So the Idiot Formerly Known as My Boyfriend, after I've thrown out all his crap and been the stereotypic post break up mess walking around my nightgown for two days, actually poked me on facebook today. Like we're still friends. Like nothing is wrong. Like he's some 14 year old girl. And this little incident reminded me who I am. I'm Bunni Spiegelman. No man has ever broken me and I'll be goddamned if this pansy, who can't even find the balls to PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL ME IF HE'S ALL THAT WORRIED ABOUT MY WELL BEING, is going to be the first. So I made another little YouTube Update featuring my response to Who's Who in Ball-less Glory.

I once said the best thing about being a writer is if I like you, I'll make you famous and if I hate you...I'll make you famous.

(Incidentally anyone out there maybe help me out so I can embed these videos on my blog? Anyone?)

Labels: ex-boyfriend

Well, 'Mouse wanted to hear the Paris Diaries. Considering their length, I thought perhaps what would be better would be to video blog an old story of mine that I found myself telling my dance teacher this story, which I blogged long ago and even performed when I was dating Ivan the Horrible. Since I can't embed video in this blog, please click the link to see the lovely, but heartbroken Prof. Spiegelman explain to you why seeking vengeance isn't necessary and why blue margaritas are. And leave me nice feedback, cos I'm kinda nervous about this whole little experiment.
"I want you to be happy," he says. My tears on his shirt. He's crying. It's been so long since I made a man cry. I suppose I should take some sort of pleasure in that.

If only I had walked away in the beginning. Or kept to the plan-be distant and bitchy, use him for what I wanted and not get emotionally involved. I never do the smart thing, the right thing. My mother has no sense of direction-she gets lost in bathrooms and on 20 minute drives to the movies. I'm the emotional equivalent of the same thing. Show me the wrong man, a bad relationship, a decision that will undoubtedly result in overwhelming pain and I instinctively head in that direction. I felt his pain more than I felt my own. Like a fool, kissing him and soothing him when I should have been angry, when I should have sent him away with nothing but scorn and insult. Instead, I waited for him on my stoop at night shaking with anticipation and yet asking myself over and over "What the hell am I doing? Why am I wasting my time on what I know will only end in pain?" Because it's going to be painful anyway. Because it was worth it to me to feel special and loved again if only for a moment.

Because I thought I would have more time.

I'm too old for this. If I had known when Eric left, this is what my life was going to be like-I would have killed myself without hesitation. I fought so hard to stay alive-two years of wanting to die every minute of every day. Two years of running the gauntlet of the 200 ways to kill myself on the way to work only to have to run them all again on the way home. Not to slash my chest open while making dinner. Not to walk in front of traffic. Not to overdose on sedatives and pain killers. Not to throw myself under the 6 train. Not to drink drano. And for what? For this? To have fallen this far? To survive only to discover that I really did die that day, and this other girl who is still alive is just the ghost of a ghost. A collection of horrible memories, psychological problems, and movie quotes. Something not even my parents could really love-just throw money at.


You would think I wouldn't have any more tears in me after all of this, but I do.

I haven't eaten since Tuesday. All I have in my system is bourbon and iced tea. And I'm almost out of bourbon, which is the only reason why I am going to leave the apartment. Outside the sun is shining and I'm in here vomiting bile because I have nothing left to vomit. If I could throw up my heart, I would. I suppose I'm hoping that is what is going to happen. I keep drinking so I can keep sleeping. The minute I wake up the first thing I do is think about cutting myself and then I think of him and then I take two large gulps of bourbon so I can go back to sleep and dream of snow and painlessness.

I'm so sick of fighting for this empty useless life.

He says he's doing this for me, so I can be happy because he can't be what I want him to be. Of course he can't. Because what I want, what I have never recovered from, is that old life-the one where for one brief and shining moment I had everything I wanted, everything I never thought I could have-and I was right. I just want to be loved again. Like I was. When I had someone to come home to. When I had someone who took care of me when I was sick. When I didn't care about being a famous writer, I just wanted to be a teacher and be his wife.

For two year sof my life, I was afraid to die. I kept asking God to let me live a little longer. And now I will never ever stop regretting that. If only I had died, I would at least died happy. People sometimes tell me I'm lucky I've survived all of this. I'm tempted to tell them-luck is dying without knowing any of this. Still being able to believe in something, anything, worthwhile-and not living on stubborness and alcohol.

