for members to tell their ghost stories.
ooh ooh! pass me the flashlight. ive shared parts of this before, but id like to put it all in one place. its not a pure "ghost story" in that we technically communicated a few times, though it wasnt "us" speaking to each other.
id known her for three years before we got together, but wed never met up in real life. we liked each other but never took the leap. she got with a guy for about half a year and i was happy for her. we had fallen out of contact for a while, then we picked it back up. teasing (and flirting), i asked her "broken up with whats his name yet?". to my surprise, she responded "pretty much". long story short, i would later learn he said something, she flew off the handle (she was slim on details but i got the impression she at least slapped him) and ghosted him. he would continue to contact her, and its clear he had no idea they were broken up.
fast forward about three years. in our last few days, she went totally distant on me. it took me a day or two to notice. i caught her in a small, incredibly stupid, obvious and pointless lie, we started fighting and she cut me off. after she cooled off, she called me back. while we were talking, it suddenly hit me, and i asked her if shed been planning to break up with me. she whispered, through tears, "yes". we talked. i made the case for our relationship but i didnt beg or plead. i did press her a few times on whether we were done for good, and while it was clear she wanted to break up and had thought it through, she didnt quite want to sever the connection completely. she said she just wanted to be alone. i said id leave her alone, we hung up. last time i ever heard her voice. its funny, the last time i saw her, wed had a great time, and somewhere inside i wondered if it would be the last. weird how we get little premonitions like that.
anyway, amicable breakup, right? we didnt speak for three days, so i decided it was best to honor the fact that shed broken up with me. i had a bad feeling there was someone else, but i was out of my mind, and friends and family were telling me that (some things were really off, like she had deleted my valentines wish, and she had removed her relationship status before we broke up, and as it would turn out, i was dead on). i simply changed my profile picture to something that wasnt associated with her, and i removed my relationship status. i would later realize she took that as rejection/abandonment/whatever.
woke up the next day and she had made a big show out of flirting with him publicly in the middle of the night. i instantly remembered i had met him some time ago and complimented his jacket at a party. in fact, she had actually brought him up a few months before we broke up, and i remembered it made me slightly uneasy. it figured. the way she went about publicly dragging this out was so over the top though, that i wondered if this was some kind of test. eventually i had sent her a text that said "i want to fight for this. youre worth it.".
spent the rest of the day anxiously (to put it mildly) checking my phone until it was obvious enough that shed ignored it.
the guy lived a few hours away and she indicated she was going to his town. i thought about driving the hour to her apartment to leave her a letter... .i was talked out of it, and to this day, im so glad. i did get one dig in. it wasnt lost on anyone, including my ex, that this guy looked just like me. she made some post bashing robin williams, and everyone replied defending him. the new guy mentioned mrs doubtfire, one of my favorite movies. i liked his comment. she got the message. so she blocked me from viewing her wall, but didnt unfriend me, and she put up a picture that id been clearly cropped out of.
i guess that was supposed to hurt, but i suddenly felt better. she was swinging wildly. this was stupid. anyway, she came back from the trip, and proceeded to make her new relationship official, delete me, and all my friends and family. that was that.
except of course it wasnt. for starters, i wanted my stuff back, but i wasnt going to push that now... .surely this was gonna crash and burn fast. couple of months tops. like others, i went pretty insane during this time. questions like "does she even THINK of me?". "will she get better with him?". after a couple of weeks i got my answer when i discovered that she was getting into the email attached to my facebook and reading the messages sent to me (its funny: among what she read was a friend my ex had never met telling me things like "youve been trapped in a codependent relationship" and my ex "cannot be alone". it should have infuriated me. her snooping had been a major, repeated conflict, she dumped me, and she still thought she was entitled to spy on me? of course i saw it through rose tinted glasses. obviously she wanted me back. i let it go for a while to monitor it, didnt want to make any waves. i realized she was doing this very late at night, like 2-3 in the morning, and i put together that she was doing all this while the new guy was at work (turns out she never returned from her trip).
if she wanted me back, i wanted to make it easy for her. i planted an email in my own email with her name in the subject line. it read "broken up with whats his name yet?". lets just say it wasnt taken as intended; she took it as a slight. a few hours later i got a bank alert. turns out she had had my missing debit card, and she used it for around 60 bucks. i texted her, she denied it. we were still connected through a joint/gaming account and what she didnt know is that i got into it. i saw her with my tshirts cut up into heavy metal gear for this new guy.
so many feelings surfaced. there was anger and outrage of course. mostly there was profound hurt, and i cried a lot that night. i hate thieves. she knew that. and my plan did not go accordingly. there was no going back. i did decide not to press charges, and i got my money back.
now it was time to "get closure" and get my stuff back. every other week id text her following up about it, always following a script from friends and family. shed pay lip service, give excuses, but she never had any intention, i dare say capability, of following through, and besides, now i know she was three hours away and not coming back. the last time, she asked me to email her a list of stuff. i did, making a point to mention my tshirts. i gave up at that point, and changed my password, and began to truly grieve.
about half a year later i realized she was no longer friends with a few of her long time, closest friends, though they were still friends with me. i was stronger by this point, and feeling nosy, so i reached out. turns out shed really lost her mind. apparently she had completely changed to fit in and her friends would call her on it and shed lose it. i know my ex well enough to suspect she was already really self conscious about it. she started small, just calling attention to them and trying to make them look bad, like she would do when she was insecure. it went on to serious attacks, and full blown harassment to the point that one of them had to change their phone number. she did the cropped photo thing to them too . meanwhile i had it confirmed that shed up and moved in with the new guy, driving out his room mate/best friend and killing their metal band because no one wanted to be near her. apparently at a party, someone made a flirty joke toward him, and my ex shoved her and tried to fight her, which in three years i never saw anything like. yikes.
about a year after our breakup, i got a friend request from her. before i could decide what to do with it, she had cancelled it. as i said, i was stronger, i wasnt triggered, so i didnt put a lot of thought or rumination into it and i certainly wasnt going to do anything about it. she sent another one some months later, cancelled it again before i could decide what to do with it. id seen her do similar things, so i know her well enough to know that it was an attempt to reach out but not be rejected.
nothing since. a month from now, it will all have been seven years ago. time has been good to me, and i healed from one of the most painful things that ever happened to me, for which im still proud today. im proud of the way i conducted myself too. no pleading or chasing or wearing my heart on my sleeve. outside of my little dig, i didnt play ball with whatever she was trying to accomplish. she never had any idea what i was going through. i think she honestly thought i painted her black and hated her if i even cared.
hypothetically, it would not be an emotional thing for me to talk to her. id have to think about it, but id probably accept a friend request if she sent one. its been years, im confident she wont, and i think that its best that we leave each other in the past.
