She used to stretch out in my bed like she held the deed to the mattress. Three times a day, minimum. It was a deranged cardio program that only two degenerates in love could maintain.
But it was the mornings that mattered.
Every single morning began with mandatory backdoor diplomacy. She treated it with the reverence of a Sunday High Mass. Over a hundred mornings. Over a hundred prayers screamed into a pillow while the rest of the world was just drinking coffee and reading the paper.
We drained each other dry like two dying batteries trying to jump-start the universe. It was raw. It was real. It was the kind of intimacy that leaves scars because it burns so hot.
And then—snap.
Less than a year after she dumped me (because I moved to Tucson, or didn’t chase her hard enough, or simply refused to be the villain in her victim-princess screenplay), she finds her “Forever Man.”
Forever.
Apparently, in her world, “forever” has a shelf life shorter than a carton of milk left on the counter in July.
It’s the same routine. The same script. The same circus. She just swapped out the clown.
But here is the scene that sticks. The one that tells you everything about the structural failure of her new life.
It’s Sunday, December 7th 2025 and my phone rings. She’s “working”—babysitting a special-needs kid for minimum wage—and in the background, the soundtrack is pure chaos. A child is screaming. It’s jagged and ugly. And over that noise, her voice drops into that soft, breathless whisper she used to use on me when she wanted a ring or a fight.
“Do you still love me?” she asks. “Because he’s my forever.”
And then, when I don’t give her the answer she wants, the mask slips. The “diabetic alcoholic loser” insults come flying out. She throws rocks from the bottom of a hole she dug herself, trying to break my windows because she can’t stand the view from her own.
But here is the truth. The deep, ugly, beautiful truth that the new guy doesn’t know.
Does he think he’s special? Does he think the way she touches him, the way she looks at him, is new?
He is getting a photocopy.
He is getting a blurry, faded, low-toner Xerox of the passion she gave me.
When she’s with him, she’s performing a play she rehearsed in my bedroom a hundred times. The intimacy he thinks he’s building? It’s a reenactment. It’s a cover band playing the hits.
She reads this blog. She stalks the words. She looks for her silhouette in the smoke because she knows, deep down, that the fire we had was the real thing. And what she has now? It’s just a space heater.
So, to the “Forever Man”: Enjoy the show. Truly.
But know this: You are living in a house that I built. You are sleeping in a bed that is haunted by the things she did with me. And every time she tells you “I love you,” check the acoustics. Because it sounds a hell of a lot like an echo.
She contacts me because she knows the difference between the original and the copy.
And frankly? I don’t blame her.
Survival doesn’t come free. It leaves teeth marks. And she’s realizing that her new life doesn’t have any teeth at all.
Author’s Note.
Before the silence finally set in, she sent one last text. A parting shot fired from the grassy knoll of her own resentment.
“It wasn’t you,” she wrote. “It was my vibrator that sent me to the moon.”
Classy.
A real “Broad” in the old-school, noir sense of the word—if the noir was filmed in a trailer park in Tucson. That is the Tucson breed right there: trash wrapped in a victim’s flag.
But here is the truth she doesn’t understand: Happy women don’t text their ex-boyfriends about their sex toys.
If you are truly “settled,” if you have found your “Forever Man,” you don’t spend your Sunday afternoon trying to rewrite the history of an orgasm you had a year ago. You don’t try to give the credit to a Duracell battery unless the memory of the flesh-and-blood man is haunting you.
She wants to believe it was the machine. Because machines are safe. Machines have an “off” switch. Machines don’t leave you for a better life in Vietnam.
So let her have the plastic. It fits. A synthetic joy for a synthetic life.
She’s not a villain. She’s just a tourist who realized she couldn’t afford the ticket, so she burned down the gift shop on her way out.
