Bridget Callahan is Your Best Friend

You know, I was faithful and madly in love with him for years. And I defended him to everyone. And I thought, just give him time, he just needs time, he's just in a really bad place. But when he started telling me that his "bad place" was all because of me, and his constant misery and inability to enjoy anything was because of me...well I still stuck it out for months. He spent the night at another girls house the first night we moved in together, and I stuck it out. He told me he wasn't attracted to me, and I still stuck it out. But finally I couldn't do it anymore and I left.

Then he said "what can I do?" and I said "date other people, be happy". And he did. For months he told me that he still wasn't happy, but he still kept going on so many many dates, every girl he fucking ran across. And I sat at home, trying to be empowered, trying to get over him, trying to look like I didn't care. I was miserable inside, I was so fucking unhappy, I cried every night I was alone. But I kept telling him no, I kept hoping it would get better, that something would happen that would make me feel better.

Finally, this guy starts writing me, talking to me every night. He wanted me to come visit him, he wanted to fly me down! ME, who couldn't get her own boyfriend to take her anywhere. And so I went. But see, it was his best friend. So yes, that's really really bad. I didn't care. He was fingerbanging every 21 yr old waitress on Craigslist, he was going out of town every weekend. I couldn't even pay my car bills and no one else had told me I was pretty or special for years. I thought, he doesn't love me. He even told me I wasn't pretty enough for this fucking guy to like me. So fuck him. Why should he have all the fun? Oh, it was my worst moment. It was the coldest. It was the thing to not do.

And its not even like I slept with the kid. I didn't even get that. But can you believe I did that? It tells the kind of person I am.

Course I get back and I missed him even more. And I couldn't stop thinking about him. And I felt myself starting to go crazy, that point where you feel the voices starting to divide in your head, and you can't even talk like a normal person. And the fucking tears just wouldn't stop, none of it would fucking stop. I couldn't wake up in the morning without laying there, thinking it was useless and meaningless and just a waste of my fucking life. And I tried to write a novel. I tried to pick up new hobbies. I lived for his friend's phone calls because it was the only real interest anyone had in my life, until those grew stale and stupid and cold. My friends tried, but they all hated us together, they thought I was fine. I didn't want to look stupid in front of them, look like the stupid co-dependent fat girl I felt like. I knew I was all alone. I knew he wasn't. His friend said "he's met someone else, let him go, stop talking to him so he won't feel guilty" so I did.

Then I couldn't. I called him. I said "I hate you and I miss you and please take me out and get me drunk." So he did. We sat at the bar exchanging bitterness for a few hours, while I drank as fast as I could and cried and didn't even care when people looked at me. He told me how much fun he'd been having, how he's gone to Chicago and New York for shows with this girl, how he'd seen Nick Cave twice.

Then he took me back to his place, and he loved me, and told me how all these girls knew I could steal him away at a moment's notice, and he was in love with me, and missed me, and over and over again how beautiful I was, how impossibly pretty I was, how soft my lips were and no one kissed like me. And I lied to him. I told him we weren't getting back together. I told him I hadn't kissed anyone else. I told him I wasn't even thinking about getting back together.

Then he didn't want to tell me what he was doing this weekend, for sweetest day. He refused. I got mad. I made him take me home. On the way, in the car, he told me he was going to New York with three girls. I cried. I begged him not to go. He said he couldn't cancel. I begged him to take me with him. He refused. I got out of the car and walked home. He came to my house and called and called and said "are you my girlfriend?" and I couldn't say yes. Because the last thing he said before I got out was "how can I not go to New York with three girls who want to fuck me?", and I knew nothing I said was going to stop him. I went to bed weeping again, but I'm used to it now I thought.

The next day I was desperate, I knew he was gone. I sent him emails accusing him, I sent him text messages begging him again and again to take me, to not throw me away. As if I somehow believed he wanted to keep me. I called and I called and I wept and drank and wept more into his voicemail. And he still never called. His friend was talking to both of us all day, his friend who told me not to talk to him. He was also telling him all day not to talk to me. I texted him again, I said "please don't listen to Nick. I listened to him and it was a mistake". I meant about not talking to him, but who knows what he said to Nick the next morning.

