I was on promo setup at work this past week. For those of you who have never worked retail (or perhaps know this nightmare by a different name), promo setup is a seasonal ritual that involves a lot of charts and a lot of product that isn't on any of the charts. It also involves the entire department being passive-aggressive, someone inevitably bribing us with food, and (at least the now-three times I've been on it) my fear of heights being a huge problem (I do not trust the little stepladders at work one bit). On the bright side, this time I did not get myself sent home early because I nearly passed out. (That was how I got out of the Halloween exercise this past year. I could not stand upright and consuming a decent quantity of sugar did not help and eventually I need to figure out why that keeps happening to me but the key word there is eventually.) Not so bright side, I've been in some variation of flashback mode for the last forty-eight hours and... needless to say, that sucks.
Again, this is another post about the Vulcan (who now officially gets a tag here because apparently this is something I am still majorly processing). I know, I know. I have emotionally moved on and I need to write about stuff that isn't my disastrous attempt at first love, and yet... it still affects a lot. It still explains a lot. And until I have the chance to rewire myself and make better memories involving my misguided affectionate heart, I'm going to keep writing about that dingbat and the effect he had on me.
So... timing-wise, this part of that story starts in November 2011, the month in which I made one of my top five worst decisions ever (random fact - I don't actually have a list for that other than knowing that this incident is on it) and let him back in. I actually had no control over how that happened. We ran into each other at a thing, we got put in the same spaces during that thing, we ended up talking in a hallway for over an hour, and... at some point, one of my mother's friends saw this and her little heart just melted. I know this because approximately a week later, my mother "confronted" me about it. This, if you're keeping score, is probably one of the top five weirdest things she has ever done. Apparently she was all melty over it too because she knew darn well who that boy was and how good a person he was compared to me (this turned out to be untrue but we didn't know it then) and it was so sweet that he was voluntarily talking to me!! The fact that we'd been friends in some form for a year and this was the first she was hearing of it did not matter one bit. This was my mother in flail mode, and boy was that a fun month or so for me.
Point being, I fell for him again. I fell for him because I am perpetually attention-desperate and I wanted to prove to him that I could absolutely be what I needed. And again, for a few sweet months, we were functional. Then February 2012 happened and it all went right to hell again.
I'd actually figured it out a week before I actually found out. In general, if someone posts song lyrics on Facebook, they are implying something that they themselves are sucking at finding the right words for. At some point during the first week of February, the Vulcan posted lines from "Collide" by Howie Day. If you've never heard that song, click here because despite what follows, I still think it's a beautiful song. It's just... very, very sappy. It is not a song that a single person posts lyrics from, ever. So, from that little cue alone, I figured out that the Vulcan had a girlfriend or something. This did not rest well on my vulnerable eighteen-year-old heart. I was still convinced I was in love with him, and people I was in love with were not supposed to do things like this!! But that, it turned out, was not even the worst of what happened.
Fast-forward to February 13. I remember the date very clearly, which is never a good thing considering how codawful my memory tends to be with most things. February fricking 13th. It was a Monday, too, because adding insult to injury and all that jazz. Completely normal day until I sat down with my laptop and the Vulcan and I started having one of our convos. At this point, that happened maybe once or twice a week and it would mostly be about things that happened to us. Well, this was definitely a Thing That Happened. Being the hopeless-romantic idiot that I was, I had somehow convinced myself thtat the day before fricking Valentine's Day was the perfect time to tell him that I still fancied him. And then the bomb dropped.
He. Had. A. Girlfriend.
I would learn later that the girl in question was a petite blonde pixie who may or may not have been slightly emotionally manipulative. This reveal, however, would not happen until after she broke up with him after two months. (Also turns out that getting ditched in favor of emotionally manipulative blonde pixies is something that always ends up happening to me. As of writing this, the Vulcan is the first of four people who's done that to me, and out of those, I am only on speaking terms with one.) And at the time, it didn't matter who she was. I had been two seconds from reminding him that I loved him, but that apparently meant nothing now because he was with someone else.
In hindsight, even with all the other awfulness I've survived, no betrayal has ever stung quite as much as that one.
We could've been good for each other. That was what I told myself so many times in the months that followed. And with who we were when we were eighteen, that was still an accurate statement. I do realize now that it wouldn't have lasted as a long-term thing. We were too similar in some ways and too different in others and it just wouldn't have worked. But as a short fluttery disaster of a relationship, we could've meant something. We could've saved each other. But he chose someone else, and I shut off further, and none of that mattered.
So when people ask me why I don't like Valentine's Day, it's not just because I'm 21 and single and basically everyone else I know is in love. It's because like it or not, for the rest of my life, that "holiday" will always be associated with something painful. And like it or not, I'm still not totally over it.
Song of the day - "Antebellum", Vienna Teng.
No comments:
Post a Comment