My ex boyfriend 'Joel'

Lately I've found myself slipping into whiny uterus mode and in fear of being flogged by my best friend and roomate I find that it's easiest to combat this trauma with tragic stories of exes, in efforts to slay my thirst for babies and companionship.

Today I thought I'd share about 'Joel.' His name isn't really 'Joel' but that's the name I've picked and we're running with that.

I've always found Joel to be super cute even though he's not the normal blond hair, blue eyed, hunk of man I normally go for. He's waaaaay to skinny. And brunette. And has facial hair. And wears his hair long. Only one man can get away with that and he dresses as a pirate. Yum Johnny Depp! But every time I ever saw him, Joel, and even when I run into him now, I have to catch my breath. Something about him I find super physically attractive! And then he opens his mouth. (Then again I wasn't really in it for the titillating conversation. He was dragging me out of a shit relationship into a fun and fancy free existence of perpetual singlehood for which I'll be forever grateful.)

Nevermind that on our first real date he showed up in his duck hunting camo (I'm surprised he took off the waders.) and essentially proposed to me in the middle of a mexican restaurant, I still gave him a shot. (I've never been an ace at good judgment.) Joel, the sweetheart that he was, was in kind of a rough spot too. He wanted that 'picket fence idyllic life' and I wanted to shotgun whisky shots until I forgot about my most recent foray into romantic partnership or blacked out into oblivion, whichever came first. We should have been ships that passed in the night, but we gave it the college try.

I almost killed Joel one night. I wasn't drunk, high, discombobulated, unhinged, crazy with rage. I was completely and totally with it. Had I gone through with it, it would have been pre-meditated. I would have done serious time in the slammer.

You see, my dear, dear Joel snored like a banshee. Omg you can never grasp the magnitude with which his deviated septum interrupted my sleep schedule. I struggle to find words to describe the sheer volume at which he was able to project his snoring. It was like there was a fucking John Deere tractor in my bed. And of course the asshat fell asleep in 0.2 seconds so I never had a chance to get to sleep first and just sleep through it. You remember my plan to shotgun whisky into oblivion? This was the only way I ever got any rest around that man. Who knew that a person so skinny could have such a serious case of sleep apnea?

I'm a compassionate person, I didn't immediately resort to fantasies of asphyxiation. I rolled him over time and time again. Bought breathe right strips, slathered him up in vapo rub and made him sleep practically sitting up. Nothing worked. Still I suffered. He slept like an angel, a mouth-agape-tractor-shaming angel but an angel no less. He slept the sleep of the dead, almost literally. I used to finally just give up and go sleep on the couch in the living room. Oddly enough me getting out of bed was enough disturbance to wake him the fuck up! Into the living room he'd saunter and go 'What's wrong?' I punched him in the jaw once out of sheer frustration.

The thoughts of suffication came fleetingly at first. Just hints at the back of my mind that went away upon immediate dismissal. Glimpses really. Then they began to linger. I started to just sit upright in the bed and stare at him hoping that he'd wake up from the creepy 'someone is staring at me' feeling. He didn't and the next night we'd repeat this whole exercise over again, all the while these hints became malignant and began to consume my thoughts.

I distinctly remember sitting upright in my own bed, staring at the back of Joel's head (He slept on his stomach.) and thinking to myself: 'I could take the pillow and put it over his head just long enough for him to stop breathing.' I kind of muttered it out loud after thinking it because I needed to see how it sounded. It wasn't that I wanted him to die; I needed some fucking sleep. I needed him to stop snoring or to wake the fuck up or to have the bed open up and swallow him like in that Freddy Krueger movie, but I could not spend one more night on that damn futon in the living room. I simply could not do it.

So, I broke down into histrionics and sobbed and wailed and gave his god-forsaken snoring a run for it's money. Still he did not wake up.

Joel is the only man I've ever broken up with at 6:30 in the morning before he's even had time to brush his teeth. That day, I slept the sleep of the dead. And it was glorius.

I realized that night, that if I was seriously considering suffocating him then we were never going to work out. We could never be together because eventually I'd talk myself into it and the sane part of me that said 'Omg you just considered killing this grown man, in Your bed, which would make it a pretty open and shut case of pre-meditated homicide.' would eventually lose the argument.