Stalker

Throwing open the cabinet, I see Saltines, two cans of cream of mushroom soup, and something that used to be bread but was now a few shriveled hockey pucks at the bottom of a bag. Luckily, I live in New York City, and neither of us ever sleeps.

You can order an ounce of weed, ten gallons of ice cream and and two fingers of whiskey and have it delivered to your home in under thirty minutes without ever leaving the couch. This is good news for the lazy, fat, and stalked, and I am a card-carrying member of all three.

I watch the light blinking on my answering machine as I lovingly dial the number of my favorite diner across the street, obediently answering the questions yelled abruptly over the roaring background noise. It didn’t matter if it was 4 am on a Wednesday; it always sounded like you were catching them at their busiest time, they never judged my French toast and chocolate milkshake diet, and my answering machine was invariably full of messages.  

“SOUP? WHAT ELSE?”

“YOU WANT FRIES? WHAT ELSE?”

“NO, VINAIGRETTE ONLY WHAT ELSE?” 

The chaos across the street is a comfort. More than once, I turned the corner on my way home from work and spotted him standing in front of the door to my building, which I knew from experience would not close quickly enough to keep him out if I tried to brush past. It was simpler to tuck myself on a stool at the counter until it was safe to run for it. 

Once he jumped out of a cab and ambushed me as I was walking home from work on 2nd Avenue. Once, I left a friend’s apartment in the wee morning hours only to bump into him lurking in the dark hallway because he had heard I was there. He had been grabbing my arm at parties and bars for the last few months, forcing me into a corner to “talk” about why we weren’t really broken up, I just needed to understand, he had to explain things, speaking in an endless stream of words at my face, his shark eyes dead and distant.  After a while, finding a safe place was near-impossible, consistent with the rest of New York City's real estate. I stopped going to parties and bars. And friends’ apartments. But he could still get to a phone. 

For two years, I received a minimum of 6 voicemails a day from him. Landlines did not block numbers as easily as cell phones. He would whine and speak as if we still had a relationship, telling me about his day-to-day, even though I never once responded. He would try to guilt me, saying I had to see him because it was his birthday, or I owed it to a visitor from out of town. He still worked at my old job, so all my friends believed his version of things, which was that I was obsessed with him and, though he tried to let me down easy, had stopped coming out because I was too heartbroken to be around him.  

The silence around me was deafening. His story was salacious and dramatic and easy to digest.  I was too overwhelmed to sum up the relentlessness of the buzzer ringing day and night until I disabled it and the unnerving understanding that the only thing keeping him out of my apartment was my ability to physically overpower him. Even in public, my will meant nothing; boundaries were not even a consideration. 

Hiding in the diner, systematically abandoning my life, it would have been powerful to articulate what was happening. Stalker.  That would have taken a step towards validating my experience. Stalker is aggressive. Violent. Creepy. Stalker isn’t someone just having trouble with a breakup. Stalker is someone committing a crime, someone I deserved protection from. Stalker isn’t a comment on my ability to communicate my feelings accurately and doesn’t leave room for “yeah but he’s upset” or “he must really love you.”

I traded in my old phone for some boundaries and new friends, and got rid of him. But I was isolated and traumatised, depleted of the energy to contemplate anything more than survival, robbed of the impetus to write about it and find the words. There is empowerment in naming experience, and eventually, I found the power. But I know that without words, it’s difficult to process things. And without processing things, I get emotionally exhausted and depressed. And when I’m depressed, I don’t write.

These days, not writing is a flag I pay attention to because when I am drained of energy, it means there is a vampire about, and I no longer entertain bloodsuckers.  But sitting in the diner, waiting for my stalker to get tired of stalking, my bewildered nervous system was frozen like a deer waiting to jump into traffic, poised for danger, doomed to ignorance, eating French toast at 4 AM on a Wednesday.