I’m not 100% sure why I let it go on for so long. I think you have to be fully fed up with a situation before you decide to do something to change it. I had this spiritual re-awakening not too long ago and sometimes when God sheds light on the corners of your life, the dust bunnies can’t help but burst into flames.
I met him almost 9 years ago. I think it was on Blackplanet. I don’t recall exactly how we actually ended up meeting in person, but from that point on, I can’t recall not hearing from him at least once every blue moon. We had our ups and downs and we never really dated, but back then, I’m not sure if it was the idea of spending time with him or me not feeling alone was what kept me keeping him around.
I was still seeing other people, so was he (he had a child within a time we had fallen out) but maybe somewhere in my head - I don’t know why- I felt like we’d be together at some point. Funny thing was, the more I thought about it, the more the cons piled up higher than the pros. He was responsible, good in bed but on the flip side, he could be a little boring which later on I translated as simply having nothing to say to me other than to alude to wanting to have sex but outside of sex we really didn’t have anything to talk about. Absolutely fascinating, yes I know.
Now hindsight is 20/20 and the more I think about it now, I think we both tolerated each other. I don’t think either of us really wanted to be with each other, because if he wanted to be with me, he would have let me know and if I truly wanted to be with him, I would have stopped seeing other people. At least one would think. I suppose you could say, or rather I could say, that I let him stick around because I didn’t have anything else to do.
I never met his family or friends and he never met mine. The bulk of what we were was sex, so generally speaking, we were on bootycall terms. To some, I could have been called a jump off, which I think is more accurate. When he was annoyed at his daughter’s mom or the other chick/s he was seeing, he would come see me. In any case, there were no ‘Happy Birthdays’ calls or trips planned to go out or even trips the movies. You don’t do those things for booty calls or jump offs. I’m not sure if he thought I didn’t know he treated me this way or if he thought I knew and just didn’t care. I’m inclined to believe to that he just didn’t care.
The last straw was -
A while ago I decided that I was done with feeling used because the novelty had worn off for me. I knew I had allowed him to make me feel that way but that time had come to an end. Now at one point, I was cool with the casual sex thing, but after awhile it gets old. Sex with no strings is fine if you don’t want anything more. When you want more, it’s not all that great. What’s worse is wanting more but not from anyone that you’re currently sleeping with. That’s like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. It’s never going to fit. So I let all that go, thinking that it had been awhile since I had last heard from him and that he would fade away but I forgot about his MO (pop up every once in a while to see me when he wanted to see me) and instead of just facing the situation head on, I figured it would just wither away like dust. Silly me.
He called me as I was getting off of work one day. I answered the phone with an attitude yet I don’t think he actually picked up on it. Either T-Mobile was tripping that day or he was just oblivious. He asked me how I was doing, Isaid fine. He asked me about some other things and then some how we got on the subject of seeing other people. I said I wasn’t seeing anyone and for the first time in a long time I was actually 100% single. He said he had just gotten kicked to the curb. I said ‘Really? How so?”
He explained:
He was seeing a woman who lived out of town and had been seeing her for a rather long time. He called her up and told her he had plans for her birthday weekend, he told her it would be a fun filled weekend and he had a full agenda for them. At first she says she’s not sure if she’ll have the time but she decided she’d keep the date open. Now in the past he would come up and stay the night or the weekend and she would make him wonderful breakfasts but lately she had been making excuses and hadn’t really had much time for him. The day of her birthday comes and goes and he doesn’t get her a card, however, since he already planned to spend the weekend with her, he figured he’d make it up to her when he saw her. So she texts him the next day – a 3 paged text, mind you – explaining how she was angry with him that he didn’t send her a card on her birthday and he goes on and on how he couldn’t understand why she was acting like that and that she must have been messing with another guy and wanted to spend time with him to purposely pick a fight with him over something so trivial. He then went on to explain how when they met she was seeing a married man who had at one point done the same thing to her that she was doing to him and how Karma is was a b*tch and how if she called, when she called, he’d never speak to her again because he couldn’t trust that she was telling him the truth about anything in the future and that he was always good to her and she’d never meet another man like him.
How do I know all this? Because he told me. And Isat there and listened to every last word.
In the entire 8+ years I’ve known this man, I learned more about him in this 57 minute conversation than I ever had before. First and foremost this was the longest conversation we had ever had, and second, this was the only real conversation we ever had about anything, and third, this was the only conversation we ever had where I felt that he was actually telling me the truth. However, this conversation was the begining of the end for me. Can you guess why?
He had exposed his game to me - completely. You never tell the jump off what you do with the next chick especially if you hadn’t told the jump off she was the jump off but she had already figured it out.
God will make people do the strangest things sometimes just to prove a point.
Hm.
I think I had convinced myself that I had feelings for him because I was lonely and was more concerned about being “we” instead of being “me” with someone -anybody, really- but I think part of the reason why I was upset after this chain of events was why I let it go on for so long. I recall asking him why we had never hooked up in the past to which he’d always say “I don’t know” but the more accurate answer would have been “I don’t want to be with you, I’m interested in this other chick I’ve actually been dating but when she isn’t acting right, I come see you because I enjoy having sex with you.” Now what man in his right mind would actually say that? One who wasn’t interesting in having sex with this particular female anymore because after hearing that, most would have kicked him to the curb.
