(if you missed Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and/or Part 4, you’re gonna be confused)

Alan didn’t care for my insinuation that he was pretending to be her friend only to swoop in on her during a moment of weakness. He said “despite how offended I am by that, I’m gonna do you a solid here, cause it sounds like she told you a lot of things that don’t add up. Here’s a link to her wedding invite…”

When I clicked the link, my jaw dropped. The story on the invite said they got engaged in a hotel in Texas on February 12th¹. Her mother — who was very much alive and in fine health — was listed on the invite as the one who would be giving her away.

How the fuck was that even possible? Did he not propose to her in SF? Did he maybe try to propose and she said “save it for Texas” or something? Why did she make up the death of her mother? She must’ve been with her ex since SF, and every weekend just brushed me off, biding her time until she moved to Texas and.. I don’t know, figured I’d just never check in on her or something? Maybe she had a breakup planned all along, and just never found the right way to do it?

I was furious. Confused. Hysterical. I called a friend of mine the moment I found this out. I sent her the link as well. She said “ohhhhhh…. shit. OH. SHIT. HOOOOLY FUCKING SHIT MITCZ!”². She urged me not to leave the house, or do anything crazy. “Definitely do not go over there!” were her words. I did not. I decided to text Lauren, and say something vaguely upsetting. She knew my mother was going through her cancer surgery, so I just sent her “can you talk? Just got some fucked-up news and you’re the only person I can talk to about it” and that did the task of getting her attention. She called me a few minutes later.

I launched right into a tirade of curse-laden accusations. She said she “didn’t have to listen to this shit”. She had no answers. She just brushed it off like the lie she told was about the color of her car, and not … y’know… lying to a person who’s mother has cancer about your mother dying of cancer so you could marry your ex-boyfriend. Her only excuse was that she didn’t think I’d take the news well, so she panicked. I asked how she got engaged in SF and in Texas. She said “I never got engaged in SF”, but I reminded her that she told me about the initial proposal. She said “Mitcz, what are you looking for here? I don’t owe you anything. You’re free to go off and fuck whoever you want, and I’m moving on with my life”.

*click*

And that was all I got. I was alone to sit and try to piece together this puzzle. For the record : I still don’t have most of those answers.

That should’ve been the end of it, but it wasn’t. She still emailed with me after that. We talked quite a bit, actually. I needed answers and “closure”. It’s a stupid thing, closure. It’s a selfish pursuit of an unattainable mindset. You think you can get it by just talking to the person you think can give it to you. But, you can’t. Closure only ever comes from within. Confronting someone else, in pursuit of closure, leads only to more doors being opened that you’ll try to return to close again, in yet another vain “closure” attempt and the cycle continues. I know now that closure can only come from within, but I sure as hell didn’t know it then.

So why did I continue, outside of “needing closure”? The story, of course. I fucking live for the story. And… love. I’ll be honest. God help me, I still love the woman I met on my 26th birthday and then spent the better part of the remainder of 2004 with. Even after it all went down, when we’d talk, I’d catch hints of the woman I fell in love with and part of me fell for her all over again. Even just having to go through all the emails we exchanged in order to write this story, I remembered fondly our time together and I think I’ll always miss that original woman (but not what she turned out to be, if that makes sense). It’s probably the same reason most people stay with abusive partners : you’re sitting in wait for that glorious spark that you love, and you’re blinding yourself from all the tunnels you’re dragged through on the way to those brief shafts of light. I try not to get down on humanity, but there’s still a certain cynicism about the majority of humanity as a potential life partner that — when you meet one that “clicks” — you just can’t imagine ever finding a replacement for them.

Over the next few weeks, she’d say via email how miserable she was over the whole thing. That she shouldn’t have lied to me. That she definitely shouldn’t be marrying the ex. At times, she’d ask me to send her some songs that she’d remembered hearing in my car, or just that she was thinking about but couldn’t remember the names of. We got really close all over again throughout those emails, and she apologized for “everything” about every 3rd email. We even hung out a few times. She said she chose the wrong guy to marry, that she “threw away love”. About a week before her wedding, she invited me over and we just ended up lying in bed, and I gave her a massage³.

Amongst her many emails, she referenced some kind of “keepsake” gift she was making for me. She even said it might illuminate some things, and I’d finally get the full story of what went down, and answers. Instead, she ended up handing me a rolled-up stack of paper. On them were the lyrics to all the songs she had me send her over the months prior. It’s not only a confusing “gift”, but a fucked-up one. Those were all songs I merely sent to her, not listened to, and a majority of the songs were sent after all this shit went down in the first place.

