Assertive Jealousy

I shut the computer and he is gone. It is as simple as that. Of course there is the moment of regret, the empathy that is so constant. Not just a voice telling me that I should perhaps consider someone else’s feelings, but an actual jumping into the body of the other person, a haunting. I sit with my fingers resting gently on the silver surface of my laptop and I am there inside him in his quiet bedroom, with the little red light announcing that the conversation has been terminated. The girl is gone.

For a moment he / I am disappointed. We were having a conversation in a fashion and without her / me, I will be alone with an unfinished assignment and my music and a wakeful night. He / I stare at the little red light beside her / my name, Krissy Kneen and I am wishing she/ I would relent, open my computer and continue to chat over the internet, but it is only for a moment. Some other name pops up into my facebook-driven consciousness. A girl he knows/ I know. A quick ‘hello, how are you doing’ and the haunting is over. I, Krissy, myself, no longer regret the decision to shut down the conversation.

I am not unique in his world. I am unessential. I am also not in a position to compete with Jayne or Eve or Libby or whoever else the boy is otherwise engaged with. I am married. I am not particularly good looking. I am old enough to be his mother. I am old enough to have had sex with his mother. The boy is a kid. All the boys in my life are kids. I feel like a teacher on duty in the playground at a boys school. They jump around, excitedly, ‘look what’s happening, Miss,’ ‘Have you read this book, Miss?’ we converse, and I can fool myself into thinking that they are my peers, but I will never fool them. They ditch me at the first sign of a pretty face and I am left to my own resources.

He is my imaginary friend. I’m not certain how we started to converse so regularly on the Facebook chat. He contacted me one night. I was alone. Perhaps my husband was overseas or working late. I know I was in bed, warm in my pyjamas. I was looking up pornography, my vibrator nestled on the pillow beside me. Then this popping sound, a flashing from the facebook tab. I saw his name. A friend of a friend. We had met once before at a writer’s festival. He was vaguely funny, perhaps a little over-eager. I remembered the slightly nasal whine of his voice, a very distinctive comic lilt.

‘Hello’

A greeting from someone I barely knew.

‘Hello.’

A beginning.

He asked about books I was reading, books I had read, questions about writing, story, character. A very cleverly targeted set of questions. I could not end this kind of conversation. I slipped into a frequent chatting, looked for the little green light of him whenever I arrived home. I grew incrementally fond. The evenings when he was absent were interminable. I became incautious, divulged my insecurities to someone that I had barely met. There was always someone else on the other line to him. He chatted with several women at once. ‘A mirror’ he wrote and it was a comment intended for some other girl. I felt a snag of jealousy. I was not unique. I took my place in a long and varied queue. ‘She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever met’ he said ‘I’d forgotten how gorgeous she was’ ‘I have a date with her tomorrow’. I was diminished in the crowd. I sat with my computer closed and knew that he would be there, happily engaged in a chat with someone else. The jealousy fermented.

I have a husband. I have a life, a love and no reason to be jealous of his bevy of young attractive women. I have no particular interest in the man, the boy, and yet I struggled with the realisation that I had no special place in his life.

‘I would kiss her’ he said, ‘she is pretty’.

I slapped the laptop closed after a particularly hurtful rave about the attractiveness of someone I had met and felt quite jealous of. My jealousy. My burning jealousy. The acid of it eating in to the lining of my stomach, an ulcerous emotion.