Letter #3
When J broke up with me I was devastated. She was my first real, long-term girlfriend. I think I was 28 when we broke up. We are the same age, we were 25 when we met in a poetry class at a community college in Southern California.
"Have you ever dated a woman?" she asked me on our first date. We'd been telling each other about previous relationships and after she'd heard mine, that was her question. She would prove to be my first real woman. She was so good at verbalizing her needs in bed that I became dependent on her. She had the most creative mind I'd ever experienced. We never ran out of fun things to do in bed.
But, I wasn't a very good boyfriend outside of the bedroom. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, and I bounced from job to job, taking classes here and there, I even got evicted from the apartment I was renting. She wanted me to be something, and I was so poor that I could never get ahead. She grew weary of my empty promises.
As it happened, as soon as we broke it off, I found a good job where I carved out a nice little role for myself. It was a dot-com business, during the dot-com bubble of the late 90s/early 2000s. Our office was in the City of Orange, part of a massive office complex, and downstairs on the first floor was a food court and a couple of restaurants/bars where the workers would go for happy hour, lunch, etc. I was with a bunch of my co-workers/friends, having drinks one Friday night and J walked through the door. She looked spectacular. I was dressed business casual, and with my friends, she must have been shocked to see me in this light. I looked like a total conformist, like I fit in, like everyone liked me too. She behaved completely differently toward me like she was genuinely attracted and turned on by what she was witnessing.
I took her to my office, showed her around, introduced her to a few of my co-workers, and then I took her down to the file room in the basement and fucked her brains out between the stacks of files.
By then, I had already begun to put the pieces of my broken life back together and I resisted her attempts to rekindle our old flame. It was over a year since we'd broken up. I was making good money, I had a one-bedroom with a ground-floor patio, and a little garden, and I was a block and a half from the beach.
I was surfing and playing basketball just about every day. I was rollerblading, going to clubs with friends, and working like crazy. I knew if we got back together I'd stop all of that good stuff and devote myself to making her happy. So, I never reached out again.