5th
Moving on.
Someone just asked me out and I turned him down.
I have zero enthusiasm for dating anymore, or for hooking up even. Nobody strikes my fancy. I don’t think I find any guys worthy of my attention.
After my little thing with that one boy ended, I gave the French guy a chance. French guy took me out once or twice, but there was something off about him and so I pulled out of that. Then one night with Sofi two really fucking cute guys from Emerson asked us to go to a party with them, and we turned them down. I went to Harvard to a party and didn’t really talk to a lot of guys. The French guy keeps on calling me and texting me to go out, and I keep on ignoring him. The guy who used to live in the second floor and I went out with a couple of times keeps on asking to hang out, and I’d rather stay in and do my homework. And then I just turned down a guy. It’s like I have all these opportunities, but I’m not really interested.
I still think a lot about him. I try to distract myself with my work, with other boys, with food, with shopping. It doesn’t work much. I need to get over this shit.
But it’s hard to move on when he talks to me constantly, when I know he’s always there. I should ignore him but I don’t. Then when I see him, it’s awkward. I can’t get used to seeing him as a friend when I never really saw him like that before.
And it’s not like I’m not trying to be friends. I don’t like to hold grudges, and so I can’t be mad at him, even if he hurt me. So I agreed to give it a shot, except it doesn’t work. I can’t see him at a party and say hi like a normal person. I feel awkward as fuck. And I have no way of knowing if he genuinely wants to be friends or if he wants to be friends because he doesn’t want to be the bad guy. I mean, he’s said some stuff. He’s said some stuff about how he likes hanging out with me and he thinks I’m cool and whatever. But anybody can say those things.
I do believe him when he tells me these things, though. When he tells me this has “affected” him, I believe him. He’s told me all of these things, even as he was ending things with me, about how if we’d met sooner things would be different, about how he still really likes me. And I believe all of these things. I don’t know why, because I am usually the one telling my girlfriends that all of that is a crock of shit and guys never want to end up being the bad guys. Cynical Milena back in the day is looking down at me today, saying, “Look at you piece of shit, he feeds you all these lines and you just eat it up.”
He seems honest when he says it. If he didn’t give a fuck, he wouldn’t talk to me at all, would he? So I take his words to heart. But then that doesn’t help me. Him saying he likes me still doesn’t really help me.
My mother and my sister say I shouldn’t talk to him anymore, not until I don’t give a fuck anymore. And when my mother, a bipolar nutcase, gives me advice that seems reasonable, that’s when I know that I’m doing things backasswards. She says there’s no way I should settle for less than I want, and if I can’t have him the way I want to, then there’s no incentive for me to stick around. “You have enough friends,” she says. She’s quick to dismiss his words, too. She’s as cold and cynical as I used to be— what happened to me?
When a guy tells you that you’re amazing, that likes you a lot and that you weren’t the reason why it ended but then tells you that he can’t be with you because he doesn’t want to break up with you when he leaves in December, how do you take that? I feel like I’ve handled it gracefully. I could’ve gone fucking insane, I could have yelled at him, slapped the living fuck out of him. I could’ve hated him for giving me hope, for leading me on, for breaking things off when everything seemed to be going perfectly well. I’ve done none of those.
But for now, this is what I’m holding on to so that I can be upset and not want to talk to him and I can finally get over it: He said he wouldn’t fuck me over, and he did. I feel pretty fucked over. I, the girl who lives off of random hookups and meaningless sex with boys she doesn’t give a fuck about, took a chance on him. I decided to go ahead and kiss him knowing that there was a chance I’d get hurt, but I took a chance on him because he seemed to genuinely like me. What hurts is that he wasn’t willing to risk getting hurt because he liked me back.
