DAY 32
TRIGGER WARNING: Unwanted sexual advances + Graphic description of a gruesome scene
This is Part 2 to my Day 28 blog all about D, my worst ever ex. Part 2 begins about a year and a half after I stopped talking to D. I saw him around all the time, in particular, at the mall I worked at. He was working security there and would walk by a couple of times a day, mostly not looking inside, but he knew I worked there. I would occasionally see him walking with his new girlfriend. She was a surprising choice for him, because she didn’t look like the type he described being most attracted to, emo/goth chicks. She had long brown hair, pretty and looked wholesome, like someone you’d take home to your mom. They didn’t appear to have any drama, but I wondered if I walked around looking like I had drama with D either… Probably not.
I was sick of seeing him everywhere. I felt like because I had to face him so often, I was forced to deal with the anger that would come over me every time his dumb ass face would pop up into my retinas. I just wanted to stop hating him, and get to a place where I felt nothing, and didn’t care. I was also planning on moving to the city I lived in now, so I wanted to resolve this before I left.
So I emailed him. I don’t remember what it said at all, and the email has long since been deleted, but I imagine it was long, honest, angry, exhausted, regretful and forgiving. I didn’t get a reply to it. Instead…
D showed up to my mall job. He walked in, in uniform from his mall security job, and just came up to my cashier desk.
“Hey Fanny.” (He called me by my real name, he thought my nickname, Fanny, was embarrassing because in Britain, it means vagina. Eye roll. Like I care, that’s hilarious.)
My coworker walked away, leaving me alone with him. I was beet red.
Paraphrasing… Read him in a British accent.
“I got your email.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you wrote to me. I was wondering when you’d be ready to talk again.”
“Yeah.. I was just tired of hating you.”
“I bet. We should go for coffee sometime.”
“Umm, yeah, okay.”
“Do you still have my number?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, text me. If not, just email me again.” He leaves. I was taken aback. I had spent so much time hating D that this was a bit of a shock. A year and a half is a long time to hold onto a grudge. D was the type of person who, as I look back, flourished in the idea that someone couldn’t get over him. When he walked in to my work that day, he had a fucking pep in his step.
We started hanging out again, but D was different. He was really happy. Not because of me, but because he was actually in a good place. He was training to become an EMT, and he’d been dating this girl for like 8 months and things were going really well. D wasn’t looking to hang out with me to see if we had a thing going again, he was different. He was loyal. And we really were just friends. It was strange but good.
We didn’t argue, in fact a major reason we argued was gone because D admitted to me that he was now an atheist. I apologized because I didn’t want to be the reason he was an atheist now. But I think I really was. He said I was.
But D had new beliefs now, like he thought he was an indigo child. I decided to keep my mouth shut on this one. For one, I didn’t even know what it meant, but two, I didn’t want get into any more stupid pointless arguments with him again. He could believe whatever he wanted about himself. It was just annoying to me because of COURSE he thinks he’s special. That’s what a narcissist would think.
D and I hung out very little before I moved to my new city, but we kept in touch. Things were good and it felt like we had really moved past the drama.
I move. Time goes by. I get a new boyfriend. This story is separate and will come in a future blog post. If you’ve read every blog up until now, you’ll know this is a trend. Future stories to come!
Anyway, my new relationship was different… It was polyamorous. My first ever polyamorous relationship. This will become relevant later, but that’s all you need to know without me giving away details about the guy my next man blog will be about.
I visited my hometown every other weekend. I would visit D and we would talk. I told him all about my new relationship, how it was poly. He was intrigued by this but didn’t think he could do it. He didn’t want to have to share with anyone. He also told me about his girlfriend, how great she was. It was cool. I didn’t have feelings for him anymore. I was able to be super level-headed about who D was and how things used to be. His friendship with me was thin, and he treaded carefully with me.
I’d go back to my new city and things were good for a while. But then shit fell apart, almost all at once. My boyfriend broke up with me. And I got kicked out of my apartment. (Kicked is an exaggeration, I was politely asked to move out because they wanted their niece to move in.)
So when that fell apart, I called D. The month before I moved back, D and I spend hours on the phone. Something shitty happened with him too. He also got dumped. So we bonded over that. We were both heartbroken and needed someone to talk to. So we talked to each other.
