This is not a post about being fair

I just got back not long ago and checked my email and found something that has given me pause.

It's an email from the Pocket Ex, otherwise known as Ye of No Communication Because Thou Art A Yellow-Bellied Pussy-Whipped Coward.

He wrote this:

Hi,

Don't know if this email account of yours is still in use, but in the event that
it is...

Heard from [The KS, pronounced 'Kissy'] that you are leaving for Australia to [do the Dream]. It's`good to hear that you are going after what you have always wanted to do.

Have fun, and all the best in your new careeer. I have no doubt that you will make an excellent [whatsit].

Take care,

The Pocket Ex

My first reaction was to shoot back an email which comprised of two words: "Bugger off". No, I lie. Make that three words, Alex.

"Bugger off, asshole."

Which I know, I know, is not a nice reaction given the overall pleasant tone of the email.

But that's just it, really. The tone is pleasant, and bland, and reads like something that you'd send to someone because someone told you it was the right thing to do. I hate it when people do the right thing solely because it was the right thing, and you both know they'd rather not do it. It makes the gesture cheap and it makes me feel like you're a fucking hypocrite.

It's annoying formality and impersonal nature just makes me want to throw a brick through his car window. Especially when I ran to said author for help at the worst time of my life and he basically told me to go bugger off. No, maybe he wasn't the best person to turn to for help, but I was just that desperate that I thought that I might just kill myself if someone didn't just make the pain stop, so you know what, I'm going to go easy on myself and get mad and stay mad at him for taking the easier way out without explanation.

So when I get this excruciatingly polite, typically civil servant (sneer that last please, with real feeling) sort of email, with its overtones of 'there, now I've done my duty', I would like to send an email which would be designed to vomit copiously and repeatedly on the writer's keyboard.

What pisses me off more is that lately he's been popping up on my MSN because I never bothered to delete him. And when I've said "Hi, how've you been doing" (just to be fucking friendly, mind you. Because I'm fucking nice that way.) I get fucking ignored. IGNORED.

I fucking hate being ignored. ESPECIALLY when I gave up six years of my life putting up with puppy-dog looks, mediocre vanilla sex, being 'the Pocket Ex's girlfriend' when I was so much more than that, and doing the same motherfucking thing

every

single

bloody

fucking

weekend.

And then I get the email, this exemplar illustration of perfectly formal, polite writing which DOESN'T MEAN SHIT.

And which, by the way, contains spelling mistakes which means he didn't even bother to spellcheck the fucking thing. I would like to think that best wishes meant for me after years of silence would at least contain words which exist in the English language, but nooooooooo.

I wrote this when I was mad, a long time ago.

The Space Cadet and I have a bizarre bond that can basically be summed up in one kooky phrase: we live the same life.

It's one of those strange cosmic jokes, but we actually have the same life. It's freaky. The same things happen to us (albeit at slightly different times, since my life events currently precede hers by about a year or so). We live in the same house number. We both had a What-If Boy in our lives. We both have an Ego in our lives. We have worn, by accident, the same clothes to school (turtleneck, blue jeans and boots, anyone?), we're both Sagittarians (born something like two days apart?), and yes, we have been mistaken for each other before. We had the same type of ex-boyfriend (although hers was honestly more tragic, sorry babe, but it's true) at the same time, left them for the same reasons, made the same deal with them, and had them similarly broken. And we're both pissed as hell about it.

When you're with someone for six or seven years of their lives, when you've enriched them in a million ways because they led such boring little circumscribed lives until you came along and (tried) to drag them kicking and screaming into a funkier and less Computer-Club way of living (not that it worked, the recalcitrant bastards), when you've tried to ensure that they no longer wore clothes that required you to paperbag yourself in shame (quite successful), when you've bullied, cajoled, persuaded and bullied them so that they didn't resemble something that crawled out from under a rock after eating whatever they found there first (white and pale and sluglike and flabby), when you've tried to convince them that missionary work is mainly for the preachers and not the bedroom (I speak for myself here), when you've convinced them that Marvel comics and the Economist were not the be all and end all of fine literature (nothing wrong with them, but please, it offends my bookslut soul), when you've whipped your poor libido into screaming submission because they do not appreciate your red-hot-body even though you had the potential to take them to heaven and back again - twice, when you've fucked them over left, right and centre (emotionally speaking) and they've come crawling back to you on itty-bitty little legs begging for more because those masochistic assholes loved it, what do you think you could expect after it was all over?*


We were young and stupid. Forgive us

I'll tell you what.

Not this.

