'Til I Made You Cry

I just miss you. I miss my best friend. You’re all I know here.

I read the message with a deep set frown. It’s one of many I receive on an almost nightly basis. The same thing every time. I know this is the beginning of what’s sure to be a long, repetitive conversation and lean back on the plush pillows at the top of my bed.

I miss your soft skin. I know you miss me, too. I see you look around for me at the bar, I’m more observant than you think.

This makes me scoff and my blood begins to boil. He always does this. Recently he’s been deluding himself into believing that I still want him, and let me tell you, not one bit of me wants anything to do with him.

I have tried not to be too spiteful. I have tried to handle this break up like an adult even though he’s the one who fucked up. He cheated. It’s as simple as that. And I don’t tolerate that kind of disrespect.

We’ve had break ups in the past. One was me ending it. The next, him. They were for petty reasons and we didn’t last a week apart. It was always very dramatic.

This time, though… This break up takes the cake.

I wanted to tell you, he had said. It was one time. One moment of weakness.

I had spent the last few months of our relationship feeling very insecure. I would see him talk to other girls with a cocky grin. I would see him let them touch him and get too close, but whenever I would raise the subject, he would shut me down. He would call me stupid, tell me I was seeing things that weren’t there. He didn’t have it in him to tell me what I needed to hear. A simple declaration of how beautiful he thought I was. Never.

Things weren’t the same after those first two break ups. Something felt different. Some days I felt like we had grown closer from the distance and some days I felt like he was taking me for granted. He was, though—taking me for granted. He’s even admitted it, but he also likes to tell me that I took him for granted too, that he did just as much for me as I did for him.

Wrong.

We drove in my car everywhere since he didn’t have one. I would pick him up from work at nearly two in the morning. We stayed at my house since he lives with his stepdad in a one bedroom apartment. We ate my food. We slept in my bed. And sure, when we would go out to eat or drink, he would pay when he could, but I made more money than him at the time, so I usually took care of the bill. He acted like he felt guilty. He wanted to be a man or whatever the fuck.

But I was fine with it for that year-long while.

Now, he works at a bar, one that I still frequent with work friends. He probably makes more than I do these days.

I wanted you to be part of this. You only saw me when I was broke. You’ve never seen me thrive. I’m a different person. We were supposed to do this together.

He may have more money, but I don’t believe him when he says he’s different. His ex has told me that he hasn’t changed. He cheated on her, too. Often. The difference between her and I, though, is that I’m not willing to take him back.

And that is apparently killing him.

Tonight is one that I’ve spent at the bar after getting off at nearly midnight. He had seen me but didn’t stop by to talk which I was pretty pleased with. Now, a whole hour later, he’s mad about it.

I don’t want our friends to have to choose between us.

They’re not choosing. If you want to come hang out with us, go for it, dude. Just know that I don’t want you touching me like you did last time, and I’ll only be civil. I’m not gonna be your best friend. My thumbs are like lightening on my phone’s keyboard. We only ever talk via text message now. I have him blocked on everything else.

I just want to be able to talk to you again, he replies.

I roll my eyes.

(Maybe you shouldn’t have fucked up, then.) The thought goes through my head every single time he texts me. Everything he ever says garners the same response. (Maybe you should have just kept it in your pants.)

He acts like he’s heartbroken. And maybe he is. I’m not feeling what he’s feeling. But he wants me to be heartbroken, too. He wants me to hurt like he’s hurting.

Why do you always have to be such a fucking bitch?

And if I’m not pining for him like he is for me, he wants to at least be able to inflict some pain on me. He just wants me to feel for him. But I have no sympathy. I have nothing but rage.

You haven’t seen me be a bitch yet, I tell him.

Whenever I wanna talk, you always have to be a bitch about it, he types again.

I scroll up to check how our conversation tonight even started, just to make sure that I’m not in the wrong when I say something along the lines of, “You started it,” and as I suspected, the first message of the day had been him telling me that I’m being “fucking retarded for blowing this out of proportion”. I’ve been blowing his cheating on me out of proportion.

I’ve tried to be civil with him. I really have. But each time we talk, he wants to bring up the same points over and over and so we have the same argument over and over. It’s cyclical and tedious and if he keeps it up, he’s going to see just what a bitch I can be.

You’re so fucking selfish.

I gave you everything I had.

This wasn’t all my fault. You had a part in this.

If you had kept me satisfied, I wouldn’t have had to go to my ex.

That last one is my favorite. If I had just fucked him every night of the week, he wouldn’t have had to make himself feel better. If I had just put his needs before mine, he would have stayed faithful.

Okay.

Just a handy or a blowjob. But no, you always told me that you were too tired. You had a headache.

We fucked probably three to five times every week and as much as I don’t want to say anything good about him, I’ll still tell anyone that he is not the smallest guy around in terms of dick size. It’s a little on the colossal side and often made me bleed and he, for some reason, couldn’t understand why I needed a break from it sometimes. Empathy was not one of his stronger suits.

(Let’s not forget that you would get me to cum maybe 15% of the time and I would have to ask you to.) That’s what I want to say to him, but I’m too god damn nice. I don’t want to bruise his ego any more than I probably already have by not taking him back. He deserves it, though. He deserves nothing more than hateful things spat at him. He deserved to feel the betrayal that I feel.

