Rejection

One Friday evening, Colin Conner, a student, came home from the pub. He was relaxed and in high spirits and didn’t want the evening to end. So he went on the internet. His mind was on a certain French girl he knew.

He had met her three days ago at a get together for the foreign society, and had spent some time in conversation with her. She had been so pleasant, not at all haughty as he had imagined her, and she appeared to like him and even laughed at his jokes.

‘No, look, I don’t know what’s wrong with you’ he said to himself playfully ‘I think you’ve had too much to drink.’ He was in fact quite merry. ‘Look, that girl is just way out of your league. I mean come on. She’s beautiful, intelligent and foreign. And who am I? I’m Colin Conner. I’m a nobody. I’m plain, undistinguished and am still living with my parents. I’ve never lived in another city, let alone abroad…. And yet she did genuinely seem to like me. There was something special between us. I sensed the electricity.’

He had spent the evening trying to drop hints to his friends about this French girl. But he didn’t have the courage to say it straight out, he was rather shy and sensitive and so had just kept dropping vague and mysterious hints about a party he’d been to, and how he personally thought foreign girls were a lot more intelligent and attractive than the English miseries, and he made rather general and vague statements concerning women and love. But his friends hadn’t picked up on what he was saying, either because they thought him weird for the way in which he was going on or quite simply because they could see he had a crush on somebody but just couldn’t be bothered to humour him. So he had been denied the opportunity to fully express himself and tell them about the girl.

As he sat at the computer he suddenly thought ‘why don’t I write to her?’ But then no, no, no that was stupid, she probably had lots of admirers and wouldn’t remember him. No, no it was silly. But then he recalled the electricity. ‘You know why not just write to her? I mean come on old chap, you really should have more confidence in yourself. Women like men who know what they want. You can’t just keep hiding and never make contact with her, but simply think and talk about her and never see her again! What harm can it do to write to her? If you don’t buy a ticket how are you ever going to win the lottery?’
So he decided to email her. Yet he didn’t have her address. However, surely with a bit of detective work he might obtain it? ‘Ha! When love is driving you, you can do anything’ he said to himself gaily. He had to do quite a protracted search, yet in the end he found it. ‘Ha! There it is, the address of my sweetheart. Yes, man will go to the ends of the earth for the woman of his dreams.’
He wrote the letter.

Chere Isabelle,
Just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed meeting you the other day. It was so nice to chat with such a charming, intelligent, and comme il faut young lady – we don’t have such things in England! – and I hope I will see you around again, perhaps at the next party? Anyway till then,
Best wishes and take lots of care of yourself,
Yours
Colin Conner.

P.S. Perhaps you don’t remember who I was! I was the rather plain and unattractive one (lol!) who made you laugh a bit.

P.P.S I hope you don’t think me some sort of pervert who’s stalking you! But I just wanted to say hi, and got your email address from the university website.

P.P.P.S Please don’t bother to reply to this email. I will assume you’ll get it. I know you’re very busy.

Yours Colin Conner.

And that done, he went to bed happy and thinking of his French girl, his amore.

The next day though, there was no reply.
‘Oh well, I mean come on, don’t be silly, she isn’t going to reply immediately. She does have a life of her own after all. You can’t expect people to respond instantly to emails’ he said to himself. Nevertheless he really had expected an instant reply.

Two days went by, three days went by and then a week. There was no reply.

‘Well perhaps she’s gone back to France or something, or perhaps she doesn’t check her email that often or perhaps she’s just busy. I mean she’s such an intelligent and sensitive girl: she wouldn’t be as rude as to not even send a reply. In fact perhaps she didn’t even get the email in the first place.’

However she surely must have done, for only after two days he’d thought of that and sent the message off again. And though he told himself that she might have gone abroad or was too busy, he was really thinking to himself that perhaps – for some strange reason – she just wasn’t bothering to reply. He’d become completely obsessed about her over the last week, thought about nothing else, did no work, was always looking out for her on campus, and waited obsessively on her reply. Eventually it was all too much and a few days later, he wrote to her again.

Dear Isabelle,
I wrote an email to you a week or so ago, I’m not sure if you got it? Anyway it was just to say that I enjoyed meeting you and hoped to see you again.
Anyway
Best wishes
Your friend Colin Conner.

