The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get

I still haven't heard back from Reefer Madness, but I'm busy preparing for our possible coffee outing by working myself into a frenzy about what we might discuss. Specifically, is he going to call me out about the stalking?

In the interest of letting go of the past, I'll be honest about what this stalking entailed. Bear in mind that Reefer Madness and I attended different high schools, so there was no opportunity to encounter him during the school day, whether intentionally or by chance. My stalking was confined to driving by his house (which was not on the way to anything) and generally being in the vicinity of where he practiced sports. Whether or not he ever noticed these things or saw me or heard about them is unknown, but I am certain that he knew I had feelings for him that long outlasted his feelings for me. Obviously, we are not talking about "stalking" in the prosecutable sense, but he was my inappropriate quarry.

Let's assume that we do actually get together. Even if our past association does not come up at the first meeting, if we spend more time together in the future, we will inevitably turn to the subject. It cannot be avoided. It is the elephant in the room of any future relationship we might have (even if the room itself is not yet constructed, or is derelict and in need of rebuilding, the elephant is already there). The mind must leap ahead several steps to get from the present moment to actually making plans to see one another to incorporating each other into our regular schedules, but I am so distressed over having to discuss my past behavior that I feel the need to organize my thoughts now so as not to be taken by surprise. (He is smart and cunning, so I can't rely on my superior intellect to dodge or bluster through questions.)

The most important step in choosing what I want to say if questioned on this topic is to ascertain why I was stalking him in the first place. I don't know exactly. Reefer Madness and I were, at the tender age of sixteen, engaged in a classic male-female struggle; the male pulled away from the relationship without explanation, leading the female to engage in crazy behavior in an effort to get closure and figure out why the relationship ended. Sex and the City addressed this very topic when Berger inexplicably broke up with Carrie, and those two were about twenty years older than Reefer Madness and myself, so we were obviously mature for our ages. So, part of the problem was that I never understood what caused the sudden reversal of his feelings about me. He and I never discussed it directly, relying instead on Iago as our biased and deeply flawed go-between. I had all these feelings that had developed for him that suddenly had no healthy outlet.

The other major piece of the puzzle was something for which Reefer Madness, or even the more sinister Iago, cannot be held accountable. Reefer Madness's apparent rejection of me in favor of my very best friend played into some insecurities that bedeviled my friendship with Sniffles for its entire fifteen-year duration. The way I saw things, Sniffles was this beautiful man-trap who would absorb all the male attention in the room, and I was the Velma. It meant a lot to me that Reefer Madness liked me even though he met both of us at the same time. It made me feel important, and it made me feel like he was special, because he could see something in me that was invisible to the other guys I knew. To hear that I was wrong about him and that he, like everyone else (I imagined), finally realized that Sniffles was the prettier one and the one upon whom all romantic attentions should be lavished devastated me. I was a seething cauldron of insecurities already, and this betrayal cranked the heat up to psycho levels. It is worth remembering that it is highly possible that Reefer Madness's defection to the Sniffles camp was entirely, or at least partly, fabricated by Iago as part of his campaign to be a total fucking asshole for no reason.

I obviously can't lay that whole load of personal issues on Reefer Madness no matter what happens between us, but I think that I could reasonably cut it down to saying, "I really liked you, and I thought you liked me too, and then all of a sudden you didn't like me anymore and I was hearing that you liked [Sniffles], and I was really hurt and ill-equipped to deal with it, so I'm sorry for anything I did that upset you, but I was processing my disappointment as best I could," and leave it at that. Bygones and all.