April 22, 2012
-
night creatures…
I check in on the social networking site one last time before I hop in the shower. I’ve become obsessive about checking the inbox. Two messages await, one from a friend who has a medical question. The other is from a woman who has an obsession with J.
At the same time, my phone lights up with a text from J. He’s stayed in for the night. We all did. The weather left the roads slick and unsafe. We’ve all become careful in our middle years. We’re all doing our drinking at home. I tell him that his ears should be burning because someone is asking about him. He replies that she’s a little wacky. I key in replies to her, and replies to J in turn. It’s close to 1 am, so what I’d really rather do is get cleaned up and hit the hay. Instead, I yawn.
Then the woman turns hateful and scary. I text J, “Is she friends with M? Because she’s really going off the deep end badmouthing you.” He doesn’t know, so I quickly check. No. J calls, “She’s probably drunk. She gets trashed every night, you know.” I have trouble redirecting her, but finally I find the magic words. She calms down. Then I tell J that he’s a nut magnet. This woman sounded so much like R that it was frightening.
Then J tells me that he believes that D is checking in on my page constantly. D had told me that he wasn’t checking in every day. He was growing tired of the dramas and God-botherers who populated their page with Bible verses and Thomas Kinkade artwork. I agreed, but argued that the spiritual had a right to post what they wanted to share. If he didn’t like it then he could “hide” those friends’ posts. I found myself drawn to the pages I had been invited to join by people who only knew me online. The pages were run by admins who were irreverent and witty and oh so brilliant. I made new friends there, freelance writers, screenwriters, theater people, comedians. Pages with only 34 members. We “get” each others humor so well that any post turns into a hysterically funny thread as each of us adds our comments. The groups are closed so members are added through invitation only. Very little drama to be had, and generally left me wiping tears from laughing so hard.
D wasn’t interested, and it occurred to me that he had gone to college with the intention of working in theatre. I had said nothing about what these people did for their bread and butter, but he’d likely checked out their pages as they added me as friends and commented on my posts. He was not very pleased about the way some of them flirted, even though I reassured D that it was innocent. Most of these people lived states away, in NY, in CA, or farther away…in Europe and Asia. It wasn’t as if they’d turn up on my doorstep looking for a date. The flirting only escalated when photos of me got posted, because I usually use art photos for my profile photo. I always chalked up the flirting to shock at seeing the person behind the posts. I certainly didn’t take any of it seriously. Why the hell should D get so bent out of shape?
J asks me if D’s tried to contact me recently. I tell him that he hasn’t but that I’m afraid he’ll turn up somewhere when we’re all out. “You can’t let fear keep you hostage,” he says, “Besides you know that C and I won’t let him near you.” They can’t be everywhere though. And D can walk out and wait by my car and catch me there.
“He checks your page constantly from his phone. He wants a word, a sign, that you have softened your heart,” J says, “He thinks he’s being sneaky but he gives himself away because he doesn’t realize how easy it is to see who haunts your page. He’s a big fat ghost, hiding in the closet.” J giggles at his own wit. It IS a funny visual and I giggle too. “K is right. He’s not through with you, but he can’t make it right either. He’s too arrogant to apologize, but he’s got to miss you pretty bad.”
I’m sure he does sometimes, because I miss being touched too. I don’t miss being treated badly though.