The day of her wedding, she texted me asking me not to answer my phone so she could just leave me a voicemail to explain what she was feeling in that moment. Would you like to hear it? Oh, good. Cause here it is :

About a month after her wedding, she emailed me to say that we never got a chance to do the photo shoot we’d always talked about : me, as the devil, choking her from behind. I chalked it up to a missed opportunity, but “oh well”. She said since it’s “just a photo shoot”, it’s not a problem. She would be in town for a few days coming up, and if I could get a photographer then… we’re set. I, of course, knew a photographer. My friend Michelle, better known as MichelleXStar. The headers for most of these entries were taken from that shoot. As was the cover of my debut DVD.

After that shoot, she went back to Texas and I thought that was the end of it. Apparently, she hadn’t fully moved in to the new place, so she returned from time to time and would email or text me little “thinking of you” notes, which led to our flurry of email replies firing back up again.⁴

Sometime around June of that year, she emailed me to say she was staying in LA, permanently. The marriage was over and they were getting it annulled. She wanted to go out and “celebrate”. She called me that night and said “pick me up! I need stiff drinks!”. On our drive to the bar, I asked her “can I say it? just once?”, and she sighed, “okay.. just once” and I rolled down both windows and shouted out in a long, slow manner : TOOOLD YAAAA SOOOOO!

GodDAMN that felt good.

At the bar, she was feeling sorry for herself the more she drank. She apologized up and down. On the edge of tears. I consoled her a bit, but mentally I was Cartman licking the tears of Scott Tenorman. I had to pee, but she didn’t want to be “left alone in the bar”. I figured she just meant she wanted to stand outside the single-toilet unisex bathroom for a minute. She meant she wanted to go inside the bathroom with me. I let her in. She wanted to hold my dick while I peed, “just to see what it’s like!”. I went along with it. That turned into a reacharound handjob. Which turned into her going down on me. While crying and apologizing, and jerking me off into her mouth. Turns out, a teary-eyed blowjob in the bathroom of a divebar heals a lot of wounds. Not all of them, but enough that I was able to just enjoy this woman almost literally bowing before me in shame and self-loathing.

That felt pretty good, too.

I drove her drunken, barely-verbal ass home, carried her up her stairs, tossed her onto her bed, said “get some sleep”, and walked out. That’s when I gave myself closure. We never hung out again after that.⁵

After the whirlwind that was this whole debacle, I took myself entirely out of the dating game and stayed celibate — outside of masturbation, but nothing more serious than a hug from other people —  for about 5 months. I even turned down a threesome, and an ex that wanted to re-connect, both of which I’d otherwise jump at the chance of doing. But it was just the break I needed to clear my head and move the fuck on.

I’d like to think that was just a very strange period of my life and I’m none the worse for it, but that’s probably not true. I don’t think it’s possible to go through all that and not have it affect me even all these years later. Hell, I still felt a great deal of emotion while writing this story — the only time I’ve ever told the entire story, from start to finish.⁶

In the end, I learned a lot and I’ve come away a stronger and wiser person. I think.

1. you’ll recall in Part 4 that we hung out on the night of February 9th ↩

2. which is the appropriate reaction ↩

3. cause the poor woman had sore shoulders. What am I, some kind of heartless animal who ignores a woman’s need for massage? ↩

4. by the time this whole saga commenced, the email chain was almost 2500 emails long ↩

5. We still had a few emails back and forth a few months later. Mostly about her getting the annulment finalized, and sort-of “checking in”, but my replies were pretty short. Surprisingly, I’ve still never seen her out and about on the town despite, until last year, living 1 mile away from her for almost a decade afterwards. She also, to the best of my knowledge, has absolutely zero social media presence to this day ↩

6. to be perfectly honest, I’ve still left out some weirder/minor details, like the first time we hung out after it all went down and I had a friend sit in the back of the bar, just in case she brought hired goons of her own to fuck with me, since I’d dragged her actual legal name through the mud in LiveJournal posts. And I left out a time I drove slowly past her apartment all stalker-like while she was in a car parked off to the side with her friend as I drove past — oops!. And, about the time I ran into someone who had a story about a friend of mine, and I tried to relate to them with parts of this story, only to find out she and Lauren started a company together. But, most of these things are unnecessary details and this story was long enough already ↩