On Jackson Jackass, Cheating and Being Haunted by a Ghost of Birthdays Past

When it rains, it pours.

I received a message last night through my Yahoo Personals ad. That thing has been so neglected as of late that I honestly forgot it even existed. When I logged into Yahoo Messenger last night, however, my computer pinged at me and a tiny message popped up in the bottom of my screen with a heart on it. If I could have ripped that stupid heart from my screen and thrown it into the street, I would have.

Instead of flying off the handle, however, I simply signed into my Yahoo Personals account to check my message. I sincerely wish I had just ignored it.

The message was not your typical Yahoo Personals fare. There was no comment on my smile. There was no vaguely witty response to something I had written in my profile. There was no mention that the person sending the message was into big men and thus would be interested in me. The message was one sentence consisting of three words.

“You look familiar.”

I took the bait. I shouldn’t have, but I did it anyway. Forgive me, but my judgment has been impaired as of late. That’s what happens when you get older.

By the time Gossip Girl was over, I was chatting with the guy who thought I looked familiar. He ran through a number of scenarios, trying to determine how he knew me. Then he finally hit the nail on the head.

“Did you ever date Jackson Jackass?”

What little is left of me heart dropped out of my chest. I had in fact dated Jackson Jackass. We’d gone out for a few months two years ago. He’d broken up with me on my birthday by telling me that in his mind we’d never been dating anyway. And now, on the eve of yet another birthday, his ghost was back to haunt me.

I answered as honestly as I could. “No. I never dated him. At least that’s what he told me the last time I talked to him.”

The man on the other end of this disturbing conversation ran through enough details about me to confirm that he did indeed remember me. Apparently Jackson Jackass talked about me an awful lot. I was getting ready to put an end to the conversation when something popped up on my screen that made me stop.

“And then he broke up with you because he was sleeping with your friend, right?”

Any heart I had left died in that moment.  I responded with the only thing I could think to say.  “No. You are thinking of the wrong guy.”

“I don’t think so. He told me that he had to break it off with you because he felt weird about seeing your friend behind your back like that.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t think that was me.”

There was a pause. It was the first pause offered up by my secret confessor. “Oh. I thought he told you.”

He had not told me. He’d simply told me that he had never thought of us as dating. He had told me that he didn’t see me as someone he could have a relationship with. He had not told me that he’d been sleeping with my friend.

I logged off of Yahoo Messenger. I no longer wanted to face my old demons, especially now that they were uglier and more vicious then I ever knew them to be. I wanted to curl up in my bed and try to forget yet another blow to my ego.

But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let it go. My mind kept racing around what I had just found out and it repeatedly landed on the same troublesome fact. I had been new to town when I’d been seeing Jackson Jackass. I had not had a lot of friends at the time. In fact, I’d only had one friend at the time who could have possibly slept with the man I was seeing. He had been my best friend. There simply were no other options.

I tried to convince myself that it’s all just a lot of poisoned water under a really old bridge, but the hurt and anger I was feeling just deepened until I had to do something. I threw on some clothes and took a long walk through a very cold night.

I wanted to believe it was all a cruel joke. I wanted to remember the past as I always have, even if the original memory was hardly a pleasant one. I wanted to believe my friend, someone I have fallen out of touch with but still think of from time to time, would never have done something like that to me. I wanted to believe a lot of things, but in the end I found it impossible to believe anything that didn’t make all the pain inside of me burn brighter.

I got home, my hands and cheeks stinging from the cold. I crawled into bed without bothering to undress. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I did. All of that anger and hurt and disbelief can take a lot out of a man.

Even a man who has very little left to give.