I woke up Saturday in tears already, dreaming that he was already gone. I called and called and called, but his voicemail was full at this point. He showed up at my house at 11am, in a suit already, set to go. He barged in without knocking, stood over my bed, and I knew he was going to kill me. I saw it in his face. I went hysterical, I screamed into my pillow "why why are you doing this to me?" Why would he make me fall in love with him again, make me admit my fucking weakness, only to reject me? Revenge? Or just not good enough anymore? Wasn't good enough the first time, why would I think I was good enough this time. Did he plan it out, to get back at me? Did he and Nick do it together?

Then he went into the second bedroom, through the boxes he had packed for me, and stole the only love letter he had ever written for me. It's in a manila folder. He's taken it from me twice, only to have me take it back. He said "how could you go down there and suck my friend's dick?" and he looked at me but he didn't really want an answer. I said "you hurt me for years" it was the only thing I could get out, he was just standing there so self righteous and hateful, and I slapped him. Then he spit on me. In my face. Twice. It's the second time a guy has spit in my face. I went crazy, tried to rip the letter from his hands. He shoved me on the floor and told me I was dead to him. That I had ruined his weekend.

That was the worst part. That I had "ruined his weekend". Nothing of the past two days ruined his weekend. The fact I wanted him back and he was leaving me didn't ruin his weekend. But this, the idea that I had sucked someone else's dick, that ruined it. It was only his pride he cared about. He left me sitting on the carpet, things strewn around me. That's not fair to him I'm sure some will say. Maybe some will tell me I broke his heart again, even worse. But he was going to leave me anyway. He didn't want me. He probably never really wanted me back, and it only took meeting another decent girl to convince him of it. It only took having some fun, like I'd been telling him all along.

And I was dead. I knew it. He had struck me down. He had ripped out anything left inside me. Years and years of this same scene, but he had finally killed me. He won.

At first I took it literally. I thought to myself, this is it. I am going to kill myself. I called off work. I wrote him a letter. I sat in the bathtub for hours, letting the water go cold while I contemplated how I was going to do it. I couldn't afford a gun. I was afraid of razors, that I wouldn't do it right. I wanted pills, but where to get them?
And because I had nothing handy, I didn't do it. I took to much time. I tried to think out the details, where I would put the cat, how to not hurt the family below me, how my own family would feel and what would they do for the funeral, how would they afford it. I'm ashamed my family wasn't first in my thoughts, but really, it was the cat. It's always the damn cat. The details, they made it too difficult. I wanted simple. I wanted to just fall asleep and not wake up.
I sat in the dark all night. Finally I fell asleep, but then I woke up and it was today. I was so disappointed. I lay there till 4pm, hoping I would just fall asleep some more. Then I started drinking.

And I'm still drinking, but I'm not pretending anymore that I can off myself. I can't. It's not that I don't want to. But I can't. And I won't. So I'll just continue waking up every morning. And its the most frightening awful thing. But I guess if I can construct sentences still...and I've been listening to Johnny Cash...and I've decided to get surgery...and stupid craigslist keeps taking down my ad because someone keeps flagging it which is either because I said no republicans or because he's doing it...I know that he was the one. And he's irrevocably gone. And there's nothing I can do about that. But at least maybe if you already found and lost the one, then there's nothing more to keep searching for. And that's gotta be worth something. Cause maybe I don't have the courage to physically kill myself but maybe being dead inside will be better for me. Maybe eventually everything will go numb. At the very least I can pretend I have something to say about all this. I can create this fantasy where he comes back and says "be mine again" and I say "I never stopped being yours, I'm branded, diseased, broken, with your name scratched across my insides like a kid writing on a school desk, and yes okay, yes always, yes yours."

Oh and the worst part is the cars. When he left me the first time, I heard saw his car everywhere. It was always out of the corner of my eye, for months and months, almost a year. Now it's started again, car doors, and brakes, and footsteps. All day, I turned the tv up loud so it buzzed, just to not hear the fucking cars.

But the really important thing here, the thing that I think will make me wake up just a little bit harder every morning, with just a little more shell on me, is that at least it's a story. It's a really good story. And I think I will start writing every part of it down as I remember it, until its finished. Because I really do love him, and I will always love him, even when he isn't here anymore.