I've discovered that keeping old e-mails is not only dangerous to your piece of mind, but can also endanger your relationship. I wanted to put a comforting poem in an e-mail I was sending to my friend Deb at Virginia Tech, who's going through Hell right now. I knew I had a lot of poems on e-mails that I'd sent in the past, so I just started looking through my file of "sent items" at work. Innocent enough, right?
I came across an e-mail dated August 15 where I was telling someone that Krisco was coming back from vacation-and I felt my stomach drop. I was talking to Dirk a few weeks ago about the teddy bear that Krisco gave him. He told me he felt guilty about getting rid of it because, "She got it for me when she went on vacation. I was planning on dumping her as soon as she got back,a nd she gave me this. I felt like an asshole."
Well, he told me he broke up with Krisco on August 5, so I'd been assuming she went on vacation in July, since my sense of passing time is pretty vague. Imagine how I felt when I realized that, according to his own words, Dirk hadn't broken up with Krisco until 10 days after he'd told me he had, if not later. For all I know, he was still dating her when we started dating, August 29th. He certainly spent enough time with her. He was certainly insistent enough about his desire to remain "friends" with her. In fact, until sometime in November, he still went over to her house quite regularly.
So, after taking all of this into consideration, I reacted in my usual way: paranoid fear. The only thing that kept me from outright freaking out was the fact that I was at work. They look at you funny if you're not answering phone calls and/or greeting visitors because you're crying too hard to see straight. So I decided to wait until tonight to ask him.
I asked him, when we were parked in my car, "Don't take offense, Dirk, but when did you actually break up with Krisco?" I told him what I'd found and compared it with what he'd said. His response was that he must have gotten mixed-up about when he'd actually dumped her when he told me about the teddy bear. Reassuring enough so that I quit freaking out, but not enough to completely put my fears to rest. I don't have much experience with normal relationships, but I'm pretty sure that something is wrong with ours. It shouldn't have taken me more than 5 minutes to dismiss the whole thing as a mix-up.
Dirk, Katie, and I went to a Starbucks nearby tonight. I was amazed-Katie's actually a fairly good driver. Certainly she doesn't have my creativity, which probably means that she's less likely to smash into something. One of Krisco's friends walked into Starbucks while we were sitting at a table....seeing us, she smiled and waved. Krisco's probably going to hear in detail about Dirk playing with my hair and holding me. Her "friends" are, for the most part, incredibly sadistic little assholes. They enjoy watching her writhe in pain when she hears about stuff Dirk and I do together. Sometimes I almost pity the psychotic little whore.