He tells me he cares about me and he wants me to happy before he runs out with my tears on his shirt. He'll go home to his wife and his children. He'll lose himself in the type of life that I can't even allow myself to dream about. He'll be fine. I was a momentary madness. In a year,he won't remember me. Me? How many men have I wept over in the last 7 years alone? I've lost count. I can't even remember their names anymore, although I remember what I called them here:Retrocrush, Farm Fresh, Bishop, Jolly Green Giant, Dockers, Nice Guy Eddie, Damocles, and Tony the Tiger. Most of them, years later, I barely remember at all. Half of them I would have to comb over the archives to even remember anything about them. Losing the pain of one love in another until none of them really matter.

I tell myself I'll forget him too. Like the others. He won't even be preserved in stories like Ivan the Horrible and UDR. I won't send him up to be mocked by my friends most of whom don't even know I was dating him. I barely even wrote about him. I spend the day erasing the few traces of him that I have him. Deleting his voicemails, text messages, emails, phone numbers. Throwing out his shirts and the one present he ever gave me-an illfitting Merrywidow in red and black. Not my style at all, really. He never brought me presents. Kiss Kiss bought me snow and rabbits. The Sauvage gave me the summer sun in Frehel and Koring Amande. Even Eric, I still have the necklace and bracelet he gave me all those years ago. Of course now it will make it easier to dispose of him. All his detritus is ephemeral. His smell has already faded, next will be the way he looks, and finally his voice. That will be the last thing I will lose. His verbal ticks "Are you now?" and "Do you now?" So Irish in origin. There weren't even that many inside jokes. Yet he's already harder to shake than Kiss Kiss with whom I spent a year. Kiss Kiss who looks through me and not at me when I walk in a room-even though I still have his gifts and his pictures and his inside jokes. I tell myself if I can get through this, a year from now I'll be surprised if I even remember his name.

Ibsen said that some fictions are necessary to our existence.

People will tell me that I'm better off, that I'm too good for him. People will tell me there is hope, there will be something better, that I will get the happiness I deserve. But I, I who grew up in ERs and ORs and waiting rooms. I who have survived dying so many times I lost count.I who have been hearing this bullshit since Eric left, since before that, since high school. I who grew up in ERs and ORs and waiting rooms. I know better. I know, for example, that while there may be no atheists in foxholes, there are alot of them in pediatric ICU because who could look on that and still believe that there is justice in the world? And I who survived those horrors, only to be haunted by others, how could I believe in anything other than pain? When I was in middle school the popular kids used to make fun of me for believing that anyone could be actually interested in me. All those times I wanted to to die, I pushed myself through it in order to prove them wrong, but they were right about me. All that hope for something better landed me here.

All there is here is a liquor store around the corner that delivers.
Apparently the love affair is over. The last I heard or saw of him was Saturday night when he bid me good night and said "I'll talk to you tomorrow." And that's it. Vanished. I've often said there is a special level of Hell reserved for those who break up via text message, IM, email, fax, and vmail. But below that level is another level reserved for those who don't bother to break up-who just fucking disappear. I should know because I'm the one who insisted it get built. It's right abovethe serial child rapists and a little below anyone who ever wrote an eharmony testimonial.

I have that effect on men, sudden disapperances. Mainly because they know I am the type of girl who will hunt them down, reach down their throats, rip their spines out, make them drink lemonade with their last few moments, call some friends of mine in Hell and make sure that they spend eternity redefining cruel and unusual punishment, and then wear their spines as a decorative hat as a warning to others who treat the Bunni's heart with anything less than delicate care.

So needless to say I'm a fucking mess, and physically ill over the whole freakin thing. So instead of writing, I offer you some youtube goodness. I have to do it as links since, you know, I can't post them directly here for some unknown reason.

Are you lonesome tonight? A Top Secret Spoof of the Original

The Universe Song from Monty Python and the Meaning of Life

Richard Jeni talking about break ups

Jake Johannsen talks about break ups

Dana Gould talks about insomnia

Patton Oswald explains why I am happy to be single-courtesy of Stella D'oro Breakfast Treats
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Now playing: Beth Rowley - Nobody's Fault But Mine
via FoxyTunes


"But life is not like in the movies. Everyone lies, good guys lose, and love does not conquer all."
-Swimming with Sharks

Although I have been able to hide it through my Paris posts, and even my first day post-I've been becoming more depressed. Drinking more, relying on ever increasing doses of tylenol PM, spending days in bed without the motivation to leave the apartment. Of course, I have LOTS of things to do, but I find myself sitting on the couch unable to find the will to do them. This is real depression-when you don't have the energy to eat or vacuum. My crochet project sits across the living room in a bag-I should finish it-or the needlepoint project-or read Antunes-or my student papers (oh the pain begins already)-or write part of the screenplay--or get printer paper-or go to the farmer's market or just take a walk and enjoy the last days of summer which I will miss when they are gone-but I find myself scanning over the same channels on the tv over and over trying to find something that will interest me. And when I do the first eharmony ad, the first match.com, the first debeers ad will send me into paroxyms of rage and hopelessness.

