My Ex Hates Me
By Paul Barker
When we stopped being friends or lovers or friendly lovers, I asked you to do one thing, which was to please never hate me. It was a seemingly simple request. Even though things had ended on a sour note between us, it was important that we still looked back on everything with a smile. Our relationship was owed that smile. It deserved it. We gave each other so much joy and happiness. To think that one day, I could possibly lose the right to even call you in a time of crisis seems unreal.
I remember talking to you on the phone when we broke up. It was 4:30PM and I was in Murray Hill of all places—34th and 2nd avenue to be exact—talking to you about why things needed to end. You agreed actually and everything felt pretty amicable. I just asked you for one thing: “Please don’t hate me. You’re not allowed to hate me. We’ve been through too much together for you to just start disliking me.” I told you that I will always have love and respect for you. “I don’t want you to ever feel disgust when someone brings up my name,” I told him. “I want you to always think of good things.” This might seem like too much to ask but given the nature of our relationship, it wasn’t. It would hurt too much to remain friends but since there was such a deep foundation of love and respect, I never thought we could become enemies.
But here we are a few years later and you hate me. You’ve blocked me on Facebook (the modern way of saying “I hate your guts!”) and you won’t even mention my name while in the presence of mutual friends. How did we get to this point? It makes me sick to think that someone who once meant so much to me could start to erase everything. At least you’re not indifferent. That would be truly frightening. As long as you hate me, I know you still feel something about me; I know that I still have the power to get emotion out of you.
I can’t call you anymore. I lost that right some time ago. I can’t expect you to ever ask how I’m doing because you won’t do it. I can’t get anything out of you anymore. We’ve gone from everything to nothing and it’s such a damn shame. Again, maybe I was asking too much, maybe I wanted to have my break up cake and eat it too. It’s just that I’ve had a lot of exes who have disappeared and that was fine, that’s what I wanted, but I always envisioned you to be the ex who would stick around. We’d be like Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal from No Doubt. The break up would be intense but we would eventually rediscover the friendship and be okay. Gwen wrote a whole song about this called “Cool” and I wanted that so badly to be our song.
This is an ending I no longer have control of. I have to accept that you’re going to fade away like all the others. We won’t be married adults who invited each other to our respective weddings. “I used to be in love with this person but now I just love them and that’s okay. I love them too much to not have them in my life.” Yeah, that will never happen.
Sometimes I wish we just remained friends and never got together. That’s the risk you always take, isn’t it? By getting into a relationship with someone, you have the ability to experience everything with them, but you also have to understand that you could eventually have nothing to do with them. If we never dated, I wouldn’t be writing this. Instead, I would be at your house watching the television and feeling content being with my best friend.