April 16, 2017:
"Don't think I don't know what you're doing," she says scornfully to her cat, who rests on haunches baffled and tense.
She tried to seduce me once, clumsily and stupidly, with that bovine stolidity that was peculiarly her own. First she asked if we could share a nap, then she wanted the clothes to come off. I threw her out.
She's not the brightest, and although she wants to mean well she's too engaged to her lesser angels to succeed. She's petulant, selfish, and not entirely honest. She adores me and I tolerate her, until after a certain line is crossed, and I'm done with it.
Three decades later she contacts me on social media, with the apparent belief that the years had been accidental, as if perhaps we'd misplaced each other's phone numbers. "It's me, XYZ!", she writes, and my visceral response is mild panic that she's found me out. I block her to return my world to normal.