More thoughts on stalking

I wrote yesterday about stalking, about the man who pursued me during my first semester at university despite my consistent and repeated protestations that I only ever wanted to be friends, and then not even that.

I hadn’t written much about the experience until yesterday, mostly, I thought, because it felt like one of those stories that you need to tell completely in order to tell it at all — mining through the letters and the journals and the feelings, combing through the evidence, in order to get it down. And I didn’t really have the energy to do that, nor did I have the desire — it was a chapter more or less closed, something I don’t think about that often and then not with any particular amount of feeling.

But after I wrote yesterday’s post, and after several kind people commented on it, I started to feel something else: like a fraud. The voices started to bubble up, subtly, casually: It wasn’t really that bad. He never harmed you physically. It was a long time ago. You wrote back; you stayed on the phone; you accepted gifts; you participated in the drama, the triangle. You didn’t say “enough” soon enough. It wasn’t that big a deal. You were just kids. You just were – you just are — seeking attention.

Funny, isn’t it, how we do that to ourselves?

No, the guy never boiled a bunny in my backyard. He never held a gun to my head or a knife to my throat. And for that I am grateful.

But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t stalk me. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t ignore, repeatedly, the fact that I told him that we weren’t and would never be a couple, that I wasn’t in love with him, and that I wasn’t the answer to all his problems.

And even though it hasn’t left physical or (particularly deep) psychic scars, the experience was real. And it was harmful, and hurtful, and upsetting. And it was wrong. And I need to own and acknowledge that for my own sake as well as for the sake of all the women (and yes, many men, but mostly women) who walk through this world thinking that the harms that are done to them aren’t real, no big deal. Just kids.

And let's acknowledge this: I’m also grateful that he never had access to a gun. He was sick, physically sick, in pain, with little to lose. He stole a photograph of me from my ex and photocopied it, cut my former boyfriend out of it, pinned it on his wall like I was his sweetheart. And when he decided that I had betrayed him, he drew a bullet hole in the middle of my photocopied forehead and drew blood trickling out of the wound.

So, yeah. What happened was real. Not some photocopied image of an interaction I’ve only fabricated. Not some two-dimensional, black-and-white fantasy where I change the details, cut out the facts, in order to justify my behaviour. I don’t have to apologize for being all right now, nor do I have to apologize for telling the story, for claiming the experience: stalked.

I was. And I’m fine.

And that’s fine, too.

Your basic stalker story

These are some of the letters that my high school ex-boyfriend sent me during my first year at McGill University.

It was a messy breakup, with its own share of 19-year-old drama (well, I was 19; he was 26). And because e-mail hadn't been invented yet and long-distance was still expensive, we wrote letters.

And these are the letters that my high school ex-boyfriend's roommate sent me during my first year at McGill University.

You see how things got complicated.

I have the long version printed out for posterity in my journals from the period, but I can't read that version, those entries, just as I can't read any of the letters I still carry around without feeling immediately and violently nauseated.

The short version is that the boyfriend dumped me and the roommate moved in to comfort me (prompting the ex-boyfriend to continue to be intrigued) and, over the course of a summer and my first semester away at university, the comforting turned to stalking, with all manner of stalking accessories: the twice-weekly and lengthy emotional letters, the gifts, the phone calls at all hours of the day and night, the showing up unannounced at my door (from a different city), the suicide threats and emotional manipulation (well, I suppose that emotional manipulation is part and parcel of it all as opposed to its own thing), the cutting off, and the final letter, the only one I don't have, the one I steamed open in my dorm room, surrounded by my friends.

There was no return address. He had used a window envelope, and a postage meter as opposed to a stamp, all in the name of trying to pass it off as just another letter. The ex-boyfriend, though, had tipped me off, even if the clumsy attempts at concealment wouldn't have. I opened it and read the last line — "I pity you and I pity the mediocrity for which people like you stand" — and sealed it shut again, wrote his address on it and "Return to Sender," and stuck it back in the mail.

I am writing this here, now, not to tell you the whole story. Maybe one day I'll tell the whole story, one day, if I can find a way to get some larger meaning out of it. But I'm writing this here, now, because perhaps the larger meaning is that you already know the story. You've heard it a thousand times, different details, but the same accessories. How many of us have our own stalker stories, that pile of letters that we keep around, more than two decades later, just in case we need evidence one day? That's the story, and it still sucks.

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I am taking part in NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, which has me posting a blog entry every day throughout the month of November.

Her number

It’s my mother’s birthday today. She would have been 69 years old. She once told me that she was pretty sure that her “number” was 74. This was, maybe, half a year away from her death, during a period of time where things seems to be getting better, or at least holding. “But don’t tell that to anyone,” she said, and I nodded and said that I wouldn’t. I mean, who do you tell, right?

It was an odd moment. I never thought of my mother as superstitious, especially not around her cancer. When it came to that, I pictured her as bloody-minded, intensely practical, without sentiment, like the Scorpio she was. Cancer for my mother was never about support groups or meditation or creatively visualizing the disease as pellets and the chemotherapy as Ms. Pac-Man. It was about getting through and moving on, until it wasn’t.

So the fact that she had a number in her head, that she shared that number with me, was revelatory. I mean, when your mother tells you something, you want to believe her, right? And when you’re 58 and you’ve had cancer on and off for 20 years, 74 doesn’t look too bad. There was something comforting in her own admission that she, too, engaged in a kind of hopeful, magical thinking that characterized so much of my growing up. I don’t mean to paint a picture of my mom as anything less than intensely human, down to earth, accessible — but it’s true she very rarely let herself be vulnerable. I saw her cry maybe twice in my life. So when she told me her number, it was a sort of gift, an opening of a door.

Obviously, she was wrong about the number, but who can fault her for that? She is simultaneously gone and — still — everywhere. That’s the best and the worst of it in one sentence, the gift in the taking away.