I’m Breaking Up With You In Bullet Points
Dear Jarvis,
I’m breaking up with you in bullet points. I do this in the hope that your drunken, late night phone calls arguing over the meta-details of my decision might be more lucid than usual. I also do it to be kind, knowing that you, having broken up with me several times in the past with either very little explanation or with a flippant admission that you have constructed an air-tight plan to cheat on me without me catching on but, at the last minute, to preserve our “awesome friendship”, confess to the impending conspiracy, are probably not equipped to handle a female who very abruptly and in contrast to her habitual lack of self esteem puts an absolute end to a relationship that has been a constant source of welcoming comfort for your private parts.
If you need to read that twice, please do so. The sentences are longer than the ones you’re used to. There’s no shame in sounding out the big words. Unlike you, I am going to provide you with the tools to understand how wholeheartedly I despise you and why I want you to disappear from my worldview. Here we go.
I am well regarded as the neighborhood’s foremost independent scholar in the origin and classification of your body odor. Everyone can smell you coming but I’m the only one who can smell where you’re coming from. In fact, by cataloging and cross-referencing all of the aromas I’ve encountered in two years of sleeping with you I could compile an aromatic map of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. It’s that bad.
The best thing you’ve ever done, the thing you are most proud of, was pranking your best friend to the point of a court ordered psychiatric evaluation. You’ve called him “Bellevue” ever since and repeatedly dismantle his credibility whenever you fear he’s forming more logical and supportive friendships with other people.
You are the worst kind of coward. You’re the kind of guy that stands at the front of a line of martyrs and keeps turning to the guy behind him to say, “hey man, after you.” You have mastered nothing in your life outside of curating my total identity crisis. A skill that, were it not for its insipid cruelty, I would suggest as a possible career choice for you.
Indeed, you are truly gifted in getting arrested. I’m sure glad my student loan money came in just in time for me to bail you out the Manhattan Detention Complex. But, as far as I’m concerned, it was worth every penny that I invested into the New York City criminal justice system to know that you had to take a dump in front of a room of misdemeanors and career criminals.
I’m sorry there’s not a hotline for people like you, even if it only served the purpose of distracting you for a minute while I run and tell the girl you’re sitting with at the bar about that crying thing you do when you masturbate.
The longer I let you live at my house rent free, cheating on me with my roommate, the more I adapt to being treated like an idiot and waiting especially excruciating lengths of time to use the bathroom. Because, the bathroom, is that super stealthy place that I never would have looked for you in this one bedroom apartment I share with three people.
In conclusion I am not going to pretend that after delivering this letter to you and making you read it aloud to me I will not activate a plan to see you all the time, claim your friends for my own, and constantly need to speak to you privately whenever unknown females are present. I feel that after estimating the total amount of time that you were blackout drunk and innocuously mistreated me I am due a generous severance of crazy time and I will not have that time interrupted by your desire to always have the last word. Which brings me to the following terms and conditions for our new arrangement.
You go to the bars where you know people and I’ll go to the bars where I know people. If we end op at the same bar where we know the same people you can either spend the entire night trying to reconcile with me, pay my bar tab and walk me home or, leave immediately.
You are to call me every few months to have a sentimental phone conversation that leads to sex and a marathon conversation about getting back together unless, you call and I don’t answer which is code for I’m seeing someone new.
If I am seeing someone new your options are to never show your face in any public place where there is even the slightest chance you might run into me or, upon running into me and my new beau, display that Hulkish air of impending chaos and self-abuse that comes so naturally to you to inspire a my new guy’s protective instincts.
Goodbye Jarvis. Within half a year of writing this letter I hope to have deleted your number from my cell phone and formed meaningful relationships with bartenders in neighborhoods you can’t afford to buy drinks in. Please realize that the more enraged you become, the more self-induced public humiliation you create for yourself, the less work I have to do on my end. Go out and smash some windows, key some cars, urinate in the face of oncoming traffic, do you Jarvis, because I’m done. Give me back my keys and go away.
Yours Truly,
Elaine