I “unfriended” my best friend on Facebook last week. Actually, she was really my best friend ever, but, well, I was never her best friend ever, and it just got too complicated. Maybe its true that love and friendship shouldn’t be mixed; in any case, I was the one who mixed it up and messed it up. I had been her friend on FB for two years, and on My Space, for two years before that. Like so many pairs, we had great sex for while, but never made it to the “couple” status; just friendship and respect for each other and a sincere admiration on my part for the woman she was through all the changes in her life of the last four years. Those four years coincide with her university degree; no she’s no childish coed, but a married mom with children who became a single mom when she finally divorced the pathetic drug addled criminal she once so dearly loved, and now feels so guilty for leaving behind. Mutually assured abuse is a cultural phenomena of which I was unaware; but believe me, it exists. There is too much history to recount here and frankly, for the first time in my life, something I feel is too dreadful to dwell upon, even if I can’t resist the daily self-mutilation of the remainder of my dignity. I did beg on my knees, but it was just too damn little, too damn late.
Anyway to my point, social media gives a whole new dimension to the meaning of stalking, or that earlier psycho-babble term, voyeurism. I know this for a fact! For nearly three years, after the party, but before the chasm, we remained friendly, even through several massive missteps on my part, not the least of which was being more than casually interested in her lifelong best girl friend. I had my reasons, my excuses, but really, they were justifications for dealing with what I assumed were her continued rejections of me as a lover and husband. I say assumed because I recently realized I had not even made her “Top Three”, hell, I probably didn’t make her “Top Ten”
I want to say that she loved me, but really she never did; she just appreciated the fact that I loved her and I expect she was at times confused by my behavior toward her; the love hate that comes from spying on someone through an electronic key-hole. You see everyday, from her first sharing her My Space address with me, friending me that first time, everyday without fail, I would look her up. She posted pictures of her family, even her ex-husbands, taken during holidays and vacations, and family gatherings, and she posted pictures of herself, taken with those cell-phone cameras, from odd and funny angles, pictures of herself at home, out clubbing, with the kids, with her girl friends.
It was so easy to see myself in those pictures, to be the one at the beach next to her; to be opening Christmas gifts by her side, to be dancing foolishly at a country night club. It became easy to think of laying with her through the night, of waking up to her next to me, of loving her children as my own. Those damn social media pages made my fantasies possible, and every day, I would touch her face with a kiss blown from my lips onto my fingertips, and know, just know, it would happen; it would become real!
Alas, such is the stuff of fairy tales and bedtime stories, and those years of tender first awakening to hopes of love, years I mistook for fun. No matter, the awesome LED screen gave her life, shared her wistful smiles, and I think she even used that screen to take advantage of me. There’s the joke! What comes around goes around, or Karma will get you, or it took forty year’s for all those women I hurt to get even with me, and when they read this essay, those who learned to read, they will know its true! He hurts, he suffers, he’s angry, but at himself.
I awoke one morning to realize that as much pleasure as her social media sites had given me, yes, even that pleasure, I was wrong to look again at her with passion and love, to peek into her life from which I had by her been excluded. She calls a man shes seeing, a man I don’t think she loves, her “boyfriend.” She never called me that, never once. She calls him her mentor, as she once called me, but honestly, I am sure she calls the shots. And then as I gazed starstruck at the most memorable picture of her I’ve ever seen, taken incidentally, by a ten-year old neighbor who has a crush on her, as I peered into the screen’s ether to see, to feel, the softness of her face, the gracefulness of her smile, the sensuousness of her languid gait, she walking away from the camera, head turned back over her shoulders, I realized that my pleasure belonged to another, to the photographer, even if, as she later emailed me, he was her ten-year old neighbor.
I went back through the albums on-line, back through what seemed like a thousand snapshots, a thousand smiles, a hundred parties, gatherings, vacations, and not one picture of me in any of them! How is four years of fantasy possible? How was I so blind! I am not a well-kept secret, I am not her lover, her ex-husband, nor her spouse, nor her fiance, I am no longer her mentor, not ever her best friend or her confidant: I am not even and never have been her boyfriend.
In that moment, staring at my glaring absence, I had an Epiphany! No one can be what others will not allow them to be. No matter how true your love feels, no matter how deep your desire is, no matter what you need or want or even think you deserve; most of all, no matter if you know how good it would be to be together, how good you would be to her and for her; Realize this: you are just another unbalanced stalker, just another peeping tom, if she says its over.
Unfriend her on FB, My Space, Twitter or whatever. Throw away the mementos, take her number out of your phone, try not to think of her. Unfriend her, it’s over. The other guy won, whoever the other guy is… Really, you didn’t deserve her. Unfriend her! Forget her! You never made her MySpace or FB pages; she never said, or she didn’t mean to say, she loved you. Unfriend her! Unfriend her! Please unfriend her now. Don’t wait until it’s too late, until now. Unfriend her!