Kill Him Back

“He fucking did it again, seriously?” I said but I was very un serious in the way of this was expected.

Jen nodded. She’d found her husband passed out again. The minor crime really. Leaving the phone out though. Undoer of worlds. Men are so brave in their stupidity. I see it all playing out in their living room I’ve been on many times as she gives me all the details.

“This fucking idiot Syd I swear. Telling this girl how to get into our house and where the bedroom is. And her laughing him off, and him just continuing saying when I’m out of town….sick….”

Brave.

She trails off because this has happened many times. Down to some girls appearing on the ring camera.

HOA subdivision, not my style. I stir her coffee with my thrifted spoons in thrifted mugs and hand it to her as I listen. Subdivisions are so easy to find maps of though, my brain drifts. Join neighbors apps, find out who has ring cameras and who is away a lot. My nervous system calms as I think about how easy it is to learn all you want about people.

She treads carefully as she talks. Some 18yo IG model he was liking and following again. His IG that he had deleted and re deleted and recreated like he was a teenager hiding from his parents.

“But you should have seen what he was saying to her…”

I’d been looking at these messages for 10-20y in some form. My poor friend, kept getting her heart broken and kept going back and listening. She held so much hope. She held a healthy dose of denial as well. She knew. We’d both made our rounds in Al Anon.

The same hope the IG girls often held. That I had held many times. My face starts to burn with shame. Jen doesn’t know all my secrets but she knows that I have fallen for similar men as her husband back to the days of AOL. The married ones the unavailable ones the ones who love bomb by message and disappear. We look at each other sympathetically. The look says “we have changed so much and then not at all huh?”

We haven’t really grown apart the last year but our time hasn’t been as frequent. This is why I jumped out of bed at 6am and immediately made fresh coffee when Jen called me crying.

“This girl is from the coffee shop too….,” she sniffles, sliding the phone my way again and looking at the coffee accusingly. I glance down and recognize her. Fuck.

“You know her?” Jen asked, seeing the flash of recognition on my face. One secret was going to come out but which would I chose.

•

I hesitated a moment too long, or maybe not, and Jen began to fill in the blanks.

“Program?” She whispered. People who frequent 12 step often use that language. “Yoga, a training….Castle Rock?” Jen said, now just spouting off places she knows I frequent.

“Sort of,” I said, once again manipulating the veil of anonymity for my own gain.

Riley had been helping me out for a bit. She was young and tech savvy and decidedly not since the days of AOL. We had bonded over boy/man/fuckboy drama as I had frequented the coffee shop over my year of self growth. The year I grew apart from Jen but her husband was predictably ensnaring himself in my side project.

*

I came back to present with Jen, out of the memories of the beginning of what Riley and I crafted. Are crafting. She’s a genius.

“You know I’ll help if you want to leave,” I said shortly. I’d said this many times about many men, to her and other friends. And to myself, please Syd I’d say to myself get the fuck out of this situation.

But she didn’t actually know what I meant or what I was capable of. She knew I’d been distant but not why. She didn’t understand that people had had to die.

“Fuck Riley!” I yelled, bursting into the coffee shop, startling a small family. I really needed to ground a bit.

“Syd!” She said cheerily, “smell this!”

She held some warmed cider up to me.

“Not now….” I started, even though the cider was delicious and smelled like my childhood in apple orchards.

She looked at me expectantly.

“Tell me about David…” I said, tugging her into the kitchen and pulling up Jen’s IG. I flashed a pic of Jen’s husband at Riley while she began measuring out dough

“Oh……experiment.” she stated matter of factly.

“He’s too close, Ri” I said pleadingly. “His wife is my friend and… when I said pick a random guy from the coffee shop I didn’t imagine…..I mean, I meant a random out of towner….”

“He’s not from the coffee shop.” The way she stated this suddenly made me feel very old. I was only 20 years older than her. Only.

“Ok….”

“He followed me on IG. You know I have bikini and tattoo pictures on there and sometimes the creeps come out and…..” she looked at me sadly as I knew how this had ended for her before. It had been a core part of our trauma bonding.

“Well he can’t be the target for this. It’s too risky. And I can’t hurt my friend like that…”

“Hurt your friend? You’re helping her by my book. Did she show you the messages? Classic shit we have written down for our recovery girls. Dumping the vulnerability. Syd, this man was telling me about what fucking surgeries he had and how drunk on whiskey he was. And we never fucking met. It’s textbook. Our textbook.” She snorts at the end. We were nearly done with the book. I let my brain float back to when she helped me expand on what I was already dreaming about. What Sam & I dreamed about.

•

My coffee knocked over and sloshed over my cheap laptop.

“Fuck!” I screamed, jumping back and taking my bag with me.

“You okay over there?” Laughed the barista.

I wasn’t.

“Ha ha, yeah! Clumsy and….” I trail off…”not having a good day”

As she gets closer I see the recognition on her face.

“Oh. That bad?” Riley asks as she helps me pick my things up off the floor. I see her see my cuts, my bruises, my tear stained eyes.

“Men.” I say plainly. It is a good catch all and a good deflection away from my own bad behavior.

“Oh god…you mean it doesn’t stop?” she says, looking me up and down “like, when you get older, it doesn’t stop?”

I sag, still sometimes feeling 20 therefore thinking I look 20. But no, I’m 39 and still acting like a teenager.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry but I mean…”

“No, it doesn’t stop. Well, I didn’t stop…” I say to Riley.

When I begin sharing my latest heart break, Riley’s face contorts.

(“Don’t you look these men up first on Midsommer?” she asked.

Midsommer was a website where everyone posted their do not date stories, supposed to reveal men’s bad behavior so other women don’t fall for it. The thing was none of us were believing what we read. And the men kept spitting game.)

“There seriously should be a service warning women about these douchbags. Bulletin boards. Websites!”

“Right now I’m just trying to worry about my side of the street” I say, though I am desperate for a world like Riley describes.

“I’m trying to start a group…” I say sadly.

Truthfully there were two of us in the group already, and we’d both spoken to other women in the area we lived in about expanding. We desperately needed self help accountability and the strength of other women. Clearly sketchy men were not a 1:1 sport.

“Ooohh a group! I need that shit. So do my friends….” Riley began explaining her own version of heart break.

“Maybe we can meet here sometimes. And….talk more about all this?

And our weekly coffees began.