I don’t know if it’s true. Did I get what I wanted out of yesterday’s encounter? It was just a passing. I walk past her house almost any day it is reasonable for me to do so. It is exactly along my daily paths, en route to the thrift shop that she and I visited a number of times. I call her The Stripper, even though she had retired from that profession by the time we finally got together. Finally. I’d had an eye on her for probably 10 years, and there was no denying the interest was mutual. She touched me and made coy comments but it seemed one or the other or both of us had other relationships going on. When it finally came together I felt uncertain. The lies she told accumulated, and evolved. One lie about her mother transformed multiple times, with details changed that made the previous account (involving a grand piano) utterly impossible. Lies about her past, and her life’s timeline, which never made any sense. If she was, as she claimed, involved with a British dude for 12 years until whatever year she said it ended she would have started dating him at age 14, when she was still in Texas attending high school. Similar disconnects involving even her daily travels for her job often created large pockets of time unaccounted for. I never asked probing questions about any of this. We weren’t ever tight like that, or all the way into each other’s lives. But she continuously built a patchwork of fabrications, and gave herself a lot of lies to keep track of. As for her stripper past I would never have had any issue it if she was not further involved in sex work, and almost certainly still doing tricks while we were together. She had way too much money coming in for the job she had. None of this was any of my business and I never questioned it outloud, only to myself.
She said I was the one. We talked about having babies and how her mother would gift me their grand piano idling away in a storage facility somewhere. We even started rearranging this room in anticipation of putting the piano where this desk at which I type these words is located. We had some pretty good sex but it was mostly not my style. But still, she said she knew I was the one, until I guess I was not the one. Ghosting was followed by reconciliation, then about 6 more months of the same mountains of lies ending with a second and final ghosting. I did not even care. She left here without a trace. I have nothing, no physical object or changed habit to credit to her.
Why do I pass her house so regularly, so ritualistically? Just to remind her that I’m the one she promised herself to but who walked out without a word. I saw her yesterday and barely recognized her. If not for that same stupid, lying smirk on her face I might not have recognized her at all. She aged quickly. I suppose I have as well but she looked a full 10-15 years older than I believe her to be. She drinks very heavily, but had always maintained a beautiful complexion and body. Like everything with her the age she told me was probably a lie. But she was, on the surface, one of the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been with. Anywhere we went people would take me aside and be like “Dude, you scored. When’s the wedding?”
But that beauty became a cynical trap. She was unkind, even cruel, and just the perfect match for my tendency to fall into abusive relationships. There was one night when I swear had there been a weapon present she would have murdered me. And yet I kept coming back to mediocre sex, evasive conversations, and too little time between us to really make anything happen. She was almost certainly taking sex customers in Bridgeport and other Connecticut cities and towns.
The uneasy look on her face spoke volumes, as did (it would seem) my uncertainty that this was even her. It was, unquestionably. And it was perfect that this passing happened not outside of her house but at the thrift shop we used to stuff ourselves into. She’d called it the “Anorexic Thrift” for being so small and narrow. We’d go all the way to the back behind the clothes racks where I’d grab her ass because it made her smile and no one could see us. She’d gently cup my crotch. It was like our handshake. We had moments like that but it always felt perfunctory, and fleeting. She could be sweet as honey by day but when the drinking hit that rubicon she could be a goddam monster. I knew this from the start. In the 10 or so years we’d been acquianted I had even seen that side of her, the wrath directed at others. I knew it had to be coming for me, and it did. At times it seemed blood would start flowing from her eyes she would get so angry.
Why do I even think about her? The years it took to consummate our connection plays some part in it. That small feeling of triumph mixed with continuous uncertainty and vulnerability. I like to remember how she said I was a decent and lovable man. I think she still believes that and regrets letting me go, but maybe that’s just solipsistic backwash, or excuse-making.