Who the Hell Is Jenna Jones?! My frenemy from seventh grade got married over the weekend to a man who wears neon sunglasses. The boy I lost my virginity to donated blood and three of his friends liked it. The douchey guy from my freshman sociology class is listening to Rihanna on Spotify.
Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg I was lying in bed on a Monday morning lurking around Facebook like a big ole creep. I scrolled through countless pictures of so-called friends and virtual strangers, while I lightly humped my comforter, wrapping it tight between my legs. It was a maneuver that had become second nature to me over the past year. Who needs a man when you have a duvet? No, it doesnt cuddle back, but it kept me warm and hadnt broken up with me yet, so I felt pretty good about the relationship.
It was a warm summer morning in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Actually, it was around 12:30 p.m. To most functioning individuals it would have been considered the afternoon. Not me. As a twenty-four-year-old paying off my student loans by running around a nightclub doling out bottles of booze, opening my eyes to the world before 1 p.m. was a daily accomplishment that I took pride in.
I reached out for my pillow, stuffing it tight against my chest. Oh boy, did I miss the days when there was an actual human lying beside me. I would crawl onto his chest. We would spoon. Sometimes I would even play the role of big spoon. Spooning a man a foot taller than you—that is love. That was love.
Nope, none of that was going down in my apartment anymore. Instead I was busy distracting myself by looking at the carefully curated lives of other people. Catching up on their Foursquare check-ins and broadcasted humble brags like it was my goddamn job.
Two years earlier, when I graduated from New York University with a degree in filmmaking, I had assumed I was on a different trajectory. Before finishing school I had locked down a steady job working for a production company that made commercials. I had been on track to a solid career until I gave it up last year when the advertising world started to feel less like an artistic outlet and more like soul-selling business.
Rather than look for another position in the field that I took out nearly $200,000 in student loans to get a degree in, I decided to pick up more shifts at the nightclub I had cocktailed at through college. I wasnt a fan of rich assholes, late nights, or high heels—however, I could work three nights a week and take two months of vacation and still make nearly $100,000 a year.
There was also my boyfriends departure back to London, which may have had some influence on my career decision. I suddenly didnt have the pressure to grow up, work in an office, or prepare to procreate—the club, the antithesis of adult life, where “work” is essentially hanging out with friends while drinking expensive champagne, seemed like the best option.
I had drank too much the night prior and owed it to myself to lounge around in bed. I was on the verge of working up the strength to exit the soul-sucking social network and award myself with a bagel when it happened. My heart lurched, my breath got caught in my chest, my fists balled into granite. “Who the fuck is Jenna Jones?!” I screamed at my computer screen.
Huang, my Craigslist roommate, peeked his little head into my bedroom. Huang and I were not close; in fact we barely talked. He moved in as a subletter a year earlier when Charlie, my ex, moved back across the pond. Prior to Huang, Charlie and I would have impromptu dance parties in the kitchen, rollerblade in the living room, and bone on every surface we could find.
Now it was just me and Huang cohabiting in my former love den. It was supposed to be temporary, but Huang ended up sticking around. We never did the bonding thing, probably because he moved in during the time of tearful meltdowns, Adele on repeat, and a revolving door of friends coming in for weepy couch confessions.
Poor Huang, he never knew if the moans coming from my bedroom were from crying or masturbating. Okay, I know its not healthy to stalk exes on Facebook. Thats why I initiated the defriending of each other after we broke up. I wanted to avoid moments like these. But it popped up in the goddamn news feed. His sister had posted a picture of them from over the weekend. Several pictures, several disgustingly adorable pictures that I considered clicking “report” on so Facebook would take them down.
There was one of Jenna Jones wearing the protective leather suit his mother had passed down to me for motorcycle trips. And it even looked like she might be wearing my helmet, the helmet I had painted, in gold-and-pink sparkly letters, love town: pop. 2 on the back of for our first trip to Spain. Motorcycle adventures were our thing. Now it was their thing. There it was. I didnt need to look any further (or get one of my friends who was still “friends” with him to snoop out his current “relationship status”) to know the inevitable. This was serious. A status had been changed; he was declaring his relationship publicly on Facebook and his new gal was a perfect fit for my leather slacks.
