Maria Diaz

Day 4: My Year Long Obsession

I'd like to tell you about another cringe inducing story from my past. When I first moved here, I was dating this guy I had met on Nerve named Ash. I was 20 and he was 31. Ash was very different from my previous boyfriends, who consisted of a socially inept dude who refused to ever leave his parent's house, was on so much Paxil he refused to sleep with me and who had been in college for something like 7 years. After that, there was my very sweet, but very, very 420 friendly Canadian boyfriend who broke up with me after I went to visit him because he was having a meaningful phone relationship with a crystal meth addict who he had never met.

So you can imagine what my 20 year old brain, fresh in the Bay Area after years of being cooped up in my parent's house and then the bubble of Oberlin College, felt when I had this tall, dark, handsome, broad shouldered stranger by my side every other weekend (he lived in Sacramento) (what can I say? if you are hot, I will travel.) with not only a real job, a well decorated apartment and the clincher - ACTUAL sexual prowess. He had the skillz to pay the billz. Young enthusiasm can only take you so far, know what I mean?

My very naive, stars in my eyes reaction to what I now realize was an ideal friends with benefits setup is that I fell completely and utterly in love with him and by that I mean, he made me completely insane. If there is such a thing as penis power, he had it over me. He made me so nuts that when I found out he was totally cheating on me - via finding the girls Livejournal bookmarked on his computer and her romantic, saccharine descriptions of their time together, including one entry that made me want to vomit called "The Massage", rather than confront him and dump his ass, I decided to become her friend and rub my relationship with Ash in her face. She lived in New York, so she didn't have the access to him that I did.

Writing this down now is incredibly embarrasing, but I am ready to suffer for my art. What she and I should have been doing was banding together against this loser, who was playing both of us (and most of the female population of Northern California) like a well orchestrated band.

Our pseudo abusive friendship with each other lasted a couple of months, in which she would post Puddle of Mudd lyrics about how sad she was (For serious! Keep in mind she was also in her early 30s) that they couldn't be together and I would post how much I missed doing it with him (it was GOOD, ya'll!).

It all came to a head when I met her when I went to New York for the holidays. Yes, I was insane enough to propose we meet. I didn't know exactly how much she hated me until she borrowed my phone to call a friend of hers and she said to to him that she was with "Ash's GIRLFRIEND" in a tone of voice that made me know that what she really meant was: "Oh, I'm with that 21 year old slut Ash is banging." Or, her preferred nickname for me - the "hot, 21 year old party girl". I don' t remember much of my "friendship" with her after that. I'm pretty sure I stopped talking to her, especially when she started actually dating someone and ceased to be my "competition" (what were competing for? Ash was no prize, good in bed or not).

As far as me and Ash.. we stopped seeing each other regularly in January of 2003. The only problem was, I was still under his spell and I wouldn't stop calling him. He would always return a call or an email with just enough time to give me false hope and then disappear all over again. I realized a year later that it was because he too had started dating someone seriously and just conveniently left that part out of his correspondence. He was keeping me in the "in case of emergency" box. I guess that was what they taught him in the military, always have a back up plan.