"Where did I go wrong?" I think as it seems everything now sends me ever further down the rabbit hole. My mother taking her boyfriend to see my grandmother. My continued failure to get my karma to 70 on plurk, but just hover around 69. My unringing cellphone.

I walk with Office Elf after watching a movie. He has a present for his new girlfriend in his hand-he wonders outloud if she will like it. "Of course she will. It's from you." He looks at me, perhaps he is surprised that I was once a young romantic girl. "It hasn't been so long since I've forgotten what it's like." But I wish it was. God I wish I could forget what it was like to come home to lights already on in my apartment. To us sitting on the couch reading aloud to each other. To him putting peanut butter sandwiches on my pillow when I came home from work exhausted and starving. The reassuring warmth of going to bed curled up next to his soft sticky warmth and to waking up next to him. And how with him, I felt, for theonly time, like a normal girl. How we argued about how many children we were going to have and where we going to get married. He's married now to another woman-with a child. Claims we never were engaged and that I'm pathetic and cray. But still I'm haunted by it, by the loss of him. And how I only find brief flickers of it in the least appropriate of places.

And the stupid part is this is not only all my own fault, but it's the same pattern. I made the mistake of falling in love with someone I shouldn't have. I know, I know. What are the odds? To my credit I didn't know that when I fell. But, of course, I should have known because it's me. Because no decent appropriate guy would walk my way. That would just be a fundamental violation of the universal order. But I decided to stay with him even when I knew I shouldn't because the choice came down, or so I thought, between hurt now or hurt later. I thought if I hurt later, I would at last have some pleasure.

I said it once, I'll say it again. The worst decision of your life will seem like a good idea at the time.

And he was the only man to tell me he loved me in so long. To push me to open up. To send me text messages in the morning, every morning, or at least he did. To make me feel that maybe there was some hope for me yet.

But hope is a demon bitch no matter what Pandora says.

But now I find, that I am hurting now with only the prospect of more pain in the future. He comes over and when he's here, I'm thinking, "I have to leave him. I'm not happy. I'm getting worse and it's him. I was better before I met him." And I was. And I've been through this before-the increasing depression, the rage, the resentment, the staying in the completely blind hope that happiness wil return. The other side of my brain says, leave him for what? More empty lonely nights? At least this way you occasionally get hot sex. How easy I've been on him, how undemanding, how trusting I've been-and now I will begin to hate him for not treating better-where are the dinners out and the little presents just because? Christ, where did my morning phone calls go and the long long evenings together?

Why can't I be happy?

If only my life were more like a movie or an Oprah Book of the Month Club book like Open House. Predictable with happy ending. Instead, I find myself writing on bar napkins "When Eric left, I thought I had no hope. But I pushed through anyway. To get through every day by any means necessary-and if that meant taking anti depressants or drinking on an empty stomach or having yet another night of meaningless sex with someone I would normally not want to talk to for more than five minutes or all three at the same time-if it got me to the next day without throwing myself under the 6 train or drinking a drano martini or slashing open my throat while I tried to make dinner, well, then that's what I did. And then I began to come to, to come back to life, only to discover it was too late. To discover that I really was already dead and now I am the ghost of a perfect stranger. Because if I had known what was waiting for me in seven years, what I would become, I would have killed myself without hesitation knowing it was the right decision."

I leave the napkin on the table, where he could read it, its hard to miss if he were so inclined. But he doesn't even bother to look. Just walks by it, intent on kissing me hello even as I think, "I have to leave him. I have to.I have to."

I have to, but I don't. Nor do I tell him anything is wrong. I just kiss him back.

And when he leaves, the smell of his sweat still in my nose, I pour myself a drink and take half a dose of tylenol pm and think I hve to leave him. Even as I wait for him to call. And I try to decide, in the end, who I will hate more:myself, him, or Eric. But I know the answer to this one too, it has to be me. After all, I'm the one who will end up suffering.

Labels: depression, heartbreak loss