In October of 2020, I saw my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend for the first and only time. She came into the bakery where I worked to pick up a Vietnamese coffee and two butter croissants. We didn’t recognize one another, our faces obscured by masks. I was 24, the age Thomas had been when he left me and started seeing her. That felt impossible, as if I had caught up with him, but I knew somewhere out there he was now 28. I had never met the girl who he dated after me, yet I had stalked her online so relentlessly that I felt as if I had. When I saw the name on the order, I realized she stood before me. Her skin was supple and rosy and she had a high forehead framed by sun-streaked hair. My whole body trembled.
It had been four years since she’d been the target of my jealousy, but she still occupied a little corner of my brain. She was like a bruise that I prodded every so often to see if it could still make me ache. Jealousy has always been an emotion that I’ve allowed to consume me. It leaves me tingling with a sensation I sometimes cannot distinguish from arousal. In relationships I seek out doses of it by asking probing questions about who came before me. Was she pretty? Was the sex good? Did you love her? I wait for it to uncoil within my guts and ripple through my limbs. I seem to need it, like a fuel. I turn into the intensity. Within it is a reminder I am alive.
I dated Thomas from ages 17 to 20—ripe, formative years where I was trying to figure out where I might fit into the world. In that time he had gone from sweet to sour in increments, so that I didn’t feel the changes as they happened, but only the cumulative result of him coming home at night and baby-talking our dog, then walking past me silently as if I hadn’t asked him how his day was.
When he finally spoke to me it was to tell me he couldn’t have a girlfriend anymore. This wasn’t the first time he’d said this to me, but I wanted it to be the last. It was the final day of August in 2016. In the morning, I packed my belongings into my sunburnt 1991 Corolla. I didn’t look back at him as I pulled away. I drove to my parents’ house with the feeling that my life could open in front of me like a flower, if I let it.
In the following days when he tried to reconcile, I reminded him that he had done this to me seven times before. He hadn’t been happy to see me in a long, long time. He said he would change, which didn’t seem likely. “The next girl I date is going to want to marry me,” he said. It sounded like a threat.
I had been happy to be free of him until I saw him post a photo on Halloween, in a couple’s costume with a girl I’d never seen before. I felt my guts churn like I needed to shit. He wore red horns and she a halo and feathered wings. “A match made in heaven,” the caption read. I had actually asked him to do this same costume, two years prior, and he told me it was stupid. I went that year as a devil, by myself. Now I looked at him performing the role of a good boyfriend to someone new, and I felt my skin burn.
I found her name from her Instagram and typed it into google. One of the first search results was her Tumblr, where she documented her inner thoughts as if it were a diary. There I discovered their first date had lasted 12 hours, that she had let him touch her butt as they made out after a movie, that he was sweet and tender like he had been when I was 17 and he was 21. They had been dating for a month and they said I love you. The naive bliss of early infatuation was palpable and it filled me with rage. I had been replaced in only a month, but she had gotten the man I lost years ago. Part of me wanted to warn her of what he would become: that he had shoved me to the ground when I tried to clean a wound on his arm, or that once, after an argument, he drove away and left me stranded at the beach, getting colder and colder as the sun went down. The other part of me resented her for only getting this caring, devoted version of himself that he’d decided to be.
There is no lens as perversely flattering and cruel as jealousy. I scrutinized every detail about her I could find. I wanted to know everything I could about her, to sanctify her and vilify her in turn. We were the same race and had the same hair color. But I saw her as everything that I was not. She was as soft and pure as an unblemished peach. She radiated femininity in a way that made me conscious of my own deficit. I had a tendency to be caustic, aggressive, like a mangy dog with its teeth bared. She wore ruffled white blouses and owned leather shoulder bags, which reminded me of a classy, wealthy mom. She was one year younger than me, still technically a teenager. She, Thomas, and I all attended the same community college. In the margins of a notebook I wrote, unkindly, “She isn’t ugly, but her face looks malleable, like a lump of clay.” She was a ceramicist.
She loved astrology. Well, I did too, but Thomas had hated it. “You know none of that is real right?” he’d said to me once. Then I ran into him on campus post break-up and he told me, “I’m not sure how I feel about Sagittarians.”
My jealousy spawned obsession. I lost my appetite, subsisting off of protein shakes that I drank upon returning from my boxing gym at night, exhausted and sweat-drenched and not wanting my body to gnaw away at my muscle for lack of food. Anything I ate would pass through my body in 30 minutes and I would sit in the bathroom wondering if I’d even gotten any of the nutrients. My emotions were taking a physical toll on me, as if my mind, overwhelmed, had to displace its torment into the body. But I noticed something else in my obsession with her––the intensity of the emotion was addicting. Maybe this was why people gambled, I thought, or why people dove off of cliffs to get a rush. The jealousy caused me a corporeal pain that I could feel from my stomach to my loins. Yet somewhere in that hurt there was pleasure, and I did not want to look away.
