virtually dumped :(

Once, a woman in my class dumped me, quite gently, via email, although we'd never undertaken any activity together nor communicated much beyond exchanging copies of lecture notes (which, in itself, within the law school milieu, may seem like something akin to courtship behavior), and further, hadn't even done so much as that in months:

Dear Oomph,
Because you bring out my weirdness, and my weirdness is problematic for me,
I'm afraid we'll have to have some time apart. It's not you; it's me. Sorry.
Cathy Crazed

I, more or less impotently infatuated with another woman, was stunned. Had Cathy Crazed really thought there was something between us? How had Cathy Crazed thought this? Had I in any way encouraged it?

I do tend to have an intimate tone in relaxed writings, and had, perhaps more gently than the average unwilling listener, deflected her flurries of too much information punctuated by barks of self-conscious laughter and piercing, darting eyes, with my own barrage of semi sequitur statements, rather than immediately disengaging with a placating and patronizing "yeah sure... whatever" dismissal and getting away, as many others seemed to do. Until this moment, when, confronted with the impression of wildly unpredictable consequences arising from a policy of benign engagement (viz., CC's delusion of our breakup-worthy too-intimacy), I would have been pleased to abandon it in favor of all out flight.

Still, I wrote back:

Dear Cathy,
Am I to understand that you're breaking up with me?
You can't break up with me! 

and probably tried some wry humor, about her lack of standing to enter such an action or failure to exhaust administrative remedies, which probably wasn't funny and also probably failed to convey that she couldn't break up with me because of the absence of the necessary precondition: Breaking up's downright impossible to do if the parties have not first been somehow joined.

But it irritated me to get dumped, even though I hadn't contemplated dating/seeing Cathy, like a little extra slap of rejection out of the blue to accentuate the typical indignities of the mundane day. And it irritated me that, I inferred, I had occupied sufficient of CC's concern and attention for her not only to reach the conclusion that we ought to break up, but to write such a deliberate and gentle note to just that end, when I had had no idea of such a significant position and likely would have resented the imposition of her . . . what, impotent infatuation? affection? . . . on my own sovereign self if I had known.

I cannot recall any sequel. I quickly deleted the email exchange in question because I did not trust myself to not, someday, bring it out for the cruel amusement of others. Now, trying to tell the story—and considering, Dear Reader, your appetite for words, more for my own amusement than yours—I wish I had kept it for its much better record of the strange exchange.

Anyway, I told you that story for a reason I didn't, at the time I started writing it, know, and now maybe I do: So that I would remember feeling blindsided by poor Ms. Crazed's implied emotional reaction to what I had been sure was perfectly impersonally polite regard on my part. The irritation, confusion, vague guilty worries. The feeling of being imposed upon by someone else's messy and startlingly unpredictable emotions and expectations, which I had not solicited and did not deserve! And, so remembering, that I might shape my expressions to you accordingly.