You’re a writer, and you’re telling a friend of yours about this story you’re planning to write. Your friend’s also a writer, but that’s not really why you’re telling him about your idea. Not that you would ever admit it, but you tell your story ideas to this particular friend for two very simple reasons: he’s always willing to listen, and unlike your girlfriend, he’s always very complimentary. You explain to your friend that in your story, there are going to be two twin brothers. The first brother, Monty, starts one successful business after another and quickly becomes filthy rich. And once he’s filthy rich, people are constantly asking him what his secret is, and whenever this happens, Monty’s just honest and says that he’s a regular old nice guy. Since no one believes that a rich guy like Monty is actually nice, people start to test him to see if it’s true, and someone eventually poisons Monty at a big charity event, thinking that doing so will lead to an embarrassing explosive-diarrhea situation, which will lead to Monty finally dropping the whole nice-guy routine. Even though the person who poisons Monty doesn’t intend to kill him, Monty ends up dying, and when Monty dies, all his money goes to his twin brother, Ricardo. Ricardo plans to learn from what he sees as Monty’s mistake, and so instead of trying to be nice, Ricardo just focuses on making as much money as he possibly can. And just like with Monty, you tell your friend, someone ends up killing Ricardo. “But unlike with Monty,” you say, “Ricardo doesn’t get poisoned. He gets shot in the face.”
Once you’ve finished outlining your story, you ask your friend what he thinks, but before he can say anything, your girlfriend, who’s been lying on the couch on the other side of the room and acting like she’s reading a book, lets out a little laugh.
“Is there something you’d like to say?” you ask, giving her one of your death stares because you take your writing very seriously and she has promised that she wouldn’t say anything, but your girlfriend clearly can’t help herself. She closes her book and sits up on the couch and answers your question with a question: “Do you want to know what you should do?”
Your friend knows exactly where this is going and quickly makes up an excuse and is out the door before you can stop him. And once he’s gone, your girlfriend, who’s smiling, says, “If you want to tell a story about things not working out the way someone expects, you should figure out a way to retell this story that I read in the newspaper about this guy who had ants in his apartment, which for him was a big problem because I guess he’d had like some kind of traumatic experience with ants when he was a kid, and so he’s going wild, trying to get rid of the ants, and he succeeds, but it turns out that the ants were actually controlling the crumbs that the guy was always dropping all over the place, and without the ants to control the crumbs, mice show up, and the guy ends up getting some crazy disease from the mice that gets so bad that he has to be hospitalized, which in it of itself is not good, but in this guy’s case, he doesn’t have health insurance, so he racks up hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt.”
When your girlfriend finishes, you don’t say anything about her story. You simply accuse her of hating your story, and when you do this, she sighs and says that that’s not what she was saying at all. And when you demand to know what she was saying, of course your girlfriend starts telling you to just forget that she said anything. But you just keep pushing until she eventually asks, “Do you really want to know what I think of your idea?” And you’re all like, “Yeah, I really do,” because you’re not the type to back down in a situation like this. And it’s not even like she says anything that bad. All she says is that she thinks it’s kind of a ho-hum idea. And if you’re going to be honest with yourself, you know that your girlfriend does what she’s doing because you can be kind of obnoxious about the whole “I’m a writer” thing. While you don’t wear a beret or anything like that, you have on occasion tried to end random arguments that you’ve had with your girlfriend about different books and movies and TV shows by simply asserting that she couldn’t possibly understand what you’re saying because she’s not a writer. But here’s the thing: you’re not in the mood to be honest with yourself and look at the big picture. So, when your girlfriend starts to explain why she thinks your story idea isn’t that great, you go nuclear and tell her that you want to break up. “Are you being serious right now?” she asks, and when you confirm that you are in fact being serious, instead of doing what you hope she’ll do, i.e., begging you to change your mind, she simply says, “Okay, suit yourself,” then walks back to the bedroom, packs what you incorrectly assume is just an overnight bag, and leaves.
At least initially, you’re able to convince yourself that breaking up with your girlfriend was the right move, but then you start receiving the postcards from your now ex-girlfriend, who has apparently decided to celebrate the breakup by backpacking around Europe. The first postcard is sent from somewhere in Spain. There’s a picture of a beautiful coastline on the one side, and on the other side, your ex-girlfriend explains that she’s just writing to let you know that she has given your contact information to a number of organizations, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Aardvarks, which she describes as an important offshoot of the more commonly known People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And the postcards just keep coming. Although some of the postcards are more informational, like that very first postcard she sent from somewhere in Spain, most simply contain insults. For example, one postcard discusses how much she’s enjoyed exploring Rome without, as she puts it, “having to listen to you carry on about whatever idiotic system you would have surely developed to try and outsmart the pickpockets.” And another postcard, which she sends from Copenhagen, just says, “Suck it.”
The postcards, which you find kind of irritating but also kind of funny, inevitably get you thinking about all the other stuff that your ex-girlfriend does that’s kind of irritating but also kind of funny, like how she’ll just randomly start speaking with a British accent and how she occasionally treats parties as if they’re campaign events and she’s a politician, and she’ll start going around and shaking people’s hands, telling them that she’s damn glad to meet them, and making speeches on obscure topics, such as the mating calls of humpback whales. This is all to say that it doesn’t take long before you finally just acknowledge that you really miss your ex-girlfriend.
Because you’re not sure if your ex-girlfriend is receiving any of the texts you’re sending or the voicemails you’re leaving, you also send her numerous emails, acknowledging that you made a mistake and telling her that you really miss her and want her back, but she never responds to any of your messages, at least not directly. And then it happens: once you’ve gotten to the point where you would do just about anything to get her back, your ex-girlfriend sends you a selfie that she’s taken cheek to cheek with this guy who could easily be your better-looking twin brother. It’s just a regular 4×6 picture, but she’s written on the back side of it as if it’s a postcard. “I’ve found a much better Dutch version of you,” it says. “His name is Luca.” When you show the picture to that friend of yours, the one who’s always willing to listen to your story ideas, he says that he thinks it’s actually a good sign that your ex-girlfriend is sending you all this stuff because it shows that she still cares enough to try and get a rise out of you. And that might be true, but then again, it just as easily might not be. At this point, the only thing that you can say with any degree of certainty is that your ex-girlfriend has turned this into a story where you’re not completely sure what anything means, and you have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next.