PostSecret, page 47

I didn’t fall in love with her right away. (I got the impression much later that she was insulted in some strange way that it wasn’t love at first sight.) But…as the first half of 2004 slipped away, and I got to know her, I fell hard.

She was dating some odd Turkish grad student eight years her junior at the time. I patiently waited for the inevitable end to that comical mismatch before declaring my feelings to her.

That didn’t go quite as planned. My timing was abysmal. Also, she said didn’t think of me in a romantic light. Yes, I had entered the friend zone. Oh well, at least the $50 vase of flowers wasn’t completely wasted, and the flowers decorated her office for the next few months, the petals of the slowly petrifying roses taking on a deep hue of dusky burgundy.

In less than a week’s time, we resumed our “normal” friendship, naïvely believing that we could just sweep the weirdness away. I treated her with complete respect and tried to be the best friend that I could be to her. I hid my feelings once again…perhaps a bit too well.

She had convinced me to start a blog, and I regularly read hers, and our respective blogs became a frequent topic of mutual conversation. Her blog gave me an intimate window into her life that I realize in hindsight should probably have stayed shuttered.

That fall I got back to dabbling with charcoal pencils. I had not drawn any humans since the painting class I took over a decade ago, so I figured that I would try drawing her from memory, figuring that channeling my feelings into my artwork might prove therapeutic.

The result was kind of crude and didn’t really look all that much like her. I never showed it to her.

Fall turned to winter. Our doomed friendship continued. The entire season was a roller coaster of unrealized hopes, mixed signals, and frustrating loneliness. Then there was the mysterious secret admirer note slipped under my office door, which compounded my confusion. By mid-January, she had found someone else. When I found out from her blog that she had jumped into bed with him after a business dinner, I probably should have deleted her weblog from my bookmarks list right then and there; however, I continued to torture myself.

By February I wasn’t really sure if she was still seeing the same guy. We talked at length about how she was unhappy with her job, and she would probably be quitting by June or July. I realized with considerable sadness that after that summer, I would probably never see her again.

Also, in February, thanks to my stumbling upon the PostSecret website, and thanks to my rediscovery of the works of Nick Bantock, I became fascinated with the idea of correspondence as art and art as correspondence. I wanted to add my contribution to the PostSecret project, so I tried to think of something that would make a compelling postcard.

Remembering my charcoal sketch, I decided to create a card that somehow expressed the pent-up emotions I felt for my co-worker. I digitized it on a flatbed scanner, cropped it, then printed it onto an Avery micro-perforated postcard. I was a bit angry with myself that I had let this crush linger on for so long. Every time I thought I was over her, she would do or say something that would knock me back to square one, so I decided to incorporate the exaggerated, forlorn words “I will never stop loving her.” Now for the choice of typeface…

I had a stack of magazines sitting in my study that I was getting ready to throw out, and realized that combing though them for the words and cutting them out to paste on the card would be perfect to play up the desperate nature of the piece.

I was somewhat pleased with the results. so I dropped it in a mailbox before I had a chance to change my mind.

Imagine my excitement, mixed with a slight dose of abject horror, when I opened up the PostSecret site, and saw the scan of my card placed for a time at the very top of the main page, set apart from the other cards. As an unpredictable, but interesting, consequence of the nature of the medium, the cards edges were tattered, her nose and some of the words had dirty smudges, and an orange postal bar code was now printed across the front.

I wasn’t sure if she had seen the card, or if she would recognize the depiction as herself. She had mentioned PostSecret on her blog once before, but I didn’t know if she was a regular visitor.

Oh well, I figured the declared sentiment on this card could serve as a purging. It was time to move on with my romantic life. Not so easy when our frequent conversations became a nagging reminder of what I had let slip away.

After another difficult month, I let her know one evening after work that I needed to take a break from our friendship. My feelings for her weren’t fading as I had hoped. This came as a complete surprise to her; she said she didn’t know I still felt that way. Then I made a critical error.

I had been worried that she would stumble upon the card, take it out of context, and respond unfavorably. So I decided to show it to her and try to explain it. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Any explanation I tried to offer fell on deaf ears.

She left abruptly. A few days later she filed a sexual harassment claim against me. Thankfully, our human resources department understood that her claim was baseless.

Soon after, she accelerated her plans to leave. She switched to part-time, coming by her office less and less, until one day she left without saying goodbye to any of us and never came back. She had left a good bit of her personal crap in her cubicle, and those of us who shared the office space just left it undisturbed.

I didn’t have any real contact with her again. July rolled around. Her replacement was hired, and during the first week of the new fiscal year, it fell to me to clean out her old office. I put all of her personal stuff in a separate box. At the end of the day, as I was heading out, I saw the box sitting there. Rather than give it over to her old manager, I decided to drop it by her apartment on my way home from the grocery store. I knew where her apartment was because I had given her a ride home once before.

I just dumped the box on her doorstep. I didn’t leave a note because I wasn’t sure how she would react to a note from me.

That Sunday, I got a call late at night from the Plainsboro police department. Apparently, she had called the police and tried to portray me as some kind of obsessed stalker. The officer threatened me with arrest if I ever went by her apartment again. I protested that all I did was drop off a box of her personal crap from the office. Confused, I tried to call her and explain the situation. She refused to listen to me, hung up, and called the cops again. The officer called back to threaten me further, this time adding phoning her or e-mailing her to the verboten list.

The next morning I was genuinely afraid of what she might do next. She had obviously built up some sort of paranoid delusion in her mind, and the incompetent local constabulary actually took her seriously. I went to my manager to see if I could gain some protection from her through our human resources department or our general counsel office. They said there was nothing they could do at this point.

A side benefit of this second public humiliation was that people finally realized how completely out of control this female was. When someone accuses you of sexual harassment, you are guilty until proven innocent. Even when the claim is found to be completely without merit, doubt still lingers in the minds of some that the accused had to have been at fault in some way. This girl cried wolf twice that I know of, yet I wonder how many others have or will fall victim to her neuroses.

Thankfully, nothing further came of all this, and my relationship with this girl was now nothing more than a distant, albeit painful, memory.