Not : being subjected to emotional blackmail where they wail that they cannot let you go because they will kill themselves/ crash their cars because you were the best thing that ever happened to them and they will never find someone else ever again and they will never be able to let you go and they will love you forever and you are left feeling hell of a lot like we deserve all the bad things that happen to you even though it is not your fault that you do not love their short, unliterary, unmusical, unfashionable, unadventurous, unlibidinous, unsexy (I lied, asshole! And often!), unmanly selves enough to stay. (I know we look like we’d just walk all over your prostrate sobbing forms in our high heels, but we do have unfortunate consciences which kick into play at the most inopportune times)

Not : saying that we were important enough to them so we'd always stay friends, and saying that we'd tell you if we started seeing someone else, with reciprocity being intended. And then when we do, at great emotional and monetary expense to ourselves, you start giving us ominous warnings about the new guy (who looked really hot in those jeans, or without them in your fevered fantasies) and telling us that he's bad for us, that he'll hurt us, that they've heard stories from reliable sources about how much of a bastard he was, and putting doubts in our minds. And not forgetting, telling us just how much he'd like to kill the guy in question, and explicitly, how.

Not : barely a month after the heartfelt, wailing claim that this was the most painful thing that ever happened to them ever, barring the time they accidentally hit themselves in the nuts with their nunchuks (I laughed inside when you told me, loser), which made us feel lower than sea slugs after we told them about The New Guy, we find out, NOT FROM THEM, that they are seeing someone else. Nooooooo, we find out by accident, and from the last people on earth that we want to find out such news from. Just to add insult to injury.

And mind you, it's not just anyone else that they're seeing , because we could forgive that slip if they didn't tell us because they had been bewitched by someone of quality. Someone of standard and bearing, of intelligence and charm with a glorious, knee-weakening body. Someone, in other words, who reached the bar which was set by us when we were with them. Not someone who had been roundly insulted by them (when they were with us) as stupid, fat and ugly. Not when they likened the girl's intelligence to a lamp-post. Did we teach you nothing? Do we enter their lives as racehorses only for them to go out with nags after that? They besmirch our image by replacing them with substitutes which barely make the grade, if at all. And we are insulted.


They don't know how good they got it

But more insulting, more offensive than anything, was the breach of trust, the lack of integrity. Because when we held up our end of the bargain, when we came clean, whether we wanted to or not, they gave us emotional hell for it. They made us feel like we'd done something wrong for falling out of love with them, for being so utterly immoral in fact, as to get over them and fall for someone new. (We should have been wearing sackcloth and ashes and instead, we were contemplating our 'get lucky' lingerie. Shame on us.) They made us feel, in some inexplicable way, that we owed them.

But: after raising holy hell on both sides of the Pacific, what happens? Well, they suddenly realize the fat, ugly, stupid girls look mighty appealing now that they've been dumped. And they quietly hook up with someone else. And hope we don't find out. So much for dying without us in their lives. So much for never moving on, and being in the worst pain of your life. So much for wanting to throw yourself off the next handy HDB flat. They should have done it. Those fucking drama queens and their fucking low emotional blackmail tactics.

Just to really drive home the point, after the screaming wailing "you're so important to me" banners waving in the guilt-scented wind, they try and blend into the wallpaper when you suddenly feel like life is finally going to break you. "Screw the friendship, Im going to do with geek thing with my fat ugly stupid new girlfriend who likes staring at the flying window screensaver as entertainment. I like her. She's low-maintenance. (And yes she really does that). Oh, and by the way, I'm going to get married. But I won't tell you that either. I'll let you find out from someone else. Like that other time. Because I'm a lily-livered coward to whom the word 'integrity' is yet another mysterious concept which completely escapes me, kind of like the concept of 'fashion' and 'having a life outside computers'".

Lest you feel that this a bitter, sour-grapes sort of rant, let me assure you that we would rather slit our wrists than have either of them back again. We look at our respective Boys and think, Thank God.

But we are offended. And deeply. We deserved better than that.


This is self-explanatory.

I hope you fall off the stool they have to give you when you try and kiss your bride, asshole.

when in doubt, read as applying only to The Slinky Cat and not to the Space Cadet

You know what? It still holds true. I still feel annoyed. I still feel like I got gypped somehow, towards the end, that the boy who loved me and treated me so sweetly when we were together spazzed out and hurt me not once, but several times, towards the end just as I was finding grace to try harder and harder to just make him happy.

I think maybe I could write back a similarly bland, pleasant, nothing email which the emotional content of bleached single-ply toilet paper. Something that says "Thank you, I will. Oh, and congratulations on your impending wedding (which you never had the gut to tell me about you motherfucking coward)". Minus the words in the brackets of course.

But you know what? I'm not that nice, and I'm not that keen on being a Bigger Person. So fuck that. Now I just need to figure out what to say.

Bah.