The Anatomy of a Trap

She actually went and met him.

At least once recently. Within this very month, while we were sitting in this apartment pretending the outside world did not exist, she walked out the door and physically stood in the same room as the phantom voice on the phone. Like wtf.

I am nothing. I’ll never be anything. I couldn’t want to be something. That was how I felt when I found out. Not anger, just a profound, crushing existential boredom with my own pathetic life. A deep, cold detachment from the mechanics of human affection.

I told her to break up with me. For the absolute first time in my miserable existence, I looked at a woman who was actively sharing my bed and told her to leave. I wanted to cut the string. I wanted to lie down in the quiet dark and rot in peace, free from the grotesque machinery of other people’s decaying relationships.

But she didn’t leave. She begged. She collapsed into this frantic, weeping mass of flesh, crying so much it felt less like sorrow and more like a calculated biological response designed to paralyze my free will. She promised to make amends. She swore she didn’t even want to meet him. She told me he keeps calling from a dozen different numbers, relentlessly picking at the lock of her attention.

I don’t know where any of this is going. I am physically sick. My stomach turns over on itself. I am a spectator in my own decay.

I am completely, entirely confused.

Why would she go? If she hates him so much, if he is just an unwanted intruder, why agree to the meeting? Is that guy blackmailing her? Is there some unseen, absolute horror tying her to him that I am completely blind to? Or is she just a puppet, twitching mindlessly to whatever external stimuli pulls the hardest on her strings?

What the hell is actually going on?