By the pricking of my thumbs
Women can be scary. Any creature that has the capacity to be self-convincing can also be unnerving. Their expectations of you and their sense of themselves, specifically their self-worth, come to be somehow tangled and intertwined in their minds. If they pursued these feelings further they would become stalkers where the danger they represent would be more apparent.
I have a small handful of women who I have blocked from every communication device or service I use and they still find a way to annoy me from afar. They have seemingly accumulated in numbers over the years. I'm an unwilling collector.
One of them is sick with a serious disease. This saddens me, though I feel as if I have no way to tell her, or to communicate anything to her at all. It will be misinterpreted, as apparently all of my previous attempts with her have been. My past interactions with her seem to have assembled within her over the years into being something that only she believes or can see. It must be real for her. Whenever she reaches out it is for the very specific purpose of trying to guilt me into giving her money. I have ghosted her, as the kids say. The tone of her demands is startling. It assumes something almost fascinating, incredible in its basic assumptions. She mentions my son in unnerving ways, as if his life is something that involves her.
Another I have blocked for many years now. As far back as at least 2007 she would text me several hundred times within a single night. It was so maddening that one night when I worked the overnight shift at Apple I gave my phone to a romantic prospect, so that she could see how truly unhinged this previous friend had become. The prospect encouraged me to file a police report and get a restraining order. There was never a romance, only some memorable and warm flirtation. She sent me nudes one night several years later. She was sweet and pretty.
It is no exaggeration when I write that this week I was deleting all of the voice-mail messages in my phone - something I very rarely do; I usually just wait until I get a message that I have run out of space - and I saw a very recent one from my stalker in a folder that I never bother looking: Blocked Messages. She was explaining that she had "done something" to her phone and now all of her emails seemed to be coming from me. Meaning, she is emailing people and the name associated with the email that people receive from her is mine. Or, I think that was what she was describing. I didn't listen to the end of the message. She was asking me to help her fix it. Deleted.
I have not proactively communicated with this person in probably 5+ years. The last time I had it was a shared email thread in which I was asking one of her close friends to please get her some help, but that she must leave me alone.
There is this seemingly inherent sense of personal debt embedded within their communications. That I owe them something to which I have never agreed. I've done something wrong by not responding to them correctly, by not caving to their erroneous romantic faith.
I don't consider myself a magnet for this behavior at all. If I have done anything to elicit this from a person then I have no idea what that could have possibly been. I will admit that I spent much time in what can most easily be described as an underground drug culture, which may go some distance in explaining a portion of its disturbing nature. Though I swear with complete honesty that I have done nothing to knowingly provoke anything. The average young woman probably manages more frightful interactions on a monthly basis than what I have described happening across several years. In no way am I suggesting that I am to be pitied in any of this, only that I find some of it troubling.
I was once told that I was "scaring" a woman to whom I was attracted. I was mortified, I deserved it. I left a series of long semi-coherent messages on her voice mail. I was compelled to explain things to her once and for all, you see. I've never been able to speak with her again quite as comfortably as I did that night. If I even tried it might seem creepy. My natural and unhindered internal discourse leaves people feeling unsettled. I enjoy awkward and ambiguous interactions, especially intense ones. I understand now that voice mails are not the best place for this, legally.
One of the worst things that a woman can possibly say is that she doesn't feel safe around a particular man. It is damning in a way that few other things are, or can be.
I wish that I could say that I had never had sex with either of the two women I've briefly described here, but the first one I did. It was several decades ago. It did not work. I mean that I could not become aroused for her. It turned out that I was not attracted to her. I had sex with her because I had been drinking and my inhibitions were lowered. I guess. I threw up on the side of her car that night while she was driving. I remember that part and the morning, wanting to escape, to go home, to be alone, to hide from myself and all others.
There are a couple more women. I lack the energy to describe their behavior tonight. Let's see if the two I have described will permit me to live much longer after writing this. If I had a greater will to survive I would delete everything.
Some people will drag you around like a prosthetic romance if you permit them. You can hear the arhythmic sound of the hardened acrylic and silicone scraping across old wooden barroom floors, so many thousands of miles distant. Long dead jukeboxes lurking in cold, unlit corners.
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