Everyone wanted to celebrate.

Everyone except me.

I wanted to stay home, throw back a little bubbly, crawl into my bed and mercifully black out for a few hours, and then wake up again right as rain. A ringing headache encircled my skull and every so often the ground seemed to tilt a little, accompanied by a paroxysm of nausea which thankfully hadn’t yet crystallized into a volcanic eruption of barf. If I could make it through work and get home intact, I thought I’d be doing pretty good for the rest of the night. Unfortunately, the rest of the world had other plans.

It was the night of ‘The Big Flip.’ The ‘GPR’.

A Geomagnetic Pole Reversal – two, in fact. One reversal, then back again. It would happen so unmeasurably fast we wouldn’t notice anything. Shouldn’t notice anything. That’s what the scientists were saying anyway. Still, there was a lot of nervous excitement. No one really knew what was going to happen. It was taken by a lot of people to be like the advent of the 2000s, with both its incredible hope and anticipation and simultaneously its heightened fear of impending doom. But in the aftermath of the Y2K bug – or lack thereof – people were a lot more dubious of the possibility of a ‘GPR bug,’ though there was a small movement of paranoids who believed the reversal would last long enough to wipe out the electrical grid and all our technology, and cause mass calamity.

I imagined picking up pizza and something to drink on the way home – champagne instead of beer? – watch some TV, and then (just to be sure) keep all electrical appliances off during the Flip, coincidentally enough, slated for midnight. Or was that too superstitious? Maybe it wouldn’t matter; likely I’d be fast asleep by then. Alas, my night did not resemble this in the slightest.

I was leaving my office when Scott was on the phone and trying to rope me into the ‘GPR’ event he and his girlfriend, Tasha, were having at ‘The Portugal,’ which was a former Hotel now restaurant a little out of the city.

“What are you doing in the office?” he said. “You should have called in sick. Today might be the last normal day you have.” He was joking, but had no idea how eerily accurate this would prove to be.

“I know,” I said. “I regret coming in now, don’t I? My head’s killing me. I can’t come tonight.”

“This might be the last time we see each other.”

“Can the melodrama, you just want an excuse to get plastered.”

“I don’t need an excuse. It’s Friday. You don’t need one either.”

“You’re going to have to make do without me.”

“You’re no fun. This is why you’re single right now.”

The barb went deeper than he meant it to. But he didn’t know, or understand. It was too complicated to explain. My mind raced for a laid back defence, but it was too late: now I was thinking of Jennifer. ‘Ex’ sounded so brusque and unfeeling – my previous girlfriend? That thought trailed into wondering what she was doing tonight.

Why the wonder? – I already knew. She would be going on some long, involving date with her new man. Definitely some restaurant, an upmarket one, leaning over the table, staring into each others’ eyes, referring to each other with cutesy sobriquets. Gliding around amongst lots of people, showing herself off, her fine body – I could see it outlined in something dazzling and elegant –  and showing him off, too, both of them being seen strolling down a board walk hand in hand, maybe fitting a walk on the beach in there somewhere towards the end, not to swim but to have sex. I knew she would do all these things because these were all the things I wouldn’t. I didn’t like attention. She loved it.

She had a dual nature, almost Jekyll and Hydean, The girl I very much fell in love with shared her mind with the She-Hulk, practically turned green and grew mass without warning. That was not to say she became angry, rather Jennifer’s she-hulk had a deprecating sense of humour. Not self-deprecating, just deprecating. She could be touchingly kind and gentle – and mostly was – but another side of her loved to put me on the spot and embarrass me, torment me, metaphorically twist my arm behind my back until I said or did the right thing, or wrap me around her little finger, as the expression goes.

That feeling of being in a relationship with two different people (Jekyllina and Heidi?) became exhausting. I started getting the suspicion I had been downgraded from boyfriend to fawning pet, on call at all hours to attend to her impulsive desire for gratification, and if I did not give her a certain amount of attention, something was ‘wrong’ with me and needed to be ‘corrected’, usually through some creative ‘shaming ritual’. Jennifer never asked me for anything; she went ahead and took it if she wanted it. She expected my 100% availability for emotional engagement, physical contact, and sex. I should mention, Jennifer loved sex more than I did. Don’t get me wrong; while I love sex, myself, Jennifer’s intimidating sexual confidence and intimate familiarity and comfort with the male body made me often feel not as her equal but her property. She definitely wasn’t a passenger when it came to the carnal act; she was a fierce driver.

To me, sex was a serious matter, a commitment or act borne of mutual trust and devotion. She spoke frankly about sexual matters, in company, and about myself as a sexual being, and put her amazing acting ability on display mimicking what I allegedly looked and sounded like at the height of coitus, to the stifled laughter of all.

I was a toy – a sex toy – for her idle amusement, and if I was a toy, then, to Jennifer, sex was the game, and one in which she wielded the advantage – and I suffered the handicap – by virtue of the hidden arousal of the female sex, and the manifest arousal of the male. She found no higher form of comedy than in the ‘surprise erection’. She had previously derived idle amusement in covertly slipping Viagra into my food – the more inopportune the place or time, the better. More often, she only voiced the possibility as a threat, but on a couple of frightening occasions, the possibility had been realized (once, when her parents came to visit – but that’s another story…).

If there was ever a protest from me for being selected by her, yet again, to play the circus animal, she would stare me down, darkly smirking, and in an innocent, velvety voice, ask me, as if deeply concerned for my welfare, “Jerry, what’s the matter? Are you angry at me?”

I didn’t get miffed easily. But if I was angry at her, I couldn’t stay angry. She was gorgeous and knew it, and never let you forget it. If I was disgruntled with her, not just miffed, but sending out serious signals that I wanted my own life for two seconds, it made her genuinely concerned. She would put on an act with bedroom eyes turned right up and everything. It wasn’t flattery, but contained a veiled threat: get over your beef, because any other man would be fighting to be in your shoes and if you don’t kiss and make up with me, I’ll prove it to you.

It was amazing we ever got together at all. I was, and am, straightforward, good-natured, somewhat emotionally blunted and one-dimensional (according to some), no-kidding-around person, prone to inward deep-thinking at times. And Jennifer was a spectrum of – at times – contradictory emotions, desires, hopes and fears. My family were bug-eyed when she came over for Christmas; first I was offended by that, then amused, then in resigned agreement with their unspoken sentiment of ‘how did that happen?’.  

You see how it self-destructed. The more effort she put into chasing down my attention, the more I felt contained and tried to run away, until one day I ran and didn’t stop. She had been the first one to state that it was over but I was the first one to act as if it was over. But lightning had undeniably struck, and it hadn’t struck (for me) again. And now, as her final torment on me, she had moved on while I remained torn, still in love with her and boxing myself up over it.

“Jerry? You still there, buddy?”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Fuck it. Count me in.”

“Great! Ease up and have some fun tonight, meet some new people, some girls.”

“Hey, yeah, introduce to me to some bangin’ babes while I’m there.”

“Sure thing. Just don’t say ‘bangin’ babes’ ever again and it’s on. Christ, you’re really out of the dating loop these days, aren’t you?” 

“Not really.”

“It’s super obvious. You’re going to have a blast tonight. See you later, man.”

I went home, had a shower and changed into something more casual but smart, shaved, fixed my hair. I wanted to look like I was doing really good since the breakup, healthy, desirable, robust, ready to invite a new person in. Maybe it was the uncertainty of the looming Flip making me feel like I had get out of my shell and give life another crack. Or maybe Scott was right, and when the clock ticked over we would all get fried by incoming cosmic radiation and none of it really mattered.