Bye and thanks for all the s***

Just done chatting with CY who's just had his heart dumped into a blender on "frappe" setting. Well, not really dumped. More like lowered slowly while you watch.

It hurts when a friend hurts, but most of all, I find an eerie similarily between his thoughts and mine when I myself was suffering from heartbreak. The once familiar feeling of bleak helplessness, self-bashing, despair and grief.

I've almost forgotten how all that feels. It's a physical feeling, a twisting, pulling sensation that starts at your collarbone, reaches deep into your chest and ends at the diaphragm - a strange sensation of both emptiness and tightness. Hopelessness. The kind that finds you sitting alone, hugging your knees tightly, rocking to and fro, crying noisily and uglily, unmindful of the tears and snot that have free rein all over your face and neck. Scared that there's nothing else left for you, that the world's gone and left you behind. All thanks to a member of the opposite sex whom you will never fully forgive. The individual that has just done a polka on your bleeding heart in golf shoes.

It's amazing how different the views of a relationship are at different points in time. Especially on the way out. Unlike people, relationships often don't have a nice rear end view. And that view only becomes spikier the further away we walk from it. After enough time has passed, it may even come to look comic. It's then that we see exactly how much turd we'd had to step on chasing after that relationship.

I recall the angriest break-up I'd ever had. It was the one and only time in my life I ever screamed at anyone. Ever. And this wasn't even the most intense relationships I'd had, just the most frustrating. We had broken up, but he phoned me and I felt bad to reject his calls, so I agreed to talk. Of course, these calls ended badly, with him asking over and over again for reasons and not accepting any of my answers. In utter frustration and rage, I screamed at him over the phone. At least that shocked him into temporary silence. But I'll bet he remembers me as the crazy ex-girlfriend for that. I'll also bet he leaves out the part about him not accepting that we were on entirely different wavelengths, that I could never live up to the way he wanted me to be, and that we couldn't communicate if our lives depended on it.

And of course, he would have left out the part about me catching him picking up girls over chatrooms, looking them up over ICQ, asking for their numbers, asking them out (they all said no to this "weatherman"), telling them about his EX-girlfriend (i.e. me, and no, we had NOT broken up yet at that point), and showing them the beautiful poem he wrote for that same EX-girlfriend upon their breaking up (no, hadn't broken up yet here either).

(For the record, when I confronted him about this back then, he said, "It's only harmless flirting. And I didn't go out with them." When I asked what if any of the girls had actually said yes, he said that wasn't the point. Someone sound the death knell, please.)

While this ex has the honour of my most dramatic break-up, he doesn't take top prize for the being the biggest lout I've dated. Cheating, lying, name-calling, psychotic, persecution-complex, commitment-phobic, self-deceiving, threatening, judgemental, possessive, obsessive boy-men aged 18 to 37 have whirled in and out of my life. Quite an interesting lot, on hindsight, but terribly bad for me.

So I say to them: "Bye and thanks for all the shit."