Why won't you love me??
How do you go from “I want to be with you” to “your nipples would make a nice addition to my lampshade”? There’s a fine line between wanting to see someone and stalking. My question is where on God’s green earth is that line? Having never been a stalker (at least not one with a restraining order), I’ve always been intrigued by what it is that makes someone go that extra mile and end up parked outside their target’s house peering through the blinds at 3:00 in the morning. Sure, I’ve done the occasional drive by, the call and hang up trick (this is before the introduction of caller id, I was 12) and happened to check their gmail status to see if they were on line, but it’s never once occurred to me to plaster hundreds of pictures of someone in my closet and make a little shrine to them or carve their initials into my forearms.
I have had the misfortune, however, of being a target. Sure at first it’s natural to feel all popular because someone so badly wants your attention. But the creep factor starts setting in when they start asking for measurements of your back, or threaten to hose you down if you don’t put that darn lotion right back into the basket. When it gets to the point that you’re afraid to be alone in your own home, they start following you around at work, and start harassing your friends about how you might feel, that’s a very berry bad sign.
I “dated” (and I use that term loosely) Hairy McBacksweat when I was fat and going through hard times. We lasted for a few months, and I ended the “relationship” when I woke up from my low self esteem induced haze and realized that Hairy McBacksweatand I weren’t meant to be together. Mainly because I had a shred of dignitity, wanted to be with someone that was smart enough to string together a sentence with more than 4 words in it, who didn’t walk around scratching his nut sack all the time, and who peed with the door closed. I wasn’t asking for the world here, so the relationship ended.
“I love you,” he told me. I stared at him blankly and blinked in return. “We can work this out,” he added. I kept staring at him blankly. “Please.” Another blank stare from me. Finally, after 45 minutes of him cursing, pleading, yelling, crying and my silent responses he left-it was over, or so I thought. Thank freaking God because I had seen a scary side to him that I’d never seen before. There was just something that kind of snapped, and for a split second I thought he was going to strangle me.
At work the next day, he showed up at my cubicle and wanted to talk things out. Um, we’re at work, it’s not time for talkies-it’s time for reading blogs and fooling around on the internet work. I excused myself by telling him that I had to be in training in 5 minutes. He walked me to the training room, asking me if he could measure my back and pleading with me the whole way. I finally had to yell at him in the middle of the hallway to tell him there was nothing left to talk about and to leave me alone.
Still not over.
He started visiting Foxy at work all the time. This required that he walk right past my desk to get to hers. Oh, that’s clever. Hey, totally not obvious that you’re doing that to see what I might do. And then there were talks about how he just wanted “closure” and “why won’t she love me?”. Um, that’s not closure, pal. Here’s what will help you, let it go. When he wasn’t bothering Foxy, he was calling my brother-in-law to talk about his feelings and determine how their relationship would change now that he and I weren’t together. Yeah, just what every guy wants: to talk about his feelings with some unstable dude. So hot. Can’t believe I let him get away.
These examples are just minor annoyances, the scary part happened when he showed up at my apartment one day. I lived in a nice ground floor apartment while we had been seeing each other. Thankfully, there were bars on the windows and without a key, the only way to get into the building was by being buzzed in. I was standing right by the kitchen windowwhen the phone started ringing. I looked at caller id, saw it was him calling and ignored the call-just as I had been doing for the last week. He left me a voicemail, which I checked. “I know you’re in there screening your calls, I can see you.” I stepped away from the window and immediately called my sister to come over.
Two minutes later my phone rang again, this time he was calling me from the front door wanting to be buzzed in. I’ll never get exactly how this happened, I meant to push a button that denies the entry, but instead ended up pushing the button that grants the entry. He was inside my building…and my front door was unlocked. Just as I ran to lock my front door, he opened it and stepped inside. My useless dog merely ran over to him and licked his hands. Traitor!
“This is it,” I thought to myself. “My sister is going to be too late. The only thing she’ll find is my right hand and my scalp. They’ll find other bits of me scattered around his house, and he’ll be wearing my skin as a suit.”
He insisted that he had just come over to declare a truce. He said he thought we could remain friends. He swore that he was finished making scenes at work, and demanding explanations from my friends. Then he told me that he just wanted to hold me one more time before he gut me like a fish. Okay, he didn’t actually say that last part, but I thought it was coming. Thankfully, my sister arrived 5 minutes after he did and I was able to talk him into leaving (without him taking my nipples).
Shockingly enough, the friendship didn’t pan out. Mainly because I started pretending like he didn’t exist when I saw him at work, never responded to any of his email/phone messages, and would stare blankly at him if he tried to talk to me in the cafeteria.
Hairy McBacksweat is long gone now. He’s married-to an actual living, breathing human woman. Not to one of those real dolls (DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK if you’re at work, unless you want to be fired from your cushy job) like I thought he’d end up with. I do think of him every once in awhile, and then I throw up in my throat and wonder what on earth I ever saw in him. I’m gagging right this very second.
