I thought being at home for break would be relaxing since all I the only things I had scheduled on doing before leaving for NY to see Tony was to watch trashy TV, scrounge around in the kitchen for fat-free organic snacks (since my mom has suddenly become some kind of health nut), and catch up with old friends. I was surfing Facebook today since I haven’t been on that cocaine-laced website for the entirety of this past semester to catch up on some Berkeley gossip and saw that one of my friends has a gf (his first. Yeah, I know, awww!). So I clicked on her profile, naturally :p, (which I was able to do since she is one of the few who don’t worry about stalkers slash prospective employers and keeps her profile public) and was flipping through her photos to see what she looks like, and I stumbled across a photo that propelled me into my obsessive and overly analytical mind. It was a picture of my friend’s girlfriend with An, the girl that Tony was planning on leaving me for earlier this year. Apparently they know each other because they were both in the Vietnamese Students Association together (ugh, another reason for me to look down on such ethnic enclaves). I didn’t have a face to pair with the name and the repressed anger before, but now I do. It just brought up a lot of the same unpleasant feelings from my birthday when I found out about her and the same unanswered questions I had started haunting me again. I thought I had put the whole issue behind me, but I guess I had just pushed back into the corner of my mind, unobtrusive but still taking up space.
(But really, how quickly can you get over such news?)
Would he have ever told me about her himself?
If he stayed with me because he loved me, like he said when I confronted him on my birthday, why did he send her another message in June expressing his wistfulness over their never having gotten together?
Would he have fallen in love with her like she expected?
Mostly, I dwelt on the fact that he wanted to be with somebody so completely different from me. Maybe that was the appeal in the first place. The first thoughts that came to my mind when I saw her picture were that she looked really young and also that she wasn’t especially attractive. Sorry if the latter makes me sound like a bitch but 1) she’s technically “the other woman (actually, girl in this case)” so I’m not expected to have high opinions of her, and 2) I actually objectively don’t think she is attractive because I remember thinking that when I actually saw her in person with Robert before I knew that she was the An. Tony has brought up a few times before that the fact that he finds me so attractive aggravates the situation in his mind, so maybe that’s why? Or maybe she just has a great personality, the kind that boosts someone’s attractiveness points by 50%. As for the young thing, I’m sure she has/had that fresh naive thing going for her that all baby freshmen do. Plus, her religiousness probably added to the innocence aspect that he thought I lacked. Since I’m the dark cynical 40-year-old woman trapped in a 21-year-old’s body (God, no wonder I love Grey’s Anatomy. I’m dark and twisty like Meredith Grey and her obvious dad issues and distrust with men), a bubbly baby-faced girl must have been the obvious antidote.
I wonder if he thinks about what could have been.
OK, time to head over to my friend’s birthday party and distract myself so I can stop before my mind spirals out of control asdhf@Q#$*(#&.
Actually, writing this has been oddly therapeutic and I just found an episode of Grey’s on Lifetime (I swear this is the first time I’ve ever watched anything on this channel). Thank you, karma.