But again there was no reply. Another week went by. Then one day he saw her from a distance, in the library. His heart pounded! So she was still here after all! She must have got his messages. So then why hadn’t she replied to him? He was overcome by anger, and decided to write to her again.

Isabelle,
I’m writing to you again because I’m really quite angry with you for not even having the common courtesy to reply to my email. (I don’t know whether it’s a cultural thing, but in England we have something called good manners.) I know that you’re here – I’ve seen you with my very own eyes – so don’t think you can hide from me!
These past few weeks have been utter misery for me. You’re such a brilliant, beautiful, sensitive and intelligent woman and for all these reasons not only do you hold a special place in my heart, but also I’m surprised you haven’t replied to me. I’m really, really sad that you haven’t replied. I just don’t know what to say.

Anyway
Best wishes
Colin Conner.
P.S. Je vous aime!

Again there was no reply. Then one Wednesday afternoon he saw her out in town. She was wearing a tight, body-hugging, all in one costume, which showed off her petit, slender body, her backside and legs most gracefully. She was out shopping with four (four!) young men, all of them strutting bucks. And as he watched her from a distance, he saw her laughing gaily without a care in the world, joking and flirting with the four young studs, totally absorbed in her own little world.

Colin headed off to the nearby park and there feeling downcast and dejected and sad at heart, sat alone on a park bench.
‘That girl’s having the time of her life and is totally oblivious to the fact that I even exist. She’s gotten all of my emails and they obviously mean jip to her.’ He felt anger at her, yet he was more resigned now, and wanted just to brood. He was overcome with a feeling of foolishness as well. There was just no way he could have any impact on her. He was totally cut out off her world and his words, his messages to her, they had fallen on deaf ears. And when he thought of all he’d written he felt silly and ashamed and wanted to curl up and go to oblivion.

A few months passed. He had time to reflect. And one further incident had irked him. At the next foreign party he’d gone to, he saw Isabelle from afar surrounded by a group of guys and dolls, and they’d all looked across at him, and stared at him as though he were a pervert or a weirdo. Later on, he overheard some of the girls gossiping, and he understood that they were talking of his ‘weird emails’ and it was plain they considered him to be some sort of stalker. He was bitterly angered by all this, but realising that he was voiceless, and couldn’t counteract their silent whisperings, he’d merely left the party early and never gone to another again.

He’d become somewhat isolated and mistrustful of people and women especially, and he kept to himself. This was how his thoughts ran.

‘The female sex! Huh! You know, I know that people will always say that people are people and that some are good and others bad, irrespective of their gender, but I’m sorry women do posses an especial kind of evil. I mean that girl: she’s got everything. She’s incredibly beautiful, she’s rich, intelligent, she’s foreign, speaks three languages, and yet she doesn’t even have the decency to acknowledge that I exist. I mean all she had to do was give me a reply, even if it was just to say she didn’t want to see me again. Is that too much to ask? And I would have been completely happy with that. I would have accepted it like a man and said fair’s fair. I’m not the sort who can’t let go. But instead she’s out having a ball, shopping, flirting and no doubt sleeping around like a slut, she’s dressing herself up everyday – all to attract attention and get every man on the planet looking at her, and yet when I am attracted to her – something she should expect – she just ignores me like I’m a piece of rubbish. If she doesn’t want admirers, she shouldn’t flaunt herself, but that’s what she’s obsessed with doing. What a vein and selfish person she is. Beautiful people, especially beautiful women, have a duty, and they should know it, to be kind, respectful and polite to those of us not so well-endowed by nature. She expects all the admiration of a queen, but she sure as hell doesn’t act with the good grace of one.

‘And all those girls gossiping about me at the party, staring straight at me as if I didn’t notice, and eyeing me up as though I’m a weirdo. Well excuse me! What a foul bunch of rats they are! How disgusting is the supposed fairer sex. Do none of them have an ounce of sensitivity? They should, as women, have some grain of understanding. They should be saying ‘oh there’s poor Colin Conner, he’s obviously just been unlucky in love with that French girl who’s clearly out of his league. Ah bless him!’ But instead they just gossip like school girls devoid of any good grace or maturity, and ogle me and treat me like a piece of scum!’

*********************************

A year went by. One night he was shopping in a supermarket. As he walked down an aisle two girls passed in the opposite direction. He thought he recognised them, and in particular, he seemed to exchange a brief but meaningful glance with one of them, as though she knew him.

