince, smirk, sigh, shake his head, hold his forehead and tussle to and fro in his chair as he recalled bad outing after bad outing. Perhaps that feeling was my own gut reaction to each venomous word that dripped from his lush lips. His emotions ran the gamut – excited, sad, annoyed, frustrated and exasperated.
Mine were on a similar scale – bewildered, amazed, stunned and frankly dumbfounded. How had this strong, handsome, world-traveled hunk remembered so many painful details about a country girl with skinny legs, a bad haircut and a baby blue Pinto?
I feverishly fumbling with those darn Skype controls so that I could at least share the floor with him during this unceremonious – and quite unexpected – romantic smackdown. After all, it only seemed fair that my accuser see my reactions as he listed every single crime I committed against him in our thirty days of intense dating some twenty years ago.
Thankfully, the Skype gods pitied me and refused to participate in my masochistic activity with #6. I found myself glued to the screen watching his animations as he relived his psychedelic memories of our forgettable dates.
And then innovation hit me: why not mute the sound and just look at HIM? Since he claimed I’d always sought selfish angles when we were together, I decided that I may as well get something out of the evening for myself.
I may not have been able to share the screen but my laptop’s camera worked just fine so rather than listen to him, I just decided to watch and photograph him instead.
“Remember when… “ he said. Mute/click!
“And then you…” Mute/click!
“And I couldn’t believe… “Mute/click!
Mute/click! Click! Click!
Forty five minutes later, I’d snapped over 50 frames of his beautiful face reciting every ugly thing he could remember about our brief time together as ‘us’. Thankfully, I hadn’t listened to most of it.
At some point, he noticed my lack of rebuttals. “You know I’m just playing with you, right?” he half-joked. “We did have some good times too.”
Really? Kind of like Axel Rose and Stephanie Seymour, I supposed.
“I suppose,” I said wearily. “It’s late though so I’d better go; I’m tired.”
“Ok,” he said without a fight. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I logged off, and promptedly posted the snapshots on Facebook. I sent him a note which read: “Here’s what I got out of tonight’s conversation.”
Stay tuned for the riveting conclusion of Night Three!
Exes, Ughs and Skype – Part II of III
“The more you suffer
The more it shows you really care…” – lyrics from Offspring’s “Self Esteem”
Night Three.
“#6 is calling,” the Skype alert read.
The alert flashed again and I squirmed. Only one person even knew my Skype ID: # 6. I ignored his first attempt to reach me but he was persistent.
Undeterred by my failure to answer the call, #6 sent a sweet, instant message asking me if I was feeling better from the prior evening. The note seemed sincere so I begrudgingly responded and logged on. I didn’t let him know that I had finally figured out how to share screens, I just let him know that I could see him.
We connected and instantly it became evident that his ‘concern’ for me was belied for his need to locate his prey and finish off the kill from the night before.
It was 11:00pmEST and I was drowsy– there’s an eight-hour time difference between # 6 and me, night and day for sure. It was morning for him so #6 on the other hand was bright eyed and chatty. He started the call by dispensing with the usual pleasantries. “How are you… how was your day…” all the half-hearted, obligatory things a woman expects to hear from a man when their date begins at 11:00pm at night (her time) in a poorly lit, sparsely populated location (his office, her bedroom).
The conversation quickly turned and once again I was on that lonely Improv stage as my chief heckler hissed and laughed while lampooning our former dating life. Each of #6’s stories was more excoriating than the last, always ending with a double-edged joke that was intended to wound as much as incite laughter. I chuckled at some of his recollections — if for no other reason than his delivery. Right, wrong or indifferent, he truly believed what he was saying. While my memories were somewhat different than his, he wholeheartedly recited each word of the dramas as if he’d written them as part of a true story, made for TV screenplay.
On this evening, I was armed with a glass of my favorite wine, Layer Cake Shiraz. At least if I was doomed to listen to more of my shortcomings as his former girlfriend, I could at least be light-headed and whimsical about it.
