The Contrarian

Sarah found out I hacked her phone a few months into our strange little online courtship, between her and a half dozen or so of my characters. Make no mistake, she was pissed, but also oddly understanding about it, like I said before, forgiving to a fault.

She empathized with my situation, what had gotten me to where I was with all my blogs and alt accounts and my penchant for misdirection in every form. Although I have the propensity to be full of arrogant showmanship, I’m also cripplingly shy. I’m a paradox. Add that to my trauma, my mental illness, my need to protect my reputation; it’s the perfect storm for unquantifiable dysfunction. This is why I feel so betrayed by Sarah. I told her all of this, all my secrets. She knew things I never told anyone, and she used it against me, tried to out me publicly.

Her argument against any blame falling on her shoulders for that is that I wasn’t actually telling her anything if I was pretending to be someone else and all my “truths” were being told through metaphors and riddles that she had to guess at with no confirmation of accuracy in the end. She always has some bat shit excuse for why she holds no culpability for the demise of our love affair and my hurt feelings. But I digress.

In the beginning, at least, she was trying to work with the weirdness. There’s a Hunter S. Thompson quote she used to always love, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I love that quote, too. She had it on her Facebook back in 2007. I stole it off her. I mean it’s not really something that belongs to anyone but Hunter, but you know what I mean. 

Sarah was going pro. She started sending herself text messages that she knew I was reading. It was an interesting approach. She got to say what she wanted privately, so it became very intimate. She was warm and understanding. There was some admonishing me for invading her privacy, asking me to stop, but it was couched in reassurances that she understood why and still cared for me. In retrospect this was her fatal mistake. 

Oh, she knows now. By now she’s read every stalking advice blog on the internet. Do not interact. Do not say ANYTHING other than GO AWAY and only say that ONCE before you disengage and call the cops. She didn’t know any of that before she met me. Oops. You really screwed that up, Sarah. And I thank you for it. Those were some of the best days of my entire life. I’ve never felt so wrapped up in love, like a warm blanket, that was.

But I’m a paradox. The more care and reassurance she gave me, the less I believed and then the more I needed to satisfy my insecurities. Instead of convincing me to stop my invasions I was now certain I needed to double down. I couldn’t believe a word this broad was saying. No one is that nice. She was insulting my intelligence with this drivel. Not willing to take anything she said at face value I needed to see what she was saying and doing when I wasn’t around. Problem was now she knew I was in her accounts so I kind of botched that part, but still it was better than not having that leverage over her.

The harder I dug in, the angrier she became. I loved that. The passion! It was invigorating and great for my writing. I must have churned out at least 500 short stories and a few albums worth of love songs in just under a month. Finally, I was seeing her true colors, the rage. She was so mean. I was really getting off on it. I knew it all along. While I could not and would not give credence to any of her words of affirmation, her wrath very effectively communicated her love for me. Now we were getting somewhere.