I moved back to my hometown, in with my parents. I needed a reset. I was now in the same city as D and all my old friends. Things were good, and it was clear D and I were preparing ourselves for the obvious. Sleeping together again.
So we did. Not a lot though. He was seeing someone else too. He was into the poly thing. He had spent a lot of time considering it for himself, but he still wasn’t warmed up to the idea that he would have to share whoever he was dating with other men. He asked me not to tell him about other men if there were any.
When I moved back, I had been curious about this guy who was more of an acquaintance in my friend group. He was 31, and I was 23. Significant age/lifestyle difference, but if he didn’t care, neither did I. He was tall, hot. Let’s call him… A? Fuck, a future dude I’m going to talk about is also an A… Let’s call him Lame A. Lame A was a very smart dude, but I’d never thought he’d be into me. Turns out, he was. He was off and on again with this woman who was… By his description of her, a psycho. But I got the feeling that Lame A was a bit of an untrustworthy douche, so perhaps one behaviour perpetuates another.
Lame A was single for this brief period of time, and we were going to a Halloween party. I was going to start out the night in my Game of Thrones Ygrette costume and finish in my Emma Stone Easy A costume. Lame A came over and wanted me to do his skeleton makeup. Right before Lame A came over, D had spent the day with me, and we’d slept together. In my mind I thought “this might be the last time we do, D…” In the case that Lame A wasn’t actually lame... Foreshadowing...
Lame A and I go to the Halloween party, and it starts out good. I flit around the party like I normally do in this heavy, faux fur coat and bow and arrow. I was a Wildling afterall. Lame A is also flitting around. We flirt very minimally, but I’m still shy. Lame A is intimidatingly hot and I was nervous around him.
These younger girls show up to the party, one in particular catches Lame A’s eye. She is cute, short-haired, and dressed like a cheerleader. She looks a lot hotter than me. I come to find out later that she’s 18...
And as the night progresses, she is steadily flirting more and more with Lame A. Sometimes even right in front of me. I try to fix myself, and get into my Easy A costume. A black corset with Scarlet Red A on my tit. But Lame A is already horny for this 18 year old. I end up walking in on them making out, right in front of me. I was… jolted. My friends all look to me and I just go downstairs and hide. A few friends, one by one, come down and talk to me. I’m not crying, just grossed out and pissed off. She actively knew I was there with Lame A, even watched me flirting with him, but she cut her way in anyway, right before my eyes. She was avoiding eye contact with me too. She knew what she was doing. But I was more annoyed with Lame A. He KNEW he was my date to this party. We had already talked about being interested in each other so it was just.. shocking.
He eventually came down and apologized, but then quickly changed the subject to talk shit about his psycho ex-girlfriend. I was tired of him at this point. He eventually leaves and goes upstairs to make out with the 18 year old more. I stayed downstairs, texted D and told him to come get me. He was there in 20 minutes.
I tried to give Lame A another chance but Lame A only got worse. He started talking poorly about my friends and I could barely get a word in. He also sucked at kissing. I just didn’t trust this guy and I was ready to boot him. He also would eventually go back to the same ex-girlfriend he had previously talked so poorly about.
I kept seeing D and having fun with him. But there were moments where old D would come out.
One night, we went to University and walked around just as a hang out. We reminisced about old times and retold some of our fun stories. But then D decides to tell me something really fucked up.
TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic Description of a Gruesome Scene
Because he was training to be an EMT, he wanted to share a story with me. He did warn me beforehand but not clear enough to make me realize I didn’t want to know. It was about a scene he came to where they found someone dead. It was here. In the University. He tells me, literally as we are standing at the top of the stairwell that someone had jumped from the top floor and landed on the bottom floor, 5 floors. He said it had actually happened more than once. He described to me how the guy fell and cracked his head open on one of the railings, which he pointed to. He then dragged me to the bottom floor so we could find the spot where he died and see if we could see any of the blood. I was scared. I didn’t want to go look, I was so horrified. He tells me it’s not that bad, that it’s all cleaned up, and it happened months ago. He described to be the guy’s head was hanging open and it was “super gnarly.”
I turned white. I am actually white right now just thinking about it. I knew he needed to talk about this with someone, because he saw it, but I was not prepared for the emotions that were overcoming me. I was sick. I couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all night and days later. I wished he had never told me because now a place I had always thought of as a safe haven was now painted with blood in my mind.
