And You Start Breaking Down and Just Go Into the Sound When You Hear That Fast Train

Now that I've posted all the emails (in poorly redacted form) between the new boy and me, I feel more prepared to talk about them.

I can't discuss them intelligently because I don't understand what happened. I assume that the new boy was taking out something on me that didn't have anything to do with me, which he sort of admitted in his apologetic email. If that's not true, then I just don't know what possessed him to unload on me like that. Nor do I understand why he would claim he still wanted to visit me when he holds me in such low regard.

A friend of mine reviewed the emails between us, and she interpreted my response to his apology as saying that the things he said were unforgivable and that I never wanted to talk to him again. That threw me into a little bit of a tail spin because that was not what I meant to say. Another friend (hi, TSCGirl) said that I obviously wanted him to fight for me, at least a little bit, which sounded more accurate to me.

I spent most of the day wrestling with whether I should email him. No one to whom I mentioned this idea thought it sounded wise. The general consensus was that: (1) the new boy is a giant asshole and (2) anything I could say to him in an email would make me sound like the type of lonely, pathetic, deluded person he accused me of being. The first point is hard to dispute, but the second point is impossible.

My mom had the most interesting theory. She said that his email was a power play, and that I'll hear from him again in a few days when he gets tired of waiting for me to cave in. She also said that I should break every single one of my fingers myself rather than reply to any email he might send. She took particular umbrage at the new boy's suggestion that I am a skank since I am the furthest thing from skanky and since she just has a bee in her bonnet generally about guys leveling such charges at girls, especially girls with whom they themselves have been physically involved. In other words, if I'm a skank then the boy is equally skanky because he was an active participant.

Anyway, I'm not as certain as my mom that the new boy will contact me again. It wouldn't shock me, but it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't either.