1
Pathetic
May 2017
Gwen
Iscarfed pad Thai siew while I scrolled through Netflix, searching for something to watch. Reading wasn’t taking my mind off my grousing thoughts like it normally did. All those super-swanky book boyfriends that occupied my shelf were not making it easier to fill the hole he left in my heart. I needed to mindlessly indulge in something, anything to divert my attention fromhim.
At the mere thought of him, my eyes darted to my phone on my lap, where his Facebook page was still open, taunting me via happy photos of his fabulous life with his new girlfriend. Frustrated with myself, I flipped my phone over and stabbed at the noodles with the plastic fork, imagining Erik’s face. It brought me a smidgen of comfort.
My gray tabby cat, Dahmer, jumped onto the sofa beside me, stalking over to sniff at the carton in my hand. He liked Thai food almost as much as I did.
“Back off,” I grumbled, pulling the carton away from his searching nose. He began to purr loudly, pushing his head against my arm, gently nipping at me. Sighing, I relented, picking up a tiny piece of beef and offering it to him. He snatched it from between my fingers and looked at me expectantly, as if waiting for more.
Dahmer was named after the Milwaukee Cannibal. I was a little angry when I’d chosen that moniker. Angry at men, specifically Erik, and angry at myself. My mother had been horrified to find out that I’d named my cat after a serial killer, but honestly, the cat needed a name as crazy as he was, and I wanted a name that didn’t reflect my new cat lady spinster status.
Ever since the day I brought him home from the pound seven months ago, he’d kept me on my toes. Dahmer gave affection when it suited him, for as long as it suited him. He also punished me as he saw fit—ignoring me, attacking my legs when I came home from work a little late. Sometimes, he left me dead things. Usually just bugs, but one time he managed to catch a mouse, and he deposited that prize on my pillow.
Neurotic cat-like behaviour aside, he was surprisingly good at sensing my moods and drawing me out of them, and he made me feel a little less alone.
Before Dahmer, the silence of my apartment was too much, even for me, and I was a girl who liked her solitude. I needed it after working in an office all day at a job I couldn’t stand.
Administration. I’d picked the most basic, brainless program to take in college. I was shoved from the unforgiving, angst-filled halls of my former high school and pressed with the task of deciding my entire future in what felt like a single moment. It was overwhelming, and instead of selecting the program I’dwantedto—which was creative writing—I’d chosen one in which I could find steady work and that my parents would approve. For stability.
All my choices had been for stability. Take Erik, for example. He was safe, and he was supposed to be my forever. But he’d cheated on me, and when I found out, I tossed all his things onto the tiny patch of yellowed grass in front of the apartment.
If only it were as easy to toss away the influence of his destruction, but I was still working on it.
I realized a few things after the breakup. The most obvious being that I was no longer content with ignoring my dreams. Ever since I was a little kid, I’d dreamed of becoming a published author. I’d always loved writing, always kept notebooks around, and amongst the collection of dresses in my closet were stacks of binders full of short stories, poems, and outlines for romance novels.
Ironic, I know, especially given my current state of hating everything to do with men—which is why I hadn’t bothered to open a notebook in months. Having my heart broken had hindered my ability to put pen to page and let the words flow through me. I’d grown desolate from the blank pages.
Severe writer’s block aside, a couple more things were holding me back from pursuing this dream of mine.
For one, my blue-collared, straight-out-of-a-nineties-sitcom family. My parents didn’t believe writing books was a sustainable career for a young woman, especially a young single woman. In our family, my dad had always been the sole provider. He owned his own welding fabrication shop, had about twenty-six employees working under him, and had contracts all over Southern and Central Ontario.
Since my parents were self-made, teaching my sister and me the importance of having a stable career was high on my father’s list of priorities. According to my dad, writing was a hobby, so, I’d hopped into the corporate world of business administration.
Once I graduated, I encountered an unforeseen problem. For every administrative job post that I found, there were at least thirty other interviewees, and over half of them were more qualified than me. This lack of available employment was how I ended up as my father’s administrative assistant at the shop—just like he’d hoped.
I’d worked there for the last three years, and every day was the same. It was slowly killing me, but I hid it well, knowing my dad would be hurt to discover how miserable I was at my job. It wasn’t the job, per se. It just wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with my time. Office work was boring, and sitting alone in the office all day long was torturous.
To make matters worse, I no longer had a boyfriend at home. My heart twisted with the betrayal at the mere thought of him.
I’d been so blindsided by his deception, but the worst part was that when he left, he took my dignity and my mojo. Which is why I found myself sitting on my sofa on a Friday night with a carton of my ultimate comfort food and my cat for company, letting the memories wash over me like acid, knowing that I was intentionally picking at the scab.
I met Erik six years ago on my first day of college in the student ID cards line. I’d been there for an hour already, and it felt like the line wasn’t moving. He looked more approachable than the crew-cut guy in front of me, and he was holding a book. My kind of people held books.
He was lean, fit, and dressed in dark blue slim jeans with a white button-up shirt and a maroon V-neck sweater. He had dark wavy hair that was cut shorter on the sides, longer on the top, and a little unruly, like he’d spent the day raking his hands through it.
I felt an overwhelming urge to talk to him, so I struck up a conversation by asking what he was reading. It wasThe Pragmatic Programmerby Andy Hunt, and he happily explained a little about it. Computer Science wasn’t really my forte—I was more into romance, the classics, sci-fi, some horror, and maybe even a little mystery—but I let him tell me about it. Cute guys digging books were my kryptonite, and Erik was a cute guy.
The conversation only flowed from there. To my astonishment, we hit it off, and he seemed to like me. He was attractive, easy to talk to, and we enjoyed a lot of the same things like videogames, paintballing, and Comic-Con—what my older sister would call “nerdy things.” When I finally made it to the front of the line an hour later, I left with his number programmed into my phone and plans to meet for coffee. It was the start of our very safe, very comfortable relationship.
Or at least, ithadbeen safe and comfortable. I didn’t see the many holes in our relationship until long after he’d left. We were constantly doing things together—checking out the art scene and museums, craft breweries, and other neat little tucked-away adventures—but I guess they weren’t enough to keep Erik interested in me for the long term. One day, Erik pulled the rug out from under me and confessed that he’d cheated on me with a girl he met at work.
To say I never saw it coming would be an understatement. Erik wassupposedto be the trustworthy good guy. He didn’t fit the stereotypical mold of a cheating bastard. It had been a sucker-punch straight to my sensitive heart.
