Love Sick

Here is the juicy story of a girl (me) discovering her queerness, a 34 year old married virgin and the end of what she thought her future was. Enjoy.

December 2019 came and left, but the cold stayed. I was working at a busy bar on Queen Street West at the time and loving every minute of it….. Said no service industry worker ever. My boss/owner of the bar was not the most pleasant woman to work for, but I did admire her work ethic. I could have done without the crying in the dry stock room, but who really loves their job right? I had been living with my boyfriend at the time for 4 years and at this point he felt more like a roommate to me. So if it isn’t obvious, I was extremely unhappy with my life, my garbage apartment and my roommate who was beginning to lose an understanding of personal hygiene. It’s almost like he developed a form of Benjamin button syndrome where only his brain began to return to a child-like state. Don’t we love this for me so far?

Soon his love for drugs and alcohol over powered what he once felt for me. I ended things with him around the middle of January, but allowed him to live in the spare room until he found a new place (far away) to live. I was definitely a push over when it came to him. He treated me like an old pair of shoes, kept around because they’re comfortable and kicked off without a care in the world where they landed. My self-confidence was basically non-existent at this point so I never asked when he was moving out or if he could maybe try and urinate inside the toilet instead of the floor/seat. I just dealt with all of it in silence.

About a month or so after him and I broke up, I met Jack. He was recently hired at my work place as a bar back to help out on weekends. Take note that in the past I had a tendency to be drawn to wildly inappropriate relationships, and I could feel that craving for chaos returning. Before I even started talking to him I knew he was married, 34, AND a virgin. To this day I still don’t know if he was actually a virgin, but given his past dedication to his religion it is a definite possibility. For some reason I found all of this attractive. I have problems. Of course I knew what I was doing was wrong, but he gave me all the validation I needed and he made me feel beautiful again. I felt myself coming back and it felt so good. I started caring about my make-up and wearing cute outfits again. My bank account now hated me, but I looked good so I didn’t care.

Eventually Jack told his wife he wanted a divorce, but he was a coward so he neglected to tell her why. I never really asked any details about how this conversation went because A. I didn’t care and B. I didn’t care at all. I needed him to help me get over my ex and he needed me to take his virginity. He did and I did. He bought me thoughtful gifts such as books about serial killers and what not. He paid attention to what I liked and what I said, it was nice. Now that I think back on it I don’t think I even liked him at all, he was kind of a really bad person. Oh well, desperate times am I right? Our relationship progressed and it was an easy distraction from my drunk roommate.

For some reason our boss/ the owner had a huge issue with us seeing each other even though we only worked together one night a week, which was a Saturday, and we were so busy that we barely even spoke. This began to cause problems between Jack and me because we were basically being bullied into quitting. I had worked there almost a year before he started and had never had any problems, I might have even liked my job. Eventually the issues our boss had with us became too much for her to hold in, so she started finding enjoyment in telling me I didn’t understand what I was doing wrong or that I just “don’t get it”. Finally I told her she was right and I truly had no idea how what I was doing was wrong, so I wished her good luck and I walked out during my shift. The following week all restaurants and bars were shut down due to COVID-19. I found a mild sense of comfort in this.

Jack found an apartment in Parkdale and I basically got free reign to decorate it. I’m really good at spending other people’s money, so it was relatively easy to furnish the place quickly. The pandemic was spreading quickly and honestly I was worried about what was going to happen. My zombie apocalypse kit wasn’t nearly ready for this and acquiring guns on short notice in Canada is problematic. I often stayed at his apartment because I had an infestation at mine that I couldn’t get rid of and everything except the small corner stores were closed. We drank, had a lot of sex, drank some more, and wrote. He was quite creative I’ll give him that, but nothing else.

Eventually everything he did started to bother me and I started fights whenever I could out of pure boredom. One day he made a comment about his ex-wife and I used it as the perfect out. I stormed out of the apartment and haven’t seen or spoken to him since. Oh and I told his wife he was cheating on her and he lost his virginity to me. I’m not proud of that, but he’s a loser and I was a disaster so here we are. You really aren’t living until you take a 34 year old Jehovah witness’s v-card.

Finally in April my ex found a place and moved out. I hadn’t lived alone in so long, I forgot how scared of the dark I was. For the first couple weeks of being completely alone you could say I struggled a bit. I had lost my best friend/long term boyfriend, my job, any certainty I once had about my sexual orientation and the world was being engulfed by a pandemic. I drank a lot…..in the shower…. while crying. My anxiety didn’t enjoy sleep unless it was wasted, so naturally I was always wasted.

I had exhausted almost everything on Netflix until I came across a show called Feel Good. I watched it over and over and over again. I realized I was obsessively watching it because I was insanely attracted to the main character, a woman. She was androgynous and beautiful, I wanted so badly to kiss her stupid face. Shortly after this epiphany, I downloaded all the dating apps and changed my preferences to women. I was scared sh*tless for lack of a better word. I had never really used dating apps and I had never dated a woman.

Why I thought online dating women for the first time ever during a pandemic was a good idea is beyond me, but I did it… a lot. I went on a few beach/park dates that went nowhere passed a night at my apartment and I was ok with that. I wanted to see what I liked. Eventually I found her and eventually I ruined it. I was so incredibly far from being in a healthy mental state when I met her. I kind of lost it and I lost her. We were so good. I would go to sleep dreaming of her lips on mine and wake up wishing they were the first thing I could taste. I was on anti-depressants and my excessive drinking was making them less effective, as a result I got stuck in a downward spiral. Every time I drank I would black out and wake up to some sort of disaster that I caused. Even today, months later, I still think about her and have so many regrets. I’m sorry.

After this whole mess I took a break from dating anyone and started writing, a lot. I got new medication and cut back my drinking a significant amount. I finally started to feel better and the darkness didn’t seem so scary any more. I spent my days writing and reading alone. I knew I needed to be good with myself before I could give myself to someone else. I’m generally a pretty social person, so spending all this time alone was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. My thoughts were once my enemies, but I slowly learned that the quiet gave me a chance to listen to them.

Somedays when I needed a break from writing I would go sit on the front stoop of my apartment building to smoke and soak up the sun. I started doing this quite often, it almost became a routine. This is when I started to see Quinn. Almost every day I would see her when she came out to walk her dog, but we never spoke, just exchanged a smile here and there. How had I never seen her before? After seeing her a few times I started getting that feeling of wanting to kiss her stupid face. She seemed shy, I knew I had to be the one to talk to her first. So I did, and we started to chat every once in a while along with the usual smile. Eventually I asked her if she wanted to have a drink sometime and she said yes, but for some reason gave me her apartment number instead of her phone number. So me being the biggest dork of all time, wrote a note with my number and tucked it under her door just enough that it would still be visible when she walked up. Later on in the day I ended up at the beach with my friend and I told him about my interaction with the woman upstairs. As I was telling him about it she texted me, I remember getting up and jumping around in true dork fashion of course. She came over that night.

It turns out she was living above me for 4 years, but we never even saw each other. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see her because I wasn’t ready. I’m not sure why things turned out the way they did, but some things are better left unknown so they say.

We’ve been dating over 3 months now and I still get just as excited when she texts me.