Your Dark Passenger

It starts out innocent enough.  A single rose left on the hood of your car after work…A typed poem sitting on your desk…Perhaps an anonymous invitation out to dinner for Valentine’s Day.  Each time you receive something there’s a little quickening to your pulse.  It’s exciting.  The mystery man of your dreams is here - finally - to sweep you from your feet.

Valentine’s Day is one of those holidays that was created for bright-eyed optimists who believe love has the power to conquer all.  Unfortunately, for every optimist out there lurks an opportunist in the shadows.  Some will just take you for every penny you have; others are after something far more ominous.

When True Crime Thursdays and the 13 Days of Love Collide.

So why stalk someone?  I can’t pretend to know all the answers to this one because I’ve never been a stalker myself.  I think the closest I ever came was taking a different hallway to class in high school so I could get a little extra face time with the guy I was pre-dating.  (You know what I’m talking about.  It’s when you aren’t exactly dating yet, but it’s about to be there.  You’re just sort of “talking.”)   I do have some ideas though.  I like to break stalking down to 3 categories: love lost, love endangered and love obsessed.

Love Lost

I think we can nearly all relate to this one.  That relationship you’ve pinned all your hopes and dreams on comes to end, leaving you a disillusioned mess weeping on the floor.  The thing is, not all of us turn into stalkers once we’ve shed our last tear over the loser we imagined we loved.  We just move on.  True story time…

Sure, I did the serious dating thing a LOT in high school, but I got sick of it by senior year and decided it was time to play the field.  Now, I’ve never been exactly what you’d call normal or anything (shocker, I know) so I found I had more in common with older peeps than those in my own age bracket.  When I was 17 I started talking to this guy who was 30 - in my defense, he was REALLY immature so I didn’t know he was 30 at first - and my parents were surprisingly cool about letting me go on a date with him, even though my dad did sufficiently put the fear of bodily harm into him with a single look.  (Not that he needed to.  I’m pretty sure I could have taken him down like a little girl if the occasion presented itself.)

You might be wondering what a 17 year old girl and a 30 year old man have in common and you’ll be unimpressed to find out the answer is nothing.  I was actually more mature than he was - sad, really.  When you toss in the fact he’d hang around the video department where I worked so he could treat the other guy I was dating like crap and be annoying in general, well, you can guess how many times I went out with him after the one date.  (And before anyone says it, I was totally up-front with everyone I went out with that I was seeing other people so it’s not like me talking to one of my guy friends should have been enough to set dude off on a jealous rampage of jerkiness.)

After I dumped his ass broke it off with him, he told me he wanted a picture to remember me by (creepy much?), but I agreed just because I was worried he’d start crying and there’s nothing more pathetic to teenage girl than an old guy crying.  Anyway…I had a crazy busy week between homework and drill team practices (I was an officer for the director I like to refer to as the devil’s unholy minion bitch - who was actively flirting with our football team’s quarterback while lecturing us on appropriate behavior) so I don’t think I was at work for close to a week.  He was tired of waiting so I walked out to my car one morning and discovered a plastic-wrapped note from him chewing me out for not providing him with a picture yet.  (Why does no one ever think I’ve got better things to do than provide them with whack-off material?) I can’t remember if I confronted him in person at work or if I called him to chew him out, but since he wasn’t a dangerous stalker type, that nipped that situation in the bud.

Moral of the story: Don’t date peeps at work.  It makes it easier for them to stalk you later.

Love Endangered

This kind of stalking has less to do with the victim and everything to do with the stalker themselves; it’s about what they think you’ll take from them.  Surprise, surprise…Jen the Psycho Magnet has dealt with this one as well.

I can’t remember if I was 16 or 17, but I do remember I was in the middle of an on phase with my on-again, off-again boyfriend that I dated for random lengths of time for about 2 years…before I viciously ripped his heart out in the end.  (Always felt HORRIBLE about that since he was perhaps the nicest guy I ever dated - and I include hubby in that as well since, while he’s completely perfect for me, he was such a bleeping jerk when we got together…and he knows that so I probably won’t get in trouble for writing that.)  Hmm…getting back on track, this actually happened right before Valentine’s Day.  I remember that very clearly because I had to work late every year on Valentine’s Day because I managed the cosmetics department and peeps needed perfume at the last minute like their lives depended on it.  Since I was working late, Sweetie McBoyfriend made a point to stay for my entire shift just to make sure I got into my car okay.  He might have even followed me home to make sure I got inside safely, but I can’t remember…It just seems like something he would have done.

Why, pray tell, would a 16 ish year old girl be dealing with this on Valentine’s Day?  Well, I had some chick come to my house a few days earlier wanting to kick my ass.  I’d never met her and clearly I wasn’t going to fight some chick because she was bored so my step-mother told her I was asleep and made her get the hell out of there.  Who was she, you ask?  Well, she was the flavor of the month for a guy I’d dumped more than a year before.  I never knew all the exact details, but we think she found a mix tape I’d made him (and he’d kept…seriously?) and flipped thinking it was new and that I was trying to steal her man.  Yeah…okay.  He would never admit it to me, but I finally called him once I’d had enough of the escort routine to feel him out about the situation.  Not like it was a major stretch of the imagination since she was JUST the kind of chick he’d go for once he started his downward drinking spiral…

Anyway…he listened very quietly while I explained what she looked like and what she’d said.   His only response was, “I’ll take care of it.”  Shocker…never heard from her again.  (Guys, do us all a favor and don’t let your quickie lays go through all your crap and find your ex…okay?)

Love Obsessed

To my knowledge, I have no experience with this one and I never want to.  This is the kind of person who decides they’re in love with you and kidnaps you on Valentine’s Day to make you love them back.  And then kills you when you don’t.  This is the kind of person who should make every woman out there cringe when she gets a secret admirer because, yeah, it could be the hottie at your office you’ve been flirting with forever; however, it could also be that nutter who stares at you each day when you go to Starbucks to get your Make My Ass Fatter Mochachino.

I know I come off like the Anti-Love spokesperson on this blog, but if all you heart-struck love-sick optimists hear nothing else I say ever then HEAR THIS: Procede with EXTREME caution.  Women die, y’all.  We get our proclivity for love and romance used against us and we get hurt.

And when I say we get hurt, I mean we get hurt in the worst ways.  We don’t just get stabbed in the heart and left for dead.  Oh, no.  That would just be to kind.  We get kidnapped and tortured and raped and held in bondage for unbearable lengths of time.  And then, only once we’ve decided that death would be a bleeping gift from God Himself, we get murdered in perhaps the most savage and brutal methods imaginable.  (Obviously, I’m guessing since I’ve never been brutally murdered.  I’m not writing this from beyond the grave…or am I?)

So this Valentine’s Day, please get me just one gift and don’t do something stupid that will get you killed.  Okay?  That’s all I want.  Don’t die for Valentine’s Day.

Jen

“Let your dark passenger come out to play…Be your own nemesis!”

Oh…real quick…I meant to end this on a more humorous note with a music video, but because this post took on a life of it’s own, I’ll be posting that on The Stiletto Philosopher a little later instead.  When you see a hyperlink in this message then you’ll know it’s done…

Trackback URI | Comments RSS