Women who will never forgive

I have encountered several women in my life whom I believe will never forgive me.

My offenses against them have been universally minuscule or non-existent.

Yes; I say "women." I could say "people." But they've almost all been women.

I can think of three examples. There are probably more; but three is enough to illustrate the point.

I met Girl 1 at a screenprinting shop in Seattle Washington. A Vietnamese woman, she was a friend and some-time girlfriend of a fellow who would become a housemate and a friend of mine. Girl 1 made an excellent beef-noodle soup, and was, really, a sweet individual — conditionally.

One day at work, I was offloading the automatic T-shirt press while she was working at the other end of the long belt-dryer, doing quality control. It's normal in such work — tedious labor — to joke around and make playful insults. On this day, I gave her the finger — playfully, and with a smile.

That was it.

"You said bad word," was all she would say to me, forever. She would never speak with me again. Nobody tried to get her to, either. (I guess that's part of it. Nobody says anything to a pinched-up, embittered woman about her attitude. This gives her liberty and licence to continue.)

Girl 2 terrorized me in my apartment in Kilkenny, where I lived with her and another woman in 2003 — and where I stayed, unnil long after she left.

I've written about this elsewhere.

Girl 2 to tried to get me evicted, a plan which went badly awry when I said I wasn't leaving.

Girl 2 flirted with me a bit. (This is my version of the story; and I don't care about anybody else's at this point.) I finally decided I'd try to say something, thinking maybe I liked her. A boyfriend came on the scene about this time, a "he's not my boyfriend" kind of boyfriend. She brought him to my birthday celebration, at my pub, where I'd invited her. They made a big production of handling each other; I confronted her, and she denied trying to make me jealous. That just pissed me off, and it was ugly.

She wanted me out of the apartment, she told me there at the pub. She pressed the point, the next day and forward, until deciding she'd move out herself.

I expect Girl 2 to remember me with nothing but self-satisfied hostility as long as we both shall live. I would never try to dissuade her nor to deny her the chance to feel haughty and justified in her hatred of me: fuck her.

Girl 3 skulked around town prepared for war until she left the country. This one had only about a year to cool down, which is a very short time in the life of a woman's grudge — but this one was particularly vile, for reasons that I don't have the right to discuss.

Girl 3 was the partner of a good friend of mine. At some point, she told my friend about a page that I didn't write, in which I wrote the story of a night of drinking and smoking, apparently at a time when she thought he was supposed to be doing something else. I wrote, according to her, specific details of time and place — details that she used against him. He still doesn't completely believe that I never wrote any such page, even though he now knows that she is an evil human being.

She was just that skilled at hatefulness.

Actually, now that I think of it, the feeling about that last one is mutual, I guess one could say. I will not forgive her, but not because I lack the ability to do so.