Bitterness and Giddiness Part Two: Infinitely Better Scrabble Guy

For a couple of days after my Instagram lapse, I felt AWFUL. I felt like I’d drunk poison—the particular rotten feeling of going backwards. There was no one to blame but myself, Usher, and Julia Roberts.

I wondered if I should take a dating break until the rottenness passed, at least until this breakup-versary month is behind me. But there’s always going to be something, some flower or sunset or moon giving me the excuse to be in a wistful funk. Forward is the only way to get unstuck and the internet is so full of faces!

I don’t know what possessed me to plan a call on the way home from a loooooong workday last Friday, but I did. (Boy, I work a lot in this story! I really work so much these days. It’s mostly wonderful and the gummies help!)

Infinitely Better Scrabble Guy was a sweet, gentle cutie from the facebook dating app. (Actually my favorite dating app right now, partly because I feel like I’ve used up the other ones!) We had like seven friends in common! I liked the way he went back and forth with his son about gaming while we were on the call, like I was immediately welcomed into his world. His work is similar to mine. When he mentioned that he plays phone Scrabble, I immediately invited myself to play.

Possibly some, though definitely not all, of my giddiness about IBSG was because it felt so good to return to Scrabble! I’d sworn it off after the long-ago Scrabble Boy saga, but I loved getting back in touch with my two-letter words! After not too many turns, IBSG placed “sex” on the board and then I added “thine” and “deepen.” I was in romantic Scabble heaven. He looked SO CUTE in his thumbnail picture, framed in gold with a little crown.

The next morning, before getting ready for my Saturday job, I strewed the peach and pink petals of my Valentine roses all over the snowy yard, feeling buoyant and set free.

IBSG wasn’t ultimately at match—I have GOT to stop pretending that “smokes occasionally” might mean just weed or just-at-a-party-sometimes. Boundaries are real and they suck, but love is addictive enough without smooching nicotine.

But it felt sooooooooooooo good to get totally silly about someone, to let my heart soar a little. I hope it comes around again soon! And I hope IBSG finds the very best partner, who’ll spoil him all to heck! He deserves it so, so much. He made me so happy.

In the meantime, it’s not such a bad thing to be all messed up a year later about a broken love thing, and it’s not a bad thing to revel in a Scrabble crush who wasn’t a match. I want to give my big weird heart time to appreciate both, to appreciate ALL the things, and to take it a little slow towards whatever adventures are next.

Bitterness and Giddiness, Part One

 

Throughout the whole one million years year that I’ve been broken up with The Shy One (Two months longer than we’d been together! I feel so impatient with this process!) I feel like I maintained some sort of dignity about the situation. At least, as much dignity as one can have while writing a million paragraphs and creating however-many art projects about a beloved ex a guy who dumped me right before Valentine’s Day.

I’ve been so strong, even with the Christmas mushroom gummies and the letters and the unblockings and reblockings and the endless wondering what to do with the just-not-my-style jewelry set he brought me back from his trip home. (Resolved: Even though if I wore it I would look like a deranged, appropriating haunt from the Island of the Well-Meaning-White Ladies, it’s beautiful and special and I’m keeping it. I’ll probably hang the earrings on the Christmas tree next year.) I’ve had, for the most part, willpower. Sometimes I was a bitch, sometimes just unbearably nakedly needy, but still, with some underlying dignity.

Until this year’s Valentine’s Day. I blame the movie Valentine’s Day—it’s a fave, but this Valentine’s lunch time, it really twisted the knife. Maybe it was a knife that needed twisting.

There’s this part where Bradley Cooper is telling Julia Roberts about his breakup and she says something like:

“Nothing to be done?”

And that just struck the saddest chord on the lobby piano in the overpopulated hotel that is my heart. I STILL think there’s something I could have done, some part of me I could have folded up and put away (Maybe in with the Christmas ornaments?) so that he wouldn’t have left me. In the background of all the love and joy and growth and vexation of time moving forward, my brain is still whirring away on that puzzle. I sincerely hope it will stop doing that someday.