That wasn’t the only time D tried to share with me something I didn’t want to know about. He told me that as an EMT, he has to look at pictures of injuries and deaths in order to prepare himself for real scenes. He asked me to look at a picture of a guy who had blown his own face off and survived. I didn’t want to look, I told him I was okay. But he showed me anyway. What I saw still haunts me. I can see it now, and I won’t describe it to you. It was much worse than anything I’ve ever seen in the Walking Dead and I LOVE the Walking Dead zombies. It was horrific because it was real. I was not okay with this and wished he’d never showed me. I do not have the stomach for a job that helps injured or sick people, so it was very inappropriate of him to share these things with me.
END OF TRIGGER OF GRUESOME SCENES.
Another night, he was out at a bar, wasted. He wanted me to come get him and bring him home with me. I waited at the bar for him for a long time, sitting around, bored. He told me 5 minutes. 5 minutes turned into 10. To 20. When 25 minutes had passed, I was done. I call him.
He says he’ll be another 5, he had to pay. But when 8 minutes passed, I drove off. I didn’t want to be this girl who waited around for men. I had learned enough by now, especially from D, that my time is valuable.
But within 3 minutes of driving away he calls.
“Where are you?! I’m outside!”
“I left.”
“Why?!”
“You made me wait too long.”
“Come back! I’m outside. I’m done now.”
I roll back, annoyed. When I get there, he’s not outside. I call him.
He finally comes out, stumbling and giggling and gets into my car. I’m annoyed as all hell.
“There was this fat girl in there with huge jugs. I just wanted to shove my face in her tits. She was hitting on me all night. If you hadn’t come, I would have gone home with her and fucked her.”
I stare at him. “I can drive you back.”
“No! I wanna be with you tonight. I was just saying.”
“No for real, you can go back there and go home with her if that’s what you really want.”
“Why are you being like this right now?”
“Why are you being such an ass right now?”
“Come on! We’re poly! Who cares?! You're not supposed to be jealous.. Ohh you're jealous! That's so cute!”
I am stupid. I take him home. I hate myself.
D tells me all about this other girl he’s sleeping with. She’s 18. What is with douchebags and much younger girls?! He was 28 at this point. He says he would date her but she wasn’t into the poly thing, and he wanted to keep sleeping with me so he wasn’t going to commit to her.
I told D about the big titted girl he talked about that night when he was sober. He apologized. He told me I should have punched him, because that was incredibly shitty of him. I thought that was weird for him to admit that what he said was really awful, new behaviour from D. But a step up from how he used to be.
But things came to a head closer to Christmas time. I was enjoying myself with D outside of those few moments, and we’d talked about possibly dating again. Just chatted mildly. It was a thought but I wanted to test him first. I wanted to see how he would be around my friends, because I have amazing friends whose judgement I trust 100%, so if they didn’t like D, it was NEVER going to happen.
I invite him to spend an afternoon with me and some friends. We hung out every Sunday afternoon and talked about philosophy, science, politics. It was a major part of my life and meant a lot to me that he could come, participate in conversation, and my friends could get to know him.
This is what happens instead…
D and I show up. D chooses to sit beside me instead of across the table, where he could be closer to the conversation. Imagine the table is long. There are TVs in the bar, with sports playing. D decides he is far more interested in the sports than what my friends and I are talking about, even though D has never expressed interest in sports, ever. We are there for 2 hours, and D does this virtually the entire time. Except…. When Lame A shows up. I had already written off Lame A, and decided he was garbage, so did all my friends. He would never be invited to a party ever again. But D and Lame A hit it off. They actually really like each other. In fact, they knew each other, briefly. They are chatting back and forth and this is a huge red flag to me because Lame A isn’t the person I want D to impress.
D wants to leave. He is done watching tv and makes up some excuse that he has to pick up the 18 year old girl he’s seeing. I shrug it off, and we leave. I drop him off at home. He promises me he will come over in half an hour, he’s not going to be gone for very long. I believe him.
