I was caught off-guard this past week in the dumbest way when I was bored and playing Bejeweled on my Kindle. When the little window popped up with my "high score" (ridiculous, as I am, essentially, playing against myself), I saw that when I first installed this stupid time-waster, I put in my name as "Liza Pretzel Bits". Long story, inside joke, suffice it to say it's something my ex-husband used to call me, and of course I got a little weepy and stupid over it. I miss things I shouldn't miss. Even though I feel like I am in a better place, and of course I prefer living by myself to living with four other people (in fact just the thought of my ex's shit taking up 3/4ths of the space in my tiny apartment gets me feeling claustrophobic), I can't let go of these silly little things. No one calls me by any of the nicknames my ex made up for me. No one calls me Munchkin. No one calls me Hey, Bitch. No one calls me Liza Pretzel Bits.
I doubt anyone ever looks over at their spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/other and thinks, while they are doing something thoroughly annoying, "God, I am going to miss this when it's not happening all the time."
Not even the most insightful among us thinks of that. But now that I'm just alone all the time and have a significant, I would say, lack of things annoying me about my home life, it's created a vacuum. I don't have my ex beckoning me over to the computer to watch a forty-minute-long video on Youtube about chem-trails or following me into the bathroom just to tell me a story, and now I kind of miss being annoyed.
I was walking around in this melancholy state, just being nostalgic, poking at that still-open sore that won't heal, feeling lonely, until I saw that the little fucker defriended me on Facebook. I have never overreacted so quickly to something so trivial. This is the new passive-aggressive way to hurt someone-you symbolically remove them from your life. I wanted, so badly, above all, to not care. I wanted to not feel wounded and embarrassed and, once again, like I was just being informed that I was an idiot. I raged out just a little, roping my best friends into it, making them parrot back the same emotions I was feeling just to justify them. It wasn't until the tenth time that I pointed out that I had more reason to cut this last invisible social media thread than he did that I realized why I never scrolled all the way down that little drop-box next to his Facebook cover photo and clicked the "Unfriend" option, not even when I thought I really hated him. I kept the lines open, remained civil, listened to him talk about girls he liked even when it went so against my nature that I wanted to rip my hair out, all because, I think, I just wanted to look like the bigger, better person. I'm not more grown-up or well-adjusted, I'm just better at faking it.
I miss his friendship, really, and the nicknames, and feeling like I had someone in my life who knew me better than anyone ever had, but it's not healthy for me to miss someone who responds to me standing up for myself just a little bit with something like this. I could have stayed friends with him forever, I know, if I had just given him everything he wanted. Things were cool as shit between us when we were broken up, but still having sex, and before I told my attorney to move this thing forward. I could be wrong about all of this, of course. He could have unfriended me by accident, but that sounds like a lie a girl tells herself when a boy doesn't call. I thought, that even after he changed from someone I knew best to someone I don't know, that he would still be someone to me. I knew he wasn't going to call me Munchkin anymore, but I thought we would at least keep liking each other's status updates and stuff. That was more than he could deal with, I guess, and I think I've learned by now not to push it and never attempt to find out why. Why doesn't matter. I have hundreds of other people who not only like my status updates and stupid links, they also like me.
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