That I Would Be Good

It's been seven years. I wish I could say that I've grown in the interim, but I really haven't. I've been hurt and hurt people in return. I've done this twice in the last year or so; having caused the Facebook blocking of the only friend I really had, in both cases.

I wish I did anything in this world so well as make people hate me. I'm great at it. I say exactly what's on my mind, in the most profoundly cruel words possible.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of it.

Okay, since there's no chance the most recent one will read this, I'll sing you the song of myself:

There was this girl. There's always this girl. It's the story of my life. She worked at my store, years and years ago. She was pretty. She was smart. I worked with her. Not in the same department, but in the same place, so that would have been a violation of The Rule, which is to not date people you work with, because I made that mistake when I was eighteen. She left, she got engaged, and I'm not sure in what order that happened, but she got divorced, and we got to talking.

I wish I could tell you the details of the talking, because it's some of the best writing I've ever done, but she has as much ownership over it as I do, and so I can't. And now it's as much of a ghost of the past as the time I wrote 20 things I learned from Cameron Crowe films, all because I pointed out that I couldn't be her Duckie Dale forever.

And I couldn't. I'll spare you the details. But the quote is, 

"Well, that's very nice. I'm glad. Well here's... here's the point, Andie. I'm not particularly concerned with whether or not you like me, because I live to like you and... and I can't like you anymore. So... so when you're feeling real low and... and dirty, and your heart is splattered all over hell, don't look to me to pump you back up 'cause... 'cause... 'cause maybe for the first time in your life I WON'T BE THERE!"

And that's how it ended. I said her new boyfriend should pick up the slack that I was taking, and she cut off all communication. Sadly, I won't see her at prom, because she was supposed to be my date, and then things happened. She met her Blaine.

I suppose that's my fault for not being better. There's a lot of people who look at Duckie and say Andie should have totally ended up with him, but let's all be honest: Duckie was going to be a loser forever. Blaine, however, was handsome, smart, mildly funny, drove a nice car, had money...

What's not to like? If you add the math up on either side, that other guy is better than me, and apparently substantially, in every way.

Maybe at least it was sudden. I went back and looked at the previous friend's message log from Facebook, and it just tapered off after about a couple of months; me shooting messages into the aether, never to be returned, until I got into an argument with ... I don't know who. It was someone's mother or stepmother or mother-in-law, and then I got axed.

Of course, that girl also brought a friend to a date. This is not the first time this ever happened to me. I think it was 1999, when I coined the term, "Buffer Couple."

I'm all fucked up. The last time I had a real relationship was over twenty years ago. I've wasted my life, and I thought I had some kind of path for the last twenty or thirty years of it, but I don't.

I have to go be non-confrontational.