THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
Entry posted by Roxanne Wilde
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I recently discovered one of the most dreadful post-relationship apocalypse tales online. I've pasted it here in it's entirety, including the URL for anyone interested. Even though I disagree mightily with this author's worldview in his other posts, I love his style - straightforward & punchy; yet still evocative, bordering on the nostalgic.
I won't laden it down any further with the unnecessary, only to say this...
Be prepared.
"The One That Got Away"
February 6, 2012 by BeijaFlor
I got a phone call today, from an old high-school buddy who I hadn’t seen in nearly forty years. He’d seen my name on a “Freecycle” website in my old neighborhood – where I’m clearing out my Dear Auntie’s house so I can sell it to pay her monthly bill from “Shady Pines”. I invited Ike to meet me at the old house, which is not far from his home, so we could catch up on forty years of “So what did you do?”
Ike shows up, looking surprisingly as he had in high school. He was pretty-much as slim as he’d been in 1970, and he had the same Abby Hoffman tumble of curls he’d worn in those days. Oh, his hair was shot through with gray, as is mine; but the years have treated Ike very well, it appears to me.
After we caught up with each other’s lives, he turned for a moment to a very-special mutual acquaintance. “I saw Kate a couple of years ago. She’s excommunicated me again. This is the third time,” he chuckled.
Oh, Gods above, Kate. I remembered her well. I had the biggest crush on her in 10th grade, and indeed right through high school and beyond; I even wrote her sonnets, yes, in the Shakespearean style. (We were both fond as hell of writing, and I actually wrote a 300-page novel in my high-school years. Thank-fully, I didn’t have enough sense to market it.) Kate put me firmly in the friend-zone, and friends were scarce enough for me that I happily stayed there while she plowed her way through a bunch of guys – including Ike. I hadn’t spoken with her since Christmas Eve of 1980, when her mother and I exchanged pleasantries and Kate recommended that I “go fornicate with a grapefruit.”
This should have been the end of a “beautiful friendship,” but in fact it was not. Just some ashes on the casket. The real end had come the previous summer.
It came on a day when I went over to Kate’s house, probably to go out to dinner with her or something. (Yes, I was a Solid Beta in the Friend Zone – but I enjoyed her company, and I was completely out of The Game anyways – hopelessly, hopelessly clueless.) Well, this particular afternoon, Kate was higher than a kite, and it was not on drugs. It was on something that had completely cemented her self-image as a femme fatale.
Kate had developed a predilection for young men who were, let’s just say, emotionally troubled. She wasn’t herself a “pretty” girl – her face too long and angular, her nose too masculine – but she had a hot figure, big sexy boobs, and long wavy hair the color of lightly antiqued brass. And after she got deflowered up at college, she took off – to a degree, possibly, making up for her Puritan youth. Or, in another fashion, getting revenge for it. She would land a fresh fish, ride him wild for a couple of months, then drop him like a sack of used food and go after another. And she’d tell me all the juicy – or I should say gory – details. I guess I was her Brother Confessor, for those last few years.
Anyways, she had just dropped her latest out-of-balance paramour a few days ago. He’d called, left messages on her answering machine, but she ignored them. Then, the previous afternoon, he’d come to her house and rang the bell – insistently, incessantly, for quite some time. She was upstairs, looking out the window, while he rang and rang and rang again, and finally he shambled back to his car and drove away.
His family found him in his bedroom closet that evening. He’d hanged himself.
Kate was ecstatic! Gott in himmel, this poor schmuck had loved her so much that losing her kicked him over the edge and he … hanged himself! She had really gotten to him! Someone had actually died from the loss of her love! She was so elated … she couldn’t have been more proud of herself if she had been given the Oscar. Let’s see, not for “best actress” … nor for “best supporting actress” … I have it. “Best destroying actress.”
As for me? They hadn’t even invented the Red Pill yet – but I gagged one down, a jagged Red Pill with edges like broken glass, that afternoon. I mean, there, but for the grace of God, went I.
I didn’t see much more of Kate, after that day. I did invite her, some months later, to share a bottle of good French champagne with me, in celebration of my first solo flight; she said no. And it was a couple of months after that she gave me that Christmas Eve “fornicate with a grapefruit” put-down.
Talking with Ike reminded me of all that – but like a time-bomb. Too much later for me to discuss it with him. But … yeah, I might have missed an exciting roller-coaster of a romance, but instead I was The One That Got Away.
SOURCE: http://beijaflorbeyondthesunset.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/the-princess-syndrome/
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