SW Stalker Seeks Recently Heartbroken SWM

Here’s something I just dug out of the archives of my brain. It was stored under high school mysteries.

There was this girl, well woman now, really, who’s shadowed me all of my high school dating existence. I don’t know why and probably never will.

We went to the same school from the ages 10 to 19. I wasn’t great friends with her, but we shared some mutual friends, so I hung out with her off and on quite a bit for 10 grades (high school went to Grade 13 in Ontario until 2 years ago). I even visited her in the hospital in the 11th grade when she tried to kill herself. Apparently, she was also bulimic, but not very good at it from what I could tell. That’s a different post, though.

Anyway from the time I was 16 until the time I was 19, I dated these fellows:

Elvis (yeah, I’m not kidding), Anthony (broke my heart), Shane (bastard), Chris1 (geek), Chris2 (nice geek), Todd (sweetie), Jerry (eye candy). I can’t remember if this is totally accurate, but it contains the main gist.

I remember that while I was dating Anthony, having this funny “puke” feeling when I saw her at the local mini-mart and she had “Tania loves” on one Converse sneaker toe and “Elvis” on the other. I mean, how many Elvis’s are there in any anglo town? I thought it was weird that she would date an ex, as my friends didn’t usually do that to each other, but what the hell. She and Elvis became really good friends, from what I’ve heard. Anyway, she went on to date Chris1 not too long after we’d broken up.

I started to think then that it was a bit weird that she’d dated two of my ex’s, but I didn’t think much of it since I hadn’t dated either of them for very long, nor had I “done it” with them (in retrospect, I’ve decided that if you can’t say the word “sex” out loud, then you’re likely not mature enough to be having it).

She went on to have a serious relationship with Chris2, which I found extraordinarily creepy, as we’d been quite an item. That was at the height of her bulimia. She never went for Todd (who was by then in university), or Anthony (he had transferred to a different high school in Grade 11) but when Jerry and I broke up after the prom, he told me that she tried to seduce him shortly thereafter. He thought it was funny, but it just reaffirmed my paranoia. Apparently she also hooked up with Shane after our romance ended rather surreptitiously for reasons that I can only describe as “very bad.” I don’t know if she had the same problems with him that I did, but that’s a different story.

Anyway, at the time, I had no idea why she would want to date these guys. In retrospect, I think she had a lot of self-esteem issues and these guys were all readily available and recently rejected. They were all from our high school, and I had broken up with them all rather spinelessly and without thought for their feelings. I always wondered if she nursed their wounds and commiserated with them on what a nasty bitch I was. I used to think that I was just being paranoid and arrogant, but now I’m not so sure.

Sometimes I think about that whole thing and wonder if I should get her number from the last remaining high school friend that I still semi-contact and give her a call to find out what the hell all of that was about. But, then I think that it’s not important enough to worry about. And it isn’t. It just makes me shake my head a bit and smile. I'm also really glad that Arthur and I never dated in high school.