As he walked home he was caught up reflecting on just who those girls had been, especially the one who had seemed to know him. Finally it came to him.

He had been at school with them. The girl who’d caught his eye was…..Lisa Potter. Lisa Potter? He thought long and hard, in deep, deep recollection, as he made his way home, trying to recall the significance of that girl. It was approaching three years now since he’d been at school with them.

When he got home, he went on the internet, and silently, like a man engrossed by one thing, went to his emails and searched for one from Lisa Potter. It came up. It was from nearly four years ago.

Dear Colin,
Perhaps you’ve never noticed me before, but I’ve seen you around in the common room and I think you’re such a cool guy, and you’re so intelligent, and I think you’re really funny as well. I’d love to spend some time with you, but I was too shy to come and talk with you and so I wrote to you instead. Everyone knows how clever you are and how good you are at your work, I thought perhaps we could meet one night after school and go to the library, and perhaps you could help me with my work (lol!).

I think you’re really special and if I had to pick my favourite boy in the whole school, I would always pick you.

Love Lisa
XXX

He was totally and utterly dumbstruck by all of this. Lisa Potter. Lisa, Lisa Potter. She was a very quiet and sensitive girl. She had been very much a nobody, someone on the fringes of the common room society, she wasn’t particularly clever, her family were poor and she certainly wasn’t attractive. She had very short and rather coarse ginger hair, had freckles, wore glasses and was slightly overweight. Everyone had called her the lesbian. Well, she wasn’t that. She was very calm and sensitive and when people had said nasty things of her she merely ignored it and remained calm and secure in her aloneness. Or so it seemed.

And here it was, this love letter from her. How sweet it was! Truly it was so sweet and flattering. And yet what had been his reaction to it? He thought back. And he recalled that it hadn’t ever really registered with him. All those beautiful and thoughtful words which he now read, he hadn’t even noticed at the time. It had totally failed to register with him. As soon as he had seen it was from Lisa Potter – that awful, unattractive nobody – he had simply ignored it, it meant utterly nothing to him, and consciously he had not taken it into consideration.
He had merely acted subconsciously. He had let his subconscious rule him, and as far as that was concerned he’d made no provision to consider the feelings of Lisa at all or to reply or speak to her.
He recalled what had happened the next day when he saw her. She had seen him walking along the corridor and had looked at him with sensitive, expectant eyes. And he, with subconscious ruling him, subconsciously embarrassed and annoyed by her protestations, and also aware that the two of them were alone together in this corridor, had merely given a snort of derision; a sort of snort half to say don’t be so silly and half to say you’re an ugly pig. He hadn’t taken her feelings into consideration at all. He’d acted purely subconsciously. Hadn’t cared to at least speak with Lisa.

After that he’d never thought twice about her. She certainly hadn’t written him any further emails as he had to Isabelle. She’d never bugged him in the slightest. Yet perhaps she’d gone through hell and been silently tormented?

He was so struck by the total and perfect parallel of the situation with that of himself and the French girl. Huh! He had been scared by the thought of being alone with Lisa in the corridor. Yes he had. And yet when he’d heard rumours that Isabelle found him creepy and was scared of finding herself alone with him, he’d felt grossly insulted and wondered why people were so immature. It was absolutely identical and he had now an insight as to how Isabelle viewed him. She had assuredly been out of his league just as he was out of Lisa’s. It was a complete parallel. And when he thought of how easily he had dismissed Lisa’s love as preposterous, and realised that that must be how Isabelle felt toward him, he felt enraged once more with that haughty Madame for her contemptible treatment of him.
But he also felt sorry for Lisa and incredibly guilty. Crumbs! She must have gone through hell just as he had. And he’d never even noticed. The whole incident had completely passed him by, and it was only now that he was beginning to acknowledge it. In fact probably nobody had noticed Lisa’s misery. God what a total, total jerk he had been, what a complete heartless bastard, a pig-faced moron. Lisa had looked up to him, thought him a cut above, believed him to be a man of class and distinction, and yet, had he acted with class? Huh! Absolutely not at all. He’d acted like a piece of scum.

He thought back to that glance, earlier on at the shops; he saw now that Lisa had known exactly who he was and that there was a marked coolness in her look. Clearly she’d realised long ago that in truth he was nothing special, that he was just a jerk: reality had heartlessly kicked her illusions to bits. She didn’t care for him at all now, that was evident. Yet there remained a cool, cool resentment in her attitude toward him: a real dislike of him. A feeling as though she didn’t care for anything in this world now, and wouldn’t ever put her heart on the line again.

