I sent him news articles, memes and little videos I thought he would react to. He never did. It was always me reaching out, trying to send my “pebbles” (like a Gentoo penguin), to keep the communication going. He didn’t seem to mind if it did or not. He could take it or leave it. And lately, he was mostly leaving it. While, for some, distance (a.k.a. “absence”) made the heart grow fonder, that didn’t appear to be what was happening between me and Andrew. Like most men (particularly the ones I had been romantically involved with throughout my life), Andrew was more of the “out of sight, out of mind” camp. Even when I tried to put myself directly in his eyeline by sending all manner of tasteful nudes.

That’s right, unlike most other girls, I didn’t just send him some random tit or crotch shot willy-nilly. Oh no, I put real thought into the composition, right down to the color of the lace on the lingerie I chose to wear. But one male cliché that Andrew didn’t adhere to was being easily, er, moved by the sending of nudes. In fact, it could often take him over thirty minutes to reply to such images. And though I wanted to believe that was because he had simply gotten so engrossed in jacking off to what I had sent him, he usually didn’t even make any mention of the loving content I had provided. I had to be the one to prostrate myself metaphorically (in addition to literally in the photo) and ask, “What did you think of what I sent you?”

He would then provide an unsatisfying non-response in the form of an emoji, something like the blushing face or the eggplant. I couldn’t stand it. Finally, I decided to stop sending him any messages altogether and see how long it took for him to notice. I knew, of course, that I was only playing a game with myself—and that, as usual, I was the one who was going to end up hurt as I ran around in circles. But I had no control over my actions. It was as if I was being guided by some alternate me, buried deep within. I suppose you might call that the “id.” Yet it felt like something even more sinister. Something that could really drive me mad…if I let it. Or, in this case, if Andrew let it.

Men, however, never want to blame themselves for the part they play in the emotional breakdown of a woman. Never want to admit that, perhaps if they had treated the woman who had gone out of her way to love him—and to show that love accordingly—a little better, she might not have become so, well, crazed. The way I did. It started gradually, then suddenly, as Hemingway once said. Like me trying to pretend that I was totally fine with the fact that we now hadn’t talked in almost three days because I hadn’t initiated anything. That was me in “calm” mode, looking back on it. It didn’t take long for my silence to do a full one-eighty into deafening loudness as I was seized by the “dormant” me, who insisted that I send him a barrage of texts after midnight demanding to speak to him on the phone. I shouldn’t have been the least bit surprised when I got no response. Not even the next morning, when he could have assuaged me by feigning to have been asleep at that hour.

The continued ice-out hit me like a ton of bricks. I guess, in reality, he was waiting all this time for me to take the hint, and, when I suddenly stopped talking to him, he assumed he had gotten off “scot-free.” He didn’t need to be the one to ghost because I had. Every guy’s dream: not coming off as the villain. Oh, how wrong he was. I was only just getting started on painting him as the villain. Not that I needed much paint to achieve that job. He sealed the identity when he blocked me after a few harmless threats about how I would tell his mother what an asshole she had raised. A part of me was considering actually doing just that, except that I knew his mother would only side with her “precious” baby boy. I had her to blame for how he turned out, after all. Mothers coddling their sons into believing they could never do any wrong. That however they act is surely the “right” way to act, no matter how much it hurts someone else. Like me.

As I watched myself, as though a floating external entity from the shell that once housed me, doing things I never thought possible, I found that I was also returning to my inner Catholic, internally chanting, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” Maybe I was hoping the prayer would somehow bring Andrew back to me, make him interested again. Maybe I was trying to will myself to be pregnant with his baby so that I could trap him into being bound to me forever. Or maybe I could just intuit that some need for salvation was imminent. I couldn’t rightly explain what had possessed me to keep reciting it. Maybe it was more demonic than godlike, whatever it was.

I repeated this prayer as I waited for him to come back from his trip to the Canary Islands. Weeks after he had blocked me. Repeated it as I watched him from the alleyway across the street from his apartment. As I photographed him and another woman’s silhouette freely fucking in the window. As I sent those photographs to his number from someone else’s phone (a friend who had no idea what they were being complicit in until it was too late). As I found myself breaking and entering into his apartment. As I stirred him and some ho (who was different from the silhouetted one a few days prior) from their post-coital slumber. As I aimed my gun at each of them, Betty Broderick-style, shooting her in the head first so that she would stop her piercing, god-awful screaming. As I then aimed it right at his groin.

That’s when he begged, at last, for us to be together again. When he said there was nothing he wouldn’t do to have my forgiveness. That’s when I realized: the prayer had actually worked. Maybe Morrissey was right: “The more you ignore me, the closer I get.” Either way, as I climbed on top of him and tied his hands to the headboard before we had our makeup sex (don’t worry, I was sure to push the other bitch’s corpse off the bed), it had to be reasoned that I was no longer a whore for being ignored. This time around, he would never ignore me again.