h2>Dating : I Found Waldo: The Kyle* Tales, Part One
This one is long overdue, but it’s a story worth telling. And I promise you, every bit of it is true.
I played Dr. Phil twice today.
It all started at our campus’s gym, as I was about to head home until I passed my friend’s recent ex-boyfriend on my way out. Wait, I’m sorry, not ex-boyfriend.
Ex-thing.
Ex-fling.
Whatever you want to call it.
The boy that insisted on meeting her parents only to end their forty day snap streak 21 days later.
Only to friendzone her, then ghost her, out of the blue, after spending their very first fourteen days together begging for a relationship.
That’s the trouble with men these days, I’m telling you. Asking to marry you one day, fleeing back to the dating app scene the next.
They can only be tracked by one thing: the distance moving on their Tinder profiles. If they un-match you after disappearing, it’s over.
Never to be seen or heard from again. All you’re left with is trails of bread crumbs from the house you used to pass every day, where you sometimes see them outside.
From the matching workout watches they asked you to sync, before they remembered that they don’t actually want to work out with you anyway.
Anyway. This boy, my friend’s ex, used to try to get me to work out with him, as a ploy to get my bestie out of her Jack Rogers flip flops, and into her own pair of gym shoes.
Never worked, and I haven’t seen this boy at the gym since he pulled the Where’s Waldo act, but he’s here now. In front of me, staring down at his phone.
He doesn’t see me. Fast as light, I whip around the corner of the locker room. I pull out my own phone, with three quick texts and one call to my best friend, asking for permission to confront him right then and there.
And so began the final touches of the pursuit of pettiness that began unfolding exactly thirteen days earlier.
With her full blessing to “Do it. Go”, I proceeded forward. Walked straight up to him, after he, shockingly, waved at me, and I started to go the fuck off.
About so many things.
How he should’ve at least told her if it was over.
How he should’ve responded to her asking to talk.
How he should’ve told her something, anything, rather than just turning on a dime and running back to his pretty little apartment and letting the Snapchat timer run out without a word otherwise.
He should’ve done a lot of things differently, and I’ll backtrack to that later. For now, I’ll focus on the chain of events that was this FORTY FIVE MINUTE LONG conversation, and the public call out that began today’s Doctor Phil charade.
At the start of my scolding him, Kyle, as we’ll call him, to avoid disclosing the ghost’s identity, stopped me, told me to walk with him, and chose to have the conversation he should’ve had weeks ago. But with ME, instead of the person he should be talking to, Katie*.
Classic immature boy behavior. Sorry boys, if you’re reading this.
I won’t even get into what we talked about, but somewhere within this conversation he accidentally admitted to me that
- yes, he had in fact, liked Katie, but he also has a thing for our other bestie, Rachel. Like I’m sorry, what?? You can’t double dip bud.
And,
- Yep, he found another girl on a dating app three weeks ago, approximately when he poofed out of Katie’s life.
I’m not quite sure what I was hoping to accomplish with this conversation, except maybe to unleash some of my pent up pettiness on the world, but, excuses aside, he did seem to at least realize that, yes, he did behave like an asshat.
Or maybe just a rat.
Once he seemed willing to listen, I did what I do best.
I dug deep for my Dr. Phil self-help anecdotes, and tried to get this boy back on the right track.
I spoke to him calmly.
I subbed in a few wise phrases I’ve picked up from some general elective psychology classes I took in college.
And I hopefully convinced this egotistical man to, at the very least, not treat this new Tinder girl he’s been stringing along like shit.
As I reiterated for him, over and over, it’s his responsibility to at least say something.
Hopefully I jammed that lesson through his massive ego. Hopefully I knocked into him that he was in the wrong.
And if I didn’t, you know what, I did get some very crucial information out of this confession, that I, of course, immediately called Katie with.
And shared with her over ice cream. And played Dr. Phil while she got her closure.
Because that’s what best friends do, they play self-help doctor for each other.
It just seems, in this case, apparently now I play Dr. Phil for their ghosters too.
Check back next week for the sequel to my unleashed story of pettiness. I’ll have a vampire story for you, maybe.
Or at least a picture of the text I sent him when he vanished in the first place.
