Life Beyond the Bar Scene: Game Over3

by Laurelin

I remember in high school being obsessed with this one guy. Jackson was the epitome of everything I thought was cool: he rode BMX bikes and wore baggy jeans and flannel t-shirts with different band shirts underneath like NOFX and Pennywise. He didn’t drink or do drugs or hang out with the cool kids, but he was always smiling and surrounded by people. He was different and I liked that.

We wound up dating for a while (it seems like a long time, but in retrospect it might have only been a few months; time is different now). He broke up with me at the end of my freshman year and I was devastated. My first heartbreak, my first bitter taste of a feeling I would in time become so familiar with. That being said, there is nothing to be done but move on, keep going to class, keep on smiling like nothing was wrong. Eventually I lost interest in Jackson and the feeling faded. I was moving on and Jackson was nothing more than a blip on my radar. That is, until Jackson started dating Jill.

Suddenly I missed him with a fierceness that can only be likened to the hunger a vampire feels after waking, born as a creature of the night for the first time. Suddenly it seemed like there was no one else, that Jackson was the only one for me, no one else should have him, especially not Jill. Who was Jill? Where the hell did she even come from? She was nothing like him; she didn’t even LIKE the music that he liked, the music that he and I liked. It was all consuming, and soon Jackson was all I could think about. I wanted him back. I remember that feeling like it was yesterday; unhealthy obsession.

My cell phone buzzes and I glance down. My heartbeat increases when I see his name. This one I think I’ll write back to, this intriguing man who isn’t really like anyone I’ve ever met before. This has been one hell of a week for me and my buzzing cell phone, which is filled with messages from people I never expected to hear from. I have spent a lot of the past year unable to move forward constructively when it comes to a few kinds of relationships in my life and for whatever reason I have just totally and completely moved on. I simply woke up one day and stopped texting, stopped calling, stopped inviting these guys out with hopes of rekindling romance. I just stopped chasing them. And the second I stopped, all of a sudden they noticed.

If anyone had told me that these guys would be saying the things that they have been saying to me in the past few weeks I would have laughed. If you had told me they would be showing up at my bar, sitting and hanging out until closing and then asking to walk me home, I wouldn’t have believed it for a second. Now, as I choose to go home alone, I acknowledge that they only want me the way I wanted Jackson back once I saw him with Jill. They liked me chasing them and once I stopped they finally looked back, circling back like a dog with a lost bone, sad that the game is finally over.

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