I don’t hurt the way he wants me to. I am not in pain. I am angry. I am made up of fire at this point, and every time he wants to talk to me, all he does is pour gasoline on the flames.

I know a large part of his so-called pain is that he doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t understand how I could go from an obedient little girlfriend who waited on him hand and foot to an actual grown woman with a backbone. He isn’t used to hearing ‘no’. He’s a country boy and both of his serious exes were from bum-fuck Texas—the types of girls who believes that men are superior, who believe that their place is in the kitchen. We had argued about it before. Our ideals didn’t match. He wanted me to be subservient. He wanted to wear the pants.

But that isn’t how I was raised. I was brought up by a strong woman and a respectable man and that’s probably one of the many reasons why he always said he didn’t give a fuck of what they thought of him.

During these lovely conversations, I had a lot of time to lie back in my queen sized bed and think—the one we used to share. The place where he once slept is now taken up by my laptop and a few books. It’s nice to be able to spread out. It’s nice not feeling suffocated. Some girls like to cuddle when they sleep, like the feeling of a larger warm body pressed up against theirs. I am not one of those girls. I need space in bed. I need to breathe. He, however, liked the contact. He liked to kick his leg over me, to hold me too close and when I would move, he would follow me. My paperbacks and laptop were much better company in the wee hours of the morning. They also didn’t expect me to fuck them after working a thirteen hour work shift.

The pauses between irritating messages give me time to reflect. During the relationship, I was in heaven. Sure, he would throw a red flag my way every once in a while—insane road rage, having to be stoned to stay in a good mood, the invalidating of my feelings time and time again, plus the whole not-really-giving-a-shit-about-my-friends-and-family. That was a big one. They were all “big ones”. But I let them go. I figured every couple had their differences. And I had convinced myself that it was normal, or really, I had convinced most of myself. There was always a little tiny voice in the back of my head that told me it wasn’t normal to have to sacrifice so much to keep someone else happy, always a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that made me feel like something just wasn’t right.

He wasn’t abusive. Some friends may argue that he manipulated me, and I’ll own up to that, but he never hit me and he didn’t start calling me names until we had broken up. The guy wasn’t even slightly territorial until afterward either.

Now, he likes to watch me at the bar. He waits for me to look at him so that he can seem extra depressed. I’ve now learned to just ignore him, to try my hardest not to even turn in his general direction. And still, he accuses me of watching him.

He’s particularly angry this night because I danced with a friend. He thinks I did it on purpose to get a rise out of him. In fact, he thinks everything I do is just to get a rise out of him. You still want my attention on you. It’s insulting the way that he flatters himself, and a huge part of me wishes I would have just made out with my drunk friend, all sloppy tongue and teeth, just to spite him.

I’m surprised you didn’t move on faster actually. Are you with a new guy yet?

I’m not doing this. I’m done for the night.

I can’t wait for you to bring some new dude to the bar. I’m gonna have so much fun fucking with you.

Is that a threat? Let’s not forget that I have dirt on you.

Well I can say a lot of shit about you too.

Alright, seriously, I’m done. I’m going to bed.

I sigh heavily and flex my fingers, a habit that I have that only shows when I’m fuming. After tapping the little moon on my phone that puts the device on ‘do not disturb’, I set it back on my bed face down.

I’m over it. I’m just so over it. I need him to move on. He’s put more effort into this break up than he ever did our relationship and I really just want to block him from my entire life.

He’s told me to stop going to the bar that he works at. He told me that I should go somewhere else and drink alone and I’ll admit, a little part of my continuing to go to The Pub is to spite him, but it’s mostly because it’s where all of my co-workers go. It’s a good spot to unwind and it has one of the best bartenders who likes me enough to hook me up with at least one free drink every night. I would be dumb to go anywhere else.

I am not going to deny myself a good time once a week because he can’t get over the relationship that he single-handedly fucked up.

After turning my lights out and crawling back under my covers, I chance another look at my phone and see his name lit up on the screen. ‘Cheater’. I thought about deleting his number entirely, but this is much better. Now, it won’t be a surprise whenever he texts me and any time he tries to be sweet and apologize, all I have to do is look at his contact name.

This got so twisted. All I wanted to do was talk. That’s all I ever want to do.

Ten minutes without a response apparently warrants an, I hate you so much, from him. It's a pretty good example of what being with a talking to him is like. He goes from kind and seemingly sincere one minute to angry and spiteful the next. I roll my eyes and turn the screen back to the sheets.

I don’t have time for this. It’s been a long day and I’ve been tired of the conversation from the beginning. I’m tired of him. I’m just tired in general.

My alarm goes off after what feels like two minutes of sleep. It’s actually been seven hours. When I hit snooze, my phone displays a new message. I open it to reveal a picture of his dick with, fuck you, bitch, typed underneath.

I’m offended but not surprised. I’ve honestly been waiting for this to happen, and now that it finally has, I open his contact information and block his number completely with a small smile of satisfaction. It’s been a long time coming. Maybe it’ll be easier for him to move on knowing that he has no way of contacting me anymore.

I genuinely hope he feels better now that he knows I’ve “seen what I’ve been missing”. I hope he’s happy with himself. The quicker that he feels better, the quicker he’ll move on.

It’s time to feel better. It’s time for both of us to feel better.

Just not together.