20 Thoughts For My Ex-Boyfriend Who Is Also My Co-Worker

1. The reason everyone stops and literally turns their bodies to listen to you whenever you speak is because you are the only alpha-male in an all female environment. It’s not because you’re Yeezus.

2. You used to really admire my body. Maybe we could borrow it for a meeting, and then you could know the pleasure of cheerfully sitting by while a gaggle of your peers fawn over someone who broke up with you.

3 Seriously. Imagine having to smile while someone is driving a fork into the back of one of those beautiful hands…I hate you.

4. Stop being hot.

5. No, that’s unreasonable — it’s not like you can help it. Instead, maybe try taking responsibility for how you look…and everything else you do. Underuse of power is still abuse of power. Believing you could never hurt a fly cannot be a thing when you have so clearly crushed me.

6. Your tattoos—like your reasons for breaking up with me—are stupid. Particularly the one on your elbow. What does that even mean? The message is that you don’t give a shit, but the syntax is presentational so…what? You don’t care what people think of you…just that they think of you? You exhaust me.

7. Put differently, there’s a difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness.

8. To that end, no one reads your stupid blog.

9. If they did, they would see you ripping off Joan Didion, you idiot.

10. Also, liking Taylor Swift does not make you an evolved male.

11. I should have broken up with you the first time you implied that you loved Taylor Swift than I do.

12. Really, how DARE you taint Taylor Swift for me—I really need her support right now. You already got the whole office, isn’t that enough?

13. I’d like to take this moment to personally thank everyone who has come up to me and told me how funny and mature you are.

14. Googling a topic after someone has mentioned it or asked you about it and then proceeding to spout off a bunch of facts you just looked up is not the same as having an interest in something or knowing about it.

• This also applies to foods you’ve never tried, places you’ve never been, and movies you’ve never seen.
• I’m especially serious about the movies. How are you satisfied knowing that your only experience of Back to the Future is second hand through Wikipedia?

15. I still don’t get how no one has caught on that you do this.

16. Or that you’re just a phony in general.

17. I suppose they don’t understand—as I didn’t—that to actually be the person you purport to be at work, you would have needed to sleep with at least fifteen more women, have had a real fight with both of your parents in order to at least start the mourning process of your superficially idyllic but emotionally frigid childhood, and have told your “best friend” who is in love with you (as she has told you several times) to move on because you’d learned to value other people’s feelings BEFORE we met.

18. Ironically, my best consolation is the fact that you stopped wanting me for no tangible reason; to wit, even though I have no reason to stop wanting you (for you are as ever you were), perhaps one day my feelings will just disappear too.

19. Sometimes I think about what it would be like if we found ourselves alone in a conference room and one thing led to another. And then I think about what would follow, and I remember, briefly, how we really are just coworkers who rushed into something, and how all that ever really existed and will ever exist between us is stale, fluorescent air.

20. I just wish I could keep that in mind while I’m looking at you.