Another Stupid Relationship Article

He talks to our mutual friend about me and she quietly passes his thoughts along to me while we’re sitting in the corner of a very busy bar (she needed to charge her phone and I don’t know anyone here) and I’m offended and irritated that he thinks I’m soft and delicate and that he says he feels bad (gross) for me (stop).

I am soft and delicate and I overthink things and word vomit everything I’m scared of and everything that’s stressing me out into my diaries (on display on my bookcase in my apartment, because I’m a hack and I get high from reminding myself incessantly of how unsuccessful I am by putting my shitty writing next to great books) but he doesn’t know that.

When we were together (that’s not the right word) he thought he knew me so well and was so smug about it and he’d say absolute nonsense about “walls coming down” and it was unbelievably stupid because everything he thought he knew and understood about me was deliberately planted there.

Can you really genuinely like someone when you are just constantly leveraging the relationship (wrong word) so that you always know more about them than they know about you?

I relay everything to a girl whose last name I do not know and who I only met for the first time an hour ago. The girl who introduced us is the kind of drunk who abruptly leaves in the middle of the conversation to go talk to strangers in line for the bathroom. So, she’s gone. Anyway, I tell this new girl everything — I trust her because I can tell she is the kind of drunk who loves giving advice. She also has a calming voice and never interrupts (it’s hard to find people who don’t interrupt). She’s the kind of drunk who would hold back a random girl’s hair or who would fold a fan out of a sopping wet drink menu and give it to the girl who’s sweating at the bar. Girls are great.

So I tell her everything and afterwards she blinks at me and says “that is so sad, what’s your number, we’re going to hang out after this.” And I start laughing — my laugh is very loud, a handful of people look over — because is it actually so sad? I was in control of everything, right? I won, right?