Document on End of a Romance Poses Questions

Judi Sullivan of Glendale has sent me a strange letter, or document, that she says she found in the bushes outside her house. It was wet and torn, and had evidently been blown there in a storm.

The letter is not dated, but since there has been no storm in Glendale for some time, I assume it is a few months old. It appears to be a fragment, and, oddly, is in legal form, listing a plaintiff and a defendant, the author herself.

Mrs. Sullivan says the letter struck her as funny. “I can feel the writer’s frustration, though sense there is no pain as one so often finds in male-female conflicts.”

I sense real pain; at least the woman has had it, finally, with her male adversary. Their relationship is through; kaput. The spelling is atrocious, but that may be because the author evidently is learning to use a computer. I have corrected the spelling except in one instance, which I have marked sic .

Mrs. Sullivan has humanely crossed out the two names, though I wouldn’t have used them anyway. The letter begins:

“We now come to the point where we can really talk here, but I don’t wish to make it hard. . . . I just want to express my feeling that I won’t take this kind of carp ( sic ) any more.

“I really hate you, and think you are very sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick! . . . Why do you keep doing the things you do? I really can’t understand but I’ll bet you have a real good reason. . . . I don’t like it one bit.

“Maybe I will have to do something to you to make you stop pestering me with the clicking in my house. I am just fooling around with my new computer, trying to get to the bottom of this legal paper so that I can see the line number and set it up for my customer tomorrow when he comes because I am going to do a document for him. . . . I really like my own business and everybody seems to love my work. I am so very excited that I can’t stand it. I just know that I will do extremely well and make some money to support myself.

“I don’t know how you will do. I think you will be a real loser in the long run because you have gotten away with so much for so many years. I don’t love you at all and can’t think that you could be so crazy as to buy a house 200 yards from me.”

End document.

“There are many questions,” remarks Mrs. Sullivan. “Is this her husband? What is the clicking? Why can’t she spell? And, of course, did they end up together?”

I sense that this letter, or document, was never sent, and was never meant to be sent. It is simply an expression of anger and frustration in the war between the sexes.

I have already suggested why its author apparently can’t spell. Her anger might have something to do with that, as well as her inexperience on her computer.

Obviously she is setting out on a new life, and she is frightened. The clicking she hears may be the symptoms of a mild paranoia--or else it is her husband, or partner, clicking his teeth. He may be in the next room, for all we know.

My guess is that this woman has made up her mind to be independent of a cad, and she is trying to keep him away with a document that obviously has no legal force, and will most likely never be read by him.

Why he has bought a house only 200 yards from her I can’t guess, but it suggests to me that he is as crazy as she thinks he is. Did she receive their house in a divorce settlement? Does he want to be near her to continue antagonizing her? Does he really love her?

Reading only her side of it, my sentiments are with the woman in this case. She obviously needs space, as they say. Her husband or partner, whatever his virtues, is obviously a nerd and a pest. She is well rid of him.

I doubt the author of this rather pitiful document will ever see this column, but if she does, I want her to know that at least one person is on her side.

I do have some advice for her, though. She had better learn to spell, if she hopes to be independent, especially in the computer typing of documents.

Carp was by no means the worst of her errors, though perhaps it was the most felicitous.

How this document ended up in the brush outside Mrs. Sullivan’s house I don’t know. But I suspect that its author got her angst out of her system by writing it; then heard that mysterious clicking, rushed to her front door and threw it out into the storm.

One thing she better do is keep that brute at least 200 yards away.