In Between Days

My dad came over Sunday.

I don’t know why but I told him all about Noah and how awful it felt that someone could like me over the airwaves for a whole year and then meet me in person and decide I suck. And what a complete mind-fuck it was that Max’s dad actually found someone who thinks he’s a catch.

He asked what the new woman looked like and I told him I didn’t want to know because there’s a massive wound festering on my self-esteem that’s threatening to open any minute now.

First Gerard, then Noah, now my baby daddy.

Fuck my life.

This shit is too real.

Hello! My name is Undesirable Nancy and I like taking long walks in the moonlight with a paper bag over my head so you can’t see my hideous face, fucking with my clothes completely on so you don’t accidentally barf, and sitting in the corner with one of those safety cones around my neck; you know, the kind they make the dogs wear after they snip their nuts so they don’t lick themselves? Just make sure the velcro is tight as fuck so I can’t talk or even breathe really because I might scare you away with the way my breath is so goddamn dramatic on the exhale. Can you just stop breathing now, Undesirable Nancy? Or at least hold your head out the window? God! Your hot breath is all over the car.

I mean, I didn’t even want a man until I got drunk that one night back in the summer of 2019 and decided I was tired of watching Bruce sing The River on YouTube and wouldn’t it be fun if I found someone to talk to? Heck yeah, it would!! A quick Google search later and I drunkenly stumbled into that music chat room and declared to the room that I would love to visit both Seattle and Washington state someday. Obviously, I know Seattle is in Washington state so my sentence didn’t make any sense at all but I was halfway through a bottle of red by that point and making sense hardly seemed like a priority. I guess it wasn’t totally cringe because someone named Grump messaged me and thought it was rad. We chatted back and forth until I finished my bottle. I promptly logged out and stumbled off to bed.

But wait!

I didn’t give him any way to contact me other than through this random music channel that I may never remember how to get back to. I logged back in quickly and he was still on so I gave him my email address because I am 800 years old and had never talked to people on the internet before him and didn’t know I was supposed to have some kind of app or somesuch something in which to converse with strangers around the globe. It didn’t matter to Grump because he was also 800 and us old people know how to make shit work.

And make shit work is exactly what we did.

Damn, that was a fun ride with Grump.

It truly gutted me when he disappeared. So much so that I revived this dead blog to write to him almost every single day in the hopes he’d come back around. Yeah. I did that. He’d read everything I’d written back in 2009 when I first started writing here so he knew the blog existed. I had no way to contact him except on these pages. So that’s what I did.

I don’t even know if Grump is dead or alive.

How I stumbled on that Reddit post a couple of months later where some guy was asking for advice about his dating profile, I’ll never know. I don’t even know why I clicked to read the comments but I did and there was Wisebutter. Just commenting away, being a total smart ass and a total good guy all at the same time. I laughed and thought ‘awww this guy is something else’ and then checked out his profile and read all of his post history several times over. I thought about sending him a message for 4 days before I actually said ‘fuck it’ and pressed send.

I had no idea that Wisebutter would turn out to be a total Casanova and would feed me his elixir almost immediately. I’d never had anybody treat me the way he did, like I was both a goddess and a whore, both strong and weak, complete and incomplete. It was a heady force that left me feeling dazed and beautiful and so incredibly feminine. He seemed to instinctively know that women wanted to be both cherished and commanded at the same time. And the way he talked to me! No man had ever said the things he said to me. It was intoxicating. Totally mystifying. I was still crazy about Grump and hoped he’d come back around but Wisebutter was a different breed. He asked me things like “who owns you?” and called me a “good girl” and talked about my body as if he knew it like the back of his hand. He could be so rogue and unbelievably scandalous but then turn around and send me walls of text detailing the most tender of emotions.

I was consumed by him.

He seemed to be consumed by me too.

Until he just….wasn’t.

There’s no other way to describe it. It’s like a faucet that he just turned off suddenly. Without warning. There was a usual morning text one Monday morning in December and by that afternoon he was gone. I could feel it when he left. We had been texting for a year by that point and had met in person in October. I could feel the exact moment the shift occurred. I knew it was over Monday afternoon at 1:30. Here that morning, gone that afternoon.

No explanation. No reason.

When I asked what happened several days later, he seemed genuinely baffled. To him, nothing had happened.

Now here I am. A month or more later and I still don’t know how to process it. I don’t know if I ever will.

He’s just up there in his spot on the map, completely oblivious to me now.

It’s mind blowing and mind numbing all at once.

SIGH

First Grump, then Wisebutter……

Now a happily ever after for the baby daddy too.

Undesirable Nancy has left the building. She’s going back to watching Bruce sing The River on YouTube.

Naked.
Without a paper bag on her head.
Breathing with her mouth wide open.