But I wait. At home. For 2.5 hours. D took forever to respond and had “got caught up.” But finally, after 2.5 hours, he shows up to my house. I ask him why he’s so late, but he doesn’t want to get into it and changes the subject. I’m already pretty annoyed. I’m watching the Walking Dead. This is an old season, so I’ll spoil it, Beth dies in the show, a character my sister told me reminded her of me. D tells me he’s glad she’s dead. He said he hated her character, she was so annoying. I find this disturbing. He then goes into a long-winded unfunny joke about how if there was a zombie apocalypse, he would kill all the men and fuck as many women as possible. I am disgusted by this. He says he’s kidding but deep down, I know he would love a world where he didn’t have to compete with any other men. I imagine this as a world where no women would want him back...
TRIGGER WARNING: Unwanted sexual advances.
He then goes to try be sexual with me. I’m trying to watch the show and I’m not in the mood. D has been annoying and off-putting to me all day. But he is persistent. He is crossing my boundaries. My mother is upstairs and I’m feeling really bad about this because I don’t want to do anything with D while my mom is home. Not only that, but what he’s doing isn’t turning me on in any way at all. But he keeps pushing. He pries his fingers down my pants and it doesn’t feel good to me at all. I tell him I don’t like it. He tells me I will like it, if I just let him keep going. I don’t really know what to do at this point, he isn’t going to stop. He wants what he wants. I don’t want this to get uncomfortable, so I take him to my room, where I can try to get this shit overwith. I take over the situation so I am in control of it, rather than him. We do hook up, and it’s quick. And when it’s over, he immediately decides to leave. He tries to tell me that he wasn’t just using me, but I felt pretty used, since he was only over for about an hour.
I sat on my couch, astounded by what just happened. I am upset with myself for letting him get what he wanted. I wished I was stronger and sent him away. But I did what made me feel safe in the moment, which was to just get it done. I don’t want this situation to be overdramatized, because I was able to put myself in a spot where I took the reins, but I still felt violated when D touched me in a way I didn’t like and wouldn’t stop when I told him to. And I only did what I did because I didn’t want to cause a scene. I knew how D could get from the past, and if I just gave in, then things would be quiet and D would leave my house calmly without disturbing my mother.
END OF TRIGGER OF: Unwanted sexual advances
As the days went on, it became more and more clear to me that D needed to be cut out of my life, permanently. Nothing about that entire last day we hung out made me think D and I could even be friends, let alone in a relationship. He was the same fuckhead I’d seen years before.
Christmas comes. It’d been a whole two weeks since either of us had even texted.
Boxing day. D wishes me a Belated Merry Christmas. I ghost.
He texts me again, a day later. He wants to know what’s wrong. I ghost. I ignore him. He messages more and more. He knows I’m pissed at him but can’t possibly think for a second why.
Absolutely no response. He gets nothing from me. He gives up.
But his number remained on my phone. I wanted to know if he was going to message me again. I wanted to be able to read it if he did in case he was going to try again. And I wasn’t wrong.
6 months later, in the middle of summer, he decides to check in.
D: Hey, got a new phone, just checking out the numbers. Who is this?
Me: You can delete this number
D: Is this Fanny? I know you probably hate me but I wanted to apologize for whatever I did to make you not want to talk to me anymore.
I was seeing someone at the time of this and the texts had caused me a ton of anxiety. The guy told me the best thing I could do was to just block and delete the number. I agreed, and that’s what I did.
The story could very easily have ended there, but.. It didn’t. Later that summer, one of my best friends told me that she spent some time with his mother, who she happened to be friends with and was interested in buying her house. She told her the most insane story, which haunted me.
Apparently, D had gotten into an accident. He was playing soccer, and got hit extremely hard in the head, so hard in fact that he actually had to get rushed to the hospital for brain surgery. They opened his skull, and had to literally peel off his face to do this surgery. She said that it was right in front, right near the front cortex, which is basically the personality part of your brain.
I was most shook by the part of the story where D’s face was peeled off. I know that it’s not hard to get that back to the way it was and it probably wasn’t his entire face, but it was still very disturbing to imagine this beautiful looking guy looking like the monster he’d felt like to me.
I’ve seen D in photos since then, since I am still friends with some of his friends on facebook, and he honestly looks the same. But what I had to wonder is, is his personality different? I don’t know...