I decided to be sad for a few minutes on the way to my evening job. I’d (Fit of well-being! Optimism! The life changing magic of tidying up my Spotify lists!) deleted my Grief Walk mix but, uh, luckily? There was this new single from Usher featuring Burna Boy, Coming Home. It devastated me all the way to my bones. It made me want to find The Shy One and just let him consume me until there was nothing left. I looked up the lyrics and it says “not just leave you for dead.” But metaphorically that’s what I wanted, to be so deep in shock and love and sex as to evaporate all the way to heaven and stay there this time, not drift back to reality and a Shy One QUICKLY getting his pants on to go, that last time.

It's fine, I can drive to work and self-immolate at the same time!

I knew there couldn’t be any seeking-out-and-being-consumed, so I did something maybe even less advisable—I looked at his Instagram in the few minutes before work started. There wasn’t much to see there, but there was this:

March 15, 2023, a little more than a month after we broke up. A stupid, generic meme saying “That feeling when everything’s just coming together.”

I know he wasn’t posting it AT me, but fuck you, dude. While I was raking the back terrace listening to fucking A Grief Observed, while I was going back to Unitarian Church to feel less isolated and alone, while I was planning to commemorate our first date/the first day of Ramadan with a street art project, his life had found exactly where it needed to be, at least in that moment of posting.

And I’m so mad at myself because the feeling he was having in that basic-as-fuck meme, it’s a feeling I wish for him! For everyone I love. It’s a great fucking feeling that everyone deserves. Resenting him for that moment of epiphany makes me seem so curdled and rotten, and in that moment, I was.

I reunlocked his WhatsApp thread and sent at desperate and devastated few questions, followed, not too long later, by an “Oops, please disregard.”

Fear and Devotion Part Two

Last week, there was an app guy who got mad at me when I wouldn’t come right over, that I wouldn’t change out of my pajamas and drive across the city to see him,  a stranger I’d just started chatting with that afternoon.

Before I blocked him, he said something like “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I work hard and I want to be loved in my off hours.”

(Dude, don’t we all.)

There was a language barrier, but still. After I deleted the app guy, I didn’t feel like he was gonna come get me or anything, I just felt like—what am I? Am I anything? Can anyone see me here? Disembodied. So small as to slip through the cracks of existence and just dissolve into the ether. This is a pretty regular emotion of online dating, of dating in general.

So, my devotion to The Shy One was a safe place. I wanted to, not pine, exactly, just live cozily in my fake-chaste fake-platonic love for The Shy One. I wanted to be just as unobtrusive as possible, and free as can be, just able to pull my love for TSO up over me like a weighted blanket. Loving someone who loves me, but who I couldn’t have—the safest possible place. I’m tired of putting my body and heart and mind and soul in the path of strangers, I wanted the soft touch of something known. Embodied and of-the-soul, safe, safe, safe.

But then, TSO wasn’t in touch for a few days, normal friend rhythm that left space for that old quest to creep back in—how could I get him to see me? How could I try again to get his unavoidably divided attention? I wanted to send him a sweet-hot picture from last January and say, “I think these two deserve a chance.”

(The young people have a phrase for this: “down bad.” So apt it makes me queasy.)

I wasn’t really gonna send the picture, but looking at it made me surge with sadness. With anger! With abandonment and betrayal. He will always, no matter how much we love each other, no matter how much I empathize with his reasons, be the boyfriend who dumped me right before a trip, Valentines Day, and a minor-but-fraught surgery.

As good as it felt (still feels!) to rest in devotion, it felt terrible to be going backwards. My heart doesn’t know how not to think of him as The One, even though I don’t even really subscribe to the concept of The One. I hope that will change someday, but I don’t think texting the darling every few days is the way there.

So I said goodbye to The Shy One again, trying to be honest and kind but feeling unhinged and toxic. It felt horrible, but I felt better the next day. Reality is scary. Forward motion is scary. Strangers are DEFINITELY scary. It’ll take time and patience and breaks and chocolate and weed gummies and tears, but being at home in myself and in hope-for-love is worth it.