Just pull the plug

Don't worry people. My GD preoccupation will soon be over. Not now. But soon.

GD hasn't contacted me in a few days. Instead of playing the waiting game, I called him and left a message. He hasn't called me back.

Now I find all of this amusing. Not only is he being MIA all over again, but he's doing this after I had confronted him about his MIA behavior. It's funny that he's doing it again, knowing full well it bothers me and fucks with me.

I was blabbing to my ex-now-friend about GD. My ex paused for a second and said, "Yellow Gal, he's just not that into you. Come on, isn't it obvious?"

I closed my eyes. "I guess," I grudgingly admitted.

"This might be hard to hear," my ex continued, "but if you pulled the same shit on me you pulled on him, I'd never call you again. And I think most guys would feel like that."

"I guess," I said. "But even if I apologized?"

"Sorry, it's hard to just gloss over, especially so early in the relationship. He doesn't know you that well."

"Fine," I said.

"It's his loss," he added.

"Right," I said. Nothing feels as low as having an ex tell you that another guy's dissing you is that guy's loss.

"Hey maybe he's acting like this again because he wants another confrontational interrogation that ends in tears," he said, dead pan.

"No I just think he likes me a lot," I said, also dead pan, "so much in fact, that he won't call me, text me or ask me to hang out. He likes me that much."

So I feel like this non-relationship GD and I have/had is like a pet hamster we both own. In the beginning, the hamster was happy, fun, and furry. We played with it and all was well.

Then one day, I got drunk and dropped the hamster into the toilet to see if it could swim. A few hours later, GD discovered me passed out on the floor and the hamster floating face down, and rescued it. The hamster was in a coma for three days afterwards and suffered extensive injuries.

Since then, I've apologized several times for the hamster incident. And I, desperate to bring back the old hamster that GD and I once knew and loved, took it to the best veterinarian, paid for its physical therapy, and even visited a pet psychologist and pet psychic.

The hamster has its good days, but mostly bad days. It usually lies in its wheel, one eye half closed, the other eye looking perpetually in the upper right hand corner of its head, as if some food pellet were suspended mid-air right above it. Patches of its fur are gone. It's losing weight. It has a twitch in its left hind leg. Soon, I have it on hamster life support.

GD meanwhile doesn't look at the hamster the same way anymore. He forgets to feed it. He'll throw in a vitamin or two once a week. But it's not his hamster anymore. And as I shove a tube into yet another one of the hamster's orifices to have a machine artificially perform yet another necessary bodily function, I realize with some sadness that I too don't look at the hamster the same way anymore.

It's just a different hamster now.

So the hamster's on its way out. The damage appears to be irreparable. It takes both of our efforts to keep the hamster alive, but if GD won't help nurse it back to health, it will die. Soon.

So my last phone call to GD is my last ditch effort to keep the hamster alive. As each passing moment that GD doesn't call me back expires, I realize with some sadness that the hamster's days are numbered.

I think I once heard a saying that hope is man's greatest and worst trait. Hope is what kept alive all those Holocaust survivors and victims of abuse. But hope also prolongs incredibly unhealthy delusions. There are stalkers ("maybe she'll come back to me") and dictators ("maybe burning books and murdering people will persuade the masses"). Here's to hoping I have the good kind of hope. Not the bad kind.

We'll see.