I knew this day would come. I even suspected he was seeing someone, but now there was this cold, hard evidence in my face. Why didnt I think to defriend all of his friends and family? (The obvious answer: Im a masochistic stalker.) There were pictures of Jenna Jones with his mom and dad at their farm where I had stayed countless times. Pictures of him laughing with the wench. Take off my goddamn pants, Jenna Jones! I summoned a satanic Exorcist voice. “Who is she? Who is she? Who is she?” I chanted.
Okay, fine, I knew who she was. She was the girl who he was moving on with. She was the one who fit the mold, the one who would give him everything I could not.
Hitting Is a Part of Healing
You can slap me if you want to,” Charlie said the last time I saw him.
I knew he was kidding but I couldnt let the opportunity slip away. Although it was petty, slapping him was exactly what I wanted. It was really over. We had broken up almost a year prior. Since we lived in different countries, me in America and him in England, we were doing a generally good job of keeping our distance. After we ended things, I made a couple of trips across the Atlantic, during which sexual acts were committed and, far worse, loving words exchanged. We had been stringing each other along, but not anymore. This was it. He was starting to date; he had just turned thirty-six and was ready for all the grown-up things that I would never share with him.
At twenty-four, I was standing on a cobblestone street in London, the city that I was supposed to be living in, facing the man that was supposed to be mine. The reality of the end finally dawned on me. I took a deep breath, trying to soothe the knot in my stomach and the tightening in my chest. Somehow over the past year, in my stages of sadness and denial, I managed to avoid the notion that we would never end up together.
I was flushed with fury, my face shamefully dripping with tears. Resentment rose up inside of me. He didnt want to be with me—it wasnt a crime, but I was pained by it. Breaking up is a grieving process and I had reached anger, the second stage before bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.
With wet eyes we faced each other on Shoreditch High Street, smiling, knowing that even though the end was ugly, the beginning and middle were so wildly beautiful. Then with swift force I took my right hand to his left cheek. We stood there in silence, shocked by my act of physical violence. My slap was immature, only delivering a brief, inconsequential pain; yet it was still a way to hurt him, even for just a moment. We wiped the tears from each others eyes, hugged, and parted ways.
The end felt oddly similar to the beginning. Our story opened and closed on the street. It all caught up with us as we always suspected it would. It began on my turf, in my country, in my city of New York. We met on Labor Day weekend in 2006, just a few days before my sophomore year of NYU began. He was English, visiting the city for the weekend to attend a friends wedding. At the time, he was in his early thirties, with enough facial scruff to make a young gal hot under the collar.
Sitting on the curb outside my Lower East Side apartment on Ludlow Street, I spotted him drinking a take-out margarita from El Sombrero, the cheap Mexican restaurant on the corner. My roommate and I had purchased a heavy armoire for twenty dollars from a homeless man on Bowery and wooed a man with a van to drop it off in front of our building. It was perfect for our cluttered apartment, but we needed some serious assistance getting it up our seven-story walk-up.
I was nineteen, busty, brassy, and full of confidence. I tugged my tank top down to reveal a couple of extra inches of cleavage as I sauntered up to him and his friend. “You guys like beer?” I purred, trying my best to summon the sexual prowess of a woman at least twenty-two. They looked up, shading their eyes from the sun, nodding enthusiastically.
“Cool, come upstairs, weve got a pack of Coronas.” I smiled. The men looked puzzled but pleased—thoughts of college-style porno plots must have been running through their thirty-year-old heads. “But first could you carry this armoire up for us?” I pointed toward my roommate, who was leaning seductively against the wardrobe, twirling her golden locks.
They foolishly agreed. After a hilarious display of the men trying to appear strong to impress us young, giggly girls, they made it up to our shoebox apartment. We cracked open beers as the boys eyed our messy home. It was a disaster zone littered with glittery tops, pictures of us covered in brownie batter, and a Paris Hilton sex tape.
“Now what?” Charlie asked.
