Nightmare Dates

by Lauren Solski
On my way to university, I made a vow to myself that I wouldn’t get involved with him again.

“Lauren. You will NOT get back together with him!” To some degree, I believed what I said. I knew that if I stayed with him, things would remain well for only a short period of time.

When food gets old, science allows it to mould. When we get old, we mould too. Unlike rotting bread on the counter, we end up scrapping off the mould and continuing on. It’s a vicious cycle that neither science, nor we can break.

Moving from Iqaluit to Toronto made me believe that both of us would find different partners. It was only logical, seeing as Toronto is a massive metropolis of eligible, sexy men.

I arrived in Toronto to settle into Ryerson with my mother. My mother and I are very similar women; we tend to be stubborn in our own ways, and therefore fight a lot.

One day, we got in a particular fight about the curtains in my dorm. To avoid the heat, I told her I was going to the mall, and that I would be back later.

I reached the mall and needed some sort of relaxation. Whenever I’m stressed, I like to relieve myself with shopping, food, or sex. Even though I was in a paradise of shopping and food, what did my smart, logical brain choose?

Twenty minutes later, I found myself at his place.

After a very “relaxing” romp, we grabbed a bite to eat. “What are we going to do?” I asked him. Secretly, I was wishing he would ask me to date him.

“I’ll see you again once you’re settled in your dorm,” he said.

A few days later, I sent him an instant message to set up a meeting. At the same time, I decided to make a crack at the fact that I wasn’t in his Top Friends on Facebook.

“That should tell you something,” he said. Thirty seconds later, he appeared offline.

“ WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?!” was my initial reaction. I had NO idea what just happened. I thought he was joking, and I didn’t find it too funny.

The next morning I explored his Facebook profile to see if the “joke” had ended. I learned that his anger was not a joke when I couldn’t access his profile.

At this point, I was beyond angry, and I wrote him an e-mail. In fact, I wrote several e-mails, only to receive zero responses. He deleted me off Facebook, MSN, and apparently, his life.

Over the next week, I realized the deletion may be a blessing in disguise. I enjoyed frosh week (minus the crying myself to sleep), and tried to move on with my life in this new, big world.

A few weeks later, I receive a phone call from him. He apologized, and asked me to accompany him to Nuit Blanche. If you’ve read Nightmare Dates before, you can probably guess what I did.

Later that night, him and I started exhibiting the art around Toronto. Halfway through our expedition, a stunning woman came up and gave him a kiss. At first, I was confused. After kissing him, she proceeded to hold his hand and join our evening. I played along and waited until she left before tearing him to shreds.

After an entire two hours of being “the other woman”, I confronted him about what happened.
He explained that he started seeing her during frosh week, and he didn’t have the nerves to end things; he didn’t want to hurt her.

It blew my mind that he was talking about only hurting her feelings. How did he think mine felt? My anger and sadness was obvious, so he promised that he would end things with her soon.

That “soon” turned into a few weeks before he finally ended it. In the meantime, I was sentenced to sneaking around with him in order for her not to find out.

The “other woman” should be my middle name.