Now in this conversation, I played the concerned friend. I told him I understood what he was going through as well as gave him advice – why did I do that, you might ask – mostly because I wanted to see how much he was actually going to tell me, which was everything. Then I said I had to go and that I would have to talk to him later, if he wanted to talk more about the situation. Why, you ask? I think I was on auto pilot by that point. He told me he wanted to come by later that night. I ended up falling asleep in the living room and he calls me the next morning around 9 am. I thought it was weird but then he says he’s on his way over and hangs up. Mind you, I was sleep and now you’re telling me you’re on your way over. Why didn’t I call him back and say don’t come over. I couldn’t tell you that, I have no idea. Maybe I thought we would have actually kicked it or talked or whatever, I don’t know. But I didn’t.
He comes over and I open the door and lay back down on the couch. He goes into the bathroom, washes up and proceeds to funk up my bathroom. I don’t know why that part stood out in my mind but it was yet another thing he had never done in my house before. He just had this level of comfort that I knew in many ways I had allowed him to build but at this point was starting to annoy me.
In my head I had planned on staying asleep on the couch but as always he plans were to come over and have sex. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to do it but after awhile your body just goes into automatic pilot, especially when someone starts messing with you. So we proceed to…well, do the do. But about 10 minutes into the act something really weird happened:
I started to cry.
I know, I was tripping, too.
I have never, ever, ever, EVER cried during sex. Not even during good sex. Never had a “I saw the sun, the moon, the mountains and the river” moments where the flood gates of emotions poured out. Please. Are you kidding me? I was never that chick. Never have been, never will be.
I cried because Iwas tired.
Iwas tired of allowing myself to be used by a man that I would never be with nor would he ever want to be with me nor did I even really want to be with him. I was tired of pretending that I was ok with a casual situation with this man when in reality I really just wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was tired after listening to a man complain about how another woman wasn’t treating him right, and that he, in essence, was doing or had done the same stuff she did to him to me, but since it wasn’t important enough for him hadn’t connected the dots and most likely never would. Weary tears.
So of course we stop and he asks me what’s wrong. To which I said something to the affect that I felt of very little value at the time and couldn’t do what we were doing because I felt that he didn’t care very much about me at all.
Now during the conversation we had about the chick he was dating I had already accepted that I didn’t have any real value to him, because out of all the stuff he had said he had done for her, he had never done any of that with me or for me, so that statement was definitely out of weariness, because in all honesty, I knew what the deal was. One would think that if you were visibly upset in the least the other person would try to understand where you were coming from, or give you a good dose of BS just to keep the party going to get back to the booty, but I guess God just wasn’t in the mood for BS that day because when I made that statement, can you guess what his response was?
Nothing. Absolutely. Nothing.
He stared at me for a few moments like a deer caught in the headlights, watched some sports on TV, then rolled over and went to sleep.
At this point I think I was too shocked to be really upset. I think it takes an awesome amount of “I don’t give a sh*t” to see a person upset, say nothing in response then feel comfortable enough to fall asleep because you know that she’s not going to cook up a nice pot of hot grits to dump on your head while you’re sleeping. I also think he was definitely blessed to not be dealing with a female who would have cooked said grits and dumped them on his head. I would have taken him just up and leaving afterward better, I’m not sure how but I think I would have. So a while later he wakes up and leaves with a half hearted “I’ll talk to you later.”
I’m was still a little baffled at his lack of saying anything but, this just frosted the “I really should have left you years ago” cake that I was baking in my mind. I still can’t understand how a person can just stare you in the face when you are obviously upset and say nothing at all. The only conclusion I can come to is: he wasn’t supposed to. You see, if he would have said something, anything other than nothing at all, it’s quite possible I might have found a reason to continue to deal with him, when the truth was this situation was like spoiled milk that had been sitting in my fridge for 8 years, I should have thrown in out a long time ago.
I let a full week and some change go by before addressing the issue. I figured I’d send him an email of goodbye because he never answered my calls or texts (yet another ‘treat em like a bootycall’ trait) but Iwanted enough time to go by so that he could at least attempt to say something but then started to think about what he really could say. Nothing. In a situation such as that, either you say something in the midst of it or what should have been said was never going to be said.
I wrote a few different drafts of the letter but the bulk of it was said in the first draft. I made it clear that I knew that I was just a side piece for him and that there was never going to be a future outside sex between us. I let him know that I had no feelings of ill will towards him – which is actually true – and that I wished him well in his life but I had no desire to see him in the future. I thought long and hard about that last part because if you know someone for almost 9 years and you learn more about them in an hour of conversation than in the entire time you’ve known them, chances are you were never really friends in the first place.
I knew I was good to him in the past but I think I had different reasons for keeping him around. To be honest, I don’t really think there ever would have really been an “us” because neither of us was truly being honest about anything with one another. I felt disrespected in the end but only because he didn’t say anything at all. In hindsight, things turned out the way they were supposed to.
Sometimes when you’re trying to live a life of truth, God will shine lights into all the corners of your life. It can feel bad at times but when the goal is to make you a better person, the more skeletons will fall out of your closet. What doesn’t kill you may hurt but you’ll definitely come out a stronger person.