Our eyes met, our connection was effortless and immediate. “We get weird,” I replied. And so it began. We spent the rest of the day and night together, bouncing from Max Fish to Sweet and Vicious to Epsteins to Dark Room, sharing our stories, sense of humor, passion, drinks, and wacky dance moves.
We clicked so intensely but we both feared the inevitable. Besides the fact that he was leaving town in the morning, he was twelve years older than me (despite what my fake ID said) and lived on a different continent.
As the sun came up, we sat in my bed eating Cheerios and drinking beer, counting the hours until hed have to board an airplane and fly back to London. We decided it would be best to write off our experience as a fling. But I was young and he was reckless and we couldnt let it go.
A string of hilarious emails led to a series of wild adventures. There were motorcycle trips across Europe, trekking through Guatemala, music festivals in Spain. It was all so spontaneous, wild, and romantic. But long distance cant sustain forever.
Out of love, we made huge gestures and sacrifices to keep our relationship afloat. We began to chase each other back and forth across the Atlantic, taking turns spending six months at a time in the others country, trying to find a balance and pick a home base. Luckily after I graduated, both of us could make a living in either New York or London—he was a writer who could work from anywhere and I worked for a production company that had offices in both countries—but we each felt an allegiance to our own city.
When he turned thirty-five the looming problems that we had foreseen came to term. His paternal clock started ticking and his career took off. He wanted to stick with his work in England, be closer to his family and friends, and ultimately settle down.
I was only a year out of college. I knew I wanted to be with him but I didnt know when I would be ready to have a ring on my finger or a baby in my belly. I was only beginning to get into my New York adult groove.
He left for London in the winter and I was to follow permanently in the spring. I tried charging forward: I started my visa process and did my best to adjust to the idea of working full time in an English production office. I even began to convince myself that I could have kids in the next year or two and that I would be content living in the countryside.
As the seasons changed, the distance between us worked to sober us up from our love-drunk illusions. He began to pull away from me and find any reason for a fight. Neither of us ever cheated or wronged the other in any real way, but we were growing up and entering different phases of our lives that we couldnt fairly journey on together. Our expiration date had arrived.
Bitter emails, uncomfortable Skype chats, and tear-filled phone calls began to take over our relationship. At the risk of sounding über cliché, thus far in my existence he was the love of my life. I was terrified that I might only get one chance to experience that kind of epic love. I relentlessly clung to the idea of the fun, adoring guy who I had met on the sidewalk, the guy who made love to me doggy style at a monastery on top of a mountain in Italy, the guy who wrote me a song called “Fever,” the guy who all the best memories of my life were with. Deep down I knew we had to end things, but letting go of our romance was inconceivable.
Although I felt like the dumped rather than the dumper, I was the one to pull the plug. It was heartbreaking to abandon the dream of being together, but one of us had to do it. I guess it was both a blessing and a curse that we broke up while living in different countries. We could block out the other completely (with the exception of social media alerts), but we never had any real sense of closure.
The last time we saw each other, the day I hit him, we sat on a bench and were brutally honest, telling of the new people wed been seeing and how wed been carrying on with our lives. He appeared to be doing better than me. He had put real effort into working through our breakup, concentrating on his flourishing career and building up his emotional and financial strength. I, on the other hand, had spent a large amount of time avoiding my feelings, traveling all over the place and dating several insignificant people for distraction. I was envious (and, lets face it, resentful) of his strength and progress. The anger I felt was not fair or warranted, but it was how my pain manifested.
Now, three months later, I had a face and name to put to my nemesis. Oh, Jenna Jones, how could you?
Charlie and I gave it our best shot, but when it came down to it we wanted different things. We had broken up almost a year earlier, and although we had a great four years together, it didnt work out. The brave young lady in me wanted to accept this, but the immature brat simply could not. I couldnt help it, the sight of Jenna Jones made me want to pee, fart, vomit, and cry all at once. She was no longer an illusion, a fictional character he was making up. She was a real-life brunette and, based on my Google research, a creative director with an excellent résumé and a better ass than mine. That bitch.