It pleased me to know I was likewise conjuring strong emotions in her. I had kept the keys to Thomas house, and I would go over to walk our dog after boxing, while he was at work. He told me that it bothered her, but he didn’t try to stop me. I had picked out the dog from the pound when I was in high school, but on paper he belonged to Thomas. I tried to maintain a consistent presence in his life because I secretly knew the dog preferred me. When I saw his black fur coat in her photos, I would feel an acute pain in my chest, as if I had been betrayed. Finally, one day I typed her name into Instagram, and found she had blocked me. Maybe it was because on a day I knew to be her birthday, I had posted a photo of me in a bikini, with a glittering, spiteful confidence. I had known she would also be searching me out, wanting to see the girl she might be contrasted against. My body was growing taut and muscular and my legs were speckled with tattoos. If I were her, I’d hate me. The way I saw it, her hatred would be a compliment. I couldn’t imagine anything more flattering than to be seen as a threat. I wanted to spoil her day with the same jab in the guts that I felt when I thought of her.
In mid-November I saw Thomas on campus again. As we talked, I sat balanced on the railing beside the walkway, the late morning light warm on my face. He asked me if I was seeing anyone and I laughed about some disappointing recent hook-ups. Thomas hadn’t made me cum until the last month of our three-year relationship; it was possible that it would take another three years for someone else to do the same. He seemed to like knowing that he could give me something no one else had. The sun simmered in the blue overhead. He smiled shyly.
My dog ran circles around me that night, happy to see me climbing the staircase to the bedroom that once was mine.
She was out of town for a week. I heard him call her each night, while sitting beside me. “Did you tell her I built this bed frame?” I asked him. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. He told her he loved her over the phone, and then rolled over and pulled me to his chest. There was comfort in our familiarity, but that wasn’t why I was there. Spite had tugged me back. It was unlikely that I would have slept with him if he were single. In the mornings, I left early, because he didn’t want the roommates to see me. He wanted to maintain his facade, but I had broken through it, and I alone knew that he was pretending.
I no longer felt the dense heat of jealousy. I missed it. But there was no envy to be had for a girl whose boyfriend was with her because he didn’t know how to be alone. In its place, there was the pleasure of revenge, but it was fleeting, and whether it was against him or her I could not say. I wasn’t sure if either of them deserved it. I couldn’t summon guilt, but an unexpected sympathy for her rose up in me. She hadn’t done anything to warrant my animosity, she hadn’t even taken from me a man that I wanted to keep.
On Sunday, while I was working the closing shift at the grocery store, Thomas texted me and told me not to come over again. “This isn’t right,” he said. “It’s not fair to her.” I told him I’d read his horoscope in the paper and it said tonight let your wishes come true. “You’re lying,” he said. I was not. That night he had me handcuff him to the bed frame I’d made. It was the last time we ever slept together.
I didn’t check in on her with obsessive frequency after that. I thought of her with tenderness and pity—she thought she knew the man she was dating, but I had lived alongside him and saw where the illusion differed from what was really there. I wanted the stress of him removed from my life, but my curiosity towards her lingered. Maybe, in some alternate lifetime, we could have been friends, lending each other books or commenting hearts underneath each other’s photos.
I looked at her account on a clothes-selling app from time to time, trying to summon the former blood rush I once felt at the sight of her name. I could see the items she “liked,” which was a distilled view into her taste in fashion––floral dresses, knit sweaters in neutral tones, clogs. The kind of clothes one might wear while frolicking in a meadow. I scrolled through and saw a pair of woven-leather mules with a low block heel. They were my size. Maybe if I had shoes like these, I would finally feel like a woman. I fantasized about her seeing me wear them, wondering why they looked so familiar. I met the seller in a parking lot and put the mules on immediately, the leather soft against my feet.
They went on to date for six months or so. When he finally broke up with her, I checked her Tumblr and saw that she posted “he never even made me cum.” Later, the Tumblr would disappear entirely.
The day she appeared in my work it was like I was seeing a mirage. I could feel my pulse throughout my body. I heard myself say, “I think we dated the same guy. . .” I couldn’t see her face, so I didn’t know if her expression faltered. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t recognize you.” She was friendly and polite, and if she was deeply uncomfortable, she concealed it. I chatted with her briefly. She was wearing spandex shorts and an oversized shirt, as if she’d rolled out of bed, not the composed young woman I’d imagined all these years. I didn’t care. I wanted her to stay, to tell me about herself and look me in the eyes. I wanted to be her friend, I wanted to forget that her boyfriend had cheated on her with me, something she probably didn’t know. I wanted her to like me and laugh with me about the dumb things Thomas had done to both of us. After she left, I hoped that she might return to my work again, but I knew she wouldn’t. If I were her, I would have been compelled back again and again to see the source of my former jealousy with the pleasure of picking at a scab. But she wasn’t me.
Cora Lee Womble-Miesner was born and raised in San Diego, CA. She graduated from NYU and her work has been featured in BUST magazine, Literary Hub, and Nosh Magazine, among others. Links to her writing can be found at https://corawomblemiesner.wordpress.com.