A year or so later, my work had a Christmas party at the same hotel I used to work at. The same hotel D may have still worked at as a bartender... And to my shock, he still did. He was bartending... MY CHRISTMAS PARTY. I happened to work with a guy who was also in my major who had brought his girlfriend, also in our major so we knew each other. I told her about D being there, and the story. She had had a horrible encounter with D as well, a more violent one, where he was shouting and making a scene at her job, so she didn’t like him at all either. She was ballsy though, and decided to get a drink from him.
When she came back, she said he actually recognized her and initiated an apology. She said he seemed different. Like he wasn’t the same confident (fake confident) person he portrayed himself to be. She tried to encourage me to go talk to him, but I vehemently refused. She was pushy, but I would not budge. I wanted to spend the night pretending like he wasn’t there and hoped that because the party had virtually 500 people there, he might not even see me.
Until the prize portion of the night happened. There was a fun little raffle for different very epic prizes, and lo and behold, I won a fucking Xbox One, bitches! I went on the stage to accept my prize, and realized right away that D would know I was there. It was awkward but also, I just won a fucking Xbox One so I didn’t even really care. And he had to watch. Watch ME achieve better than he did. I was working in my own field out of University and he was still neither an EMT nor a police officer, nor a military douche like he wanted. And even though I shouldn’t compare myself to him, I was 5 year younger and killing it already.
So that’s my D story. I did see him around town a couple times but we never made eye contact. He once sat at a table beside my friends and I in a bar, but thankfully we were leaving in the next 5 minutes so I didn’t have to bear his presence for long.
D will never hear from me again. I can’t imagine a day coming where I will change my mind on this. D may have a different personality now, I don’t know. He may not even really remember much of what he did to me. He didn’t know what could have possibly pissed me off enough to never speak to him again, so I doubt he’ll ever get a revelation about that one. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need closure on this. I don’t want to give him closure. I don’t owe him anything. The best thing I can do for myself is leave his memory behind on this blog post, and let the memories fade away.
D taught me a lot of hard lessons, but he taught me most what I don’t want. What I won’t tolerate from anyone ever again.
I will not tolerate controlling jealousy.
I will not tolerate misogynistic jokes.
I will not tolerate being yelled at.
I will not tolerate gaslighting.
I will not tolerate having my time wasted for shitty reasons.
I will not tolerate anyone who degrades me based on past, current, or future choices.
I will not tolerate disrespect.
I will not tolerate cheating.
I will not tolerate lying to save your ass.
I will not tolerate being blamed for someone’s else’s poor decisions.
I will not tolerate someone insulting my atheism.
I will not tolerate backhanded compliments.
I will not tolerate someone who ignores my "no."
I will not tolerate any amount of unwanted sexual pressure.
I can’t ever change the fact that when someone tries to touch me the way he did that my body recoils in disgust. I just have to warn people that there’s certain things I can’t do anymore. And I would want to be with someone who would accept this and adjust to me, not try to force me to enjoy something I hate.
I hope no one feels bad for me or victimizes me. I am a strong person, and I can literally kick ass. I don’t want anyone to think any of this story makes me weak, because it doesn’t. I think D made me one of the strongest people I know.
I have also thought about whether people would judge me for not reporting it, but what happened falls into a grey area and no one would actually take it seriously. It was just really gross and violating. I don’t know if he would ever go on to do it again to anyone else, but it would have to be a much more serious offence for anyone to take it seriously. There’s just nothing I can do about it except share my story. I know I have left his name out of here, but that’s because I’m not trying to out anyone in a public outcry kind of way, I’m just trying to tell my story, how I remember it. I can’t bare the responsibility of trying to ruin his life with this because I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life. People do change, particularly after a brain injury, so I guess I’ll just never know what happened to him and I really don’t care.
Memory is a fickle thing. I bet he remembers all of this entirely differently from me. I’m sure he remembers me being a lot worse than I think I ever was. Maybe I was, I don’t know. But I tried my best to be patient and accepting of someone who was always so difficult to please when I really shouldn’t have. But I am thankful for the person it’s helped to shape me into.
Thanks for the lessons, D. I’m happy to say that I don’t ever miss you, or think you were a good lay, as you would have wished. I remember you saying you hope that when I sleep with anyone in the future, I would think of him, which has never happened once. I barely remember anything about our sex life… Oh! Except that time you came on your own face and I laughed at you for 10 minutes straight. Boi, bye.