When he thought about all of this he felt deeply sorry and guilty, guilty for not having lived up to Lisa’s high expectations. He felt himself a hollow person, a charlatan, a fraud, a real loser at heart; and he saw how Lisa’s illusions of him contrasted to the real him, the ordinary person he knew himself to be. And he realised then that Isabelle was also just ordinary and that he had held delusions of her.
When he considered Lisa’s crush, he wondered if she hadn’t felt some electricity between them. She probably had. And yet was there? Truly there had never, ever been any electricity. He thought of her, her plain looks, her slightly obese shape, her short ginger hair and no matter how sensitive he might now be to the issue, and no matter how kindly he wanted to regard Lisa, there was no way in the world that he could ever feel physically attracted to her. No, it was just a fact of life. She was not his idea of a woman. Indeed at the time he was sure he had felt a repulsion toward her.

And when he realised this, he saw with the clear light of day, just how Isabelle must view him. That electricity he had felt, good God, Isabelle would never have felt that in return for him. He had taken a minor conversation and a few laughs of hers as a sign of something else. Huh! It was utterly contemptible now that he saw it. He recollected their conversation. What had it amounted to? A young foreign girl, excited to be in a foreign country, happily speaking to everyone, politely listening to all and sundry, carelessly laughing at a few jokes. She must have met countless people during her stay here, and entered into hundreds of carefree and meaningless conversations. And when he’d written her those letters, what must she have thought? He could see the look of irritation and annoyance on her face to be hounded by a man she didn’t care for, someone with whom she couldn’t possibly court, just as he couldn’t possibly court with Lisa.

A few more weeks went by. Colin was more thoughtful.

‘No, it’s always easy to get carried away and say that one sex is to blame or that women are the devil’s own daughters. But that’s pure nonsense. Atrocities are committed on both sides as they say. And when men say women are this that and the other and badmouth and generalise them, what they’re always referring to are women like Isabelle. They never mean women such as Lisa. Her type are just swept under the rug.

‘And people can always see the injustices committed against them, but never those that they commit. They’ll whinge for an eternity for the wrongs done to them, but those that they carry out will usually just remain in the sub-conscience. They’re consciously unaware of them. And people will always get worked up about those above them in life’s little hierarchy, whilst ignoring those beneath them.’

‘And when I think back to my reaction to Isabelle, well, based solely on the fact that she was beautiful, I then made the deduction that she was intelligent, sensitive and in every way brilliant. How silly! How looks can deceive. I mean perhaps she is all those things and perhaps not. But I see her now, see her as a purely ordinary mortal like everyone else. In fact she isn’t especially sensitive or intelligent or anything else.

‘And Lisa can see also that I in turn have a lily liver, and have worms wriggling through the chambers of my heart. That I’m a selfish, mindless, imbecile. She can see that and must think me a fake. And yet somehow, despite the fact that we can all see through each other, the hierarchy endures. Myself above Lisa, and Isabelle above myself. The hierarchy will always prevail. And Lisa must stay silent and can’t bring her grievances to me, and I must remain silent and can’t take my grievances to Isabelle. We’re all, Lisa, Isabelle and I precisely the same thing on the inside. Yet on the outside we’re different and that is what as humans we have to respect. For whatever reason, we’re all slaves to that system. We’re all humans trapped in the bodies of animals, thrown into life like soldiers into battle, sent on to the pitch and programmed to play life out according to archaic, primeval dictates; and one day we’ll all be set free from this bondage, we’ll walk of the pitch of life together, ball in hand, and say enough is enough my friends, and head off to the pub for a cosy chat and a beer together. But at the minute we’re trapped in the game of life, and we must play to the final whistle.’

With all of this realisation he’d come to feel slightly bitter. The more he thought of how he treated Lisa, the more anger he felt toward Isabelle’s treatment of him. However in time he was glad to have seen the truth.

‘Yes’ he thought to himself morosely, ‘it’s like that story about a man who gets sent to prison and suffers horrifically and can’t take it. And when he complains to his cellmate, his cellmate replies, ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself, you’re not innocent. If you want to maintain your sanity you’re going to have to remember that.’