I had little to say to him in response to his CSI-style post-mortem of our relationship, with the exception of a few words here and there to keep conversation going. He giggled, he gestured, and he gyrated to animate every embarrassing episode that had ever occurred between us. Apparently, my love-making had been less than that of a porn star, my cooking skills were nil and my cat got all of the love and affection he craved from me.
At some point as pieces of my emotional flesh dangled from his incisors, he noticed my silence – and absence from the screen.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked with genuine curiosity.
“Is there a reason I should be?” I responded coolly.
“You know I’m just playing,” he said with a loud, uncomfortable laugh. “Don’t be mad,” he implored, getting through to me mostly via those gorgeous eyes of his. I cracked half a smile that he never saw.
“I can’t believe your monitor’s not working yet,” he said in a frustrated tone. In reality, it was in fact working fine – I’d finally figured out how to share screens just before I connected with him on this very evening — I just didn’t feel the need to share that tidbit with him. It was clear that his interest was only in seeing my reaction to his comments in real time, apparently yet another morsel of satisfaction that I’d refused to give to him. I hadn’t yelled at him, cursed him or hung up so far so he has no idea of my emotional responses to his tales. I refused to allow him the sadistic joy of a single tear.
The hands on the clock lazily swung forward and night three crept into night four without notice. I was drained and silent, and he too seemed to have run out of ways to insult me so he deployed a different tact.
“We really did have some good times,” he waxed.
“In between me apparently scarring you for life,” I said.
“That’s not true,” he said while staring down onto his desk. “I remember the good times too.”
Thing is, he never recollected a single ‘good time’ during either of our Skype calls. “But you just don’t know,” he said shaking his head with that now clearly discomforting grin again. “You were brutal, woman, just BRUTAL.”
I didn’t respond. ‘Brutal’ is relative.
“I really cared about you but all you wanted to do was hang out with your friends… I took you places, I wanted to do things with you but you always putting your girl friends before me – EVERYBODY came before me. And at the end, you just showed up at my place when you felt like it, hung out for a minute and left. Now that I think of it – sometimes you even BROUGHT your girl friends so you COULD leave quickly after you got what you wanted.”
“Ok.” I said. Ok. That was all I could manage to get out but he understood that I was done – emotionally depleted.
More importantly, WE were done, and there was no reason for me to participate in our technologically-enhanced, sado-masochistic dance any longer. Those beautiful eyes of his were now cold and calculating, and the charm, wicked. Completely withered from all the ‘bad old times’ discussion about the “good times,” I decided to put us both out of our misery.
“Is there anything else you’d like to get off your chest?” I asked?
“No, we’re cool,” he laughed.
“Good,” I said. “I’m tired and going to bed. I have an early day.” The fact that I was unemployed and probably not arising until noon was beside the point.
“I’ll always wish you well,” I said with a genuine sense of sadness for the pain I’d caused him all those years ago. In my own way, I really did love him.
“I know,” he answered. “I know.”
And that’s how we finally ended our 20-year relationship and moved on.
If you really want to know how the rest of our relationship played at least from #6’s perspective, I guess you’ll just have to read and/or listen to the rest of Self Esteem’s lyrics. I have to say that I was deeply saddened and hurt that there was someone out there carrying around those kinds of wounds purportedly inflicted by me. Didn’t matter if they were all real or extremely exaggerated — in his mind, they were things that hurt him. There are two – make that three- sides to every story of course, and my side is quite different from his. I too experienced pain at the way things ended. However, at this stage in my life, ‘who’s right’ and who’s wrong’ for a twenty year old former relationship really doesn’t matter.
For now, word to the wise: twenty years from now, who knows how advanced social media will be, but just know that somewhere out there, they’ll be an ex waiting patiently to roast you.
These days, I’m content with listening to Evernescence’s Lacrymosa and letting him blame it all on me to whoever else out there in the universe will listen to him.
And my Skype account status is now permanently set to ‘away’.
