After Years of Stalking My Ex's New Girlfriend, I Took Her on a 2 Week Road Trip

I sat patiently in summer's womb, waiting for the day of my departure. Come August 29th, I'd decided, I would leave this town. To go traverse the United States in a green Prius. Tucson simmered with anticipation.

In the thick of a pandemic, I was fortunate to work remotely. Of all places, my hometown apartment seemed like an awfully unimaginative office. So I resolved to find something more inventive. One night, while descending into a wormhole of YouTube videos about “van life,” it occurred to me: 

Scraping 5’1, I could easily fit most of my belongings and self in my backseat. So long as I had gas money, something to nibble on, and enough to pay the creditors each month, I could transform my Prius into a makeshift RV. Could work, sleep and live in it - while traveling the world. And that’s exactly what I did. 

Like a mother with a nursery, I threw myself into the preparation of my new home. I folded down the seats and plastered the ceiling with tarot cards and old Taylor Swift album booklets. I hung popsicle fairy lights and macrame, and prepared my small bed with great care. At 3am, in the parking lot of my apartment, I trialed that bed for the first time. The Walmart-grade mattress foam may as well have been a cumulus cloud. 

Two months before leaving, I attended my friend Courtney's birthday. I gave a passing mention of my trip, and much to my surprise, she piped up and said she wanted to come with me. I couldn’t fathom anyone else wanting to abandon their home to live in a 2x4 hatchback. But Courtney met me with an enthused smile and asked if she could join me, at least for a while. And just like that, I decided the Prius could sleep two. 

I’d known Courtney a little more than five years. Of those five years, the first four were characterized by a mutual and burning disdain. I could’ve wrapped the sheaths of animosity around me like a ballgown. I once blamed every last one of my earthly woes on her. I'd resolved that anything I didn’t like about my life was Courtney’s fault, or rooted in the role she played in it. 

At the time, I was a 19-year-old bundle of unbridled acrimony. With a child flinging such venom her way, then-24-year-old Courtney bared some teeth in return. For years, we worked to silently unnerve the other, pressuring our mutual friends to pick a side and not engage with the enemy. We traded acidic barbs and passive aggressive statuses. When my best friend chose to befriend her, I refused to speak to her for two years. The richest part? For over three years of this nonsense, we never met in person - not once. But we loved to hate each other all the same.

The origin of our ancient feud was, of course, a boy. And not a memorable one at that. I long classified him as my first love, but the moniker tastes wrong now. More so a habit than an accurate descriptor, because what did I know of love at 19? That boy and I were a false, brilliant shooting star on which I pinned all my teenaged romanticism.

In retrospect, we were no shooting star, rather a nose diving plane, which may have looked a little like a shooting star at a distance. I don’t care to reflect much on the time I spent with him. Because his was an inflammatory, deliberate kind of cruelty. Figuratively speaking, I could say he dug his heel into my throat, or ashed his cigarettes on my cheeks. I had to come to grips with the fact that those were the very cheeks he used to kiss. 

To be fair, at that age, my affection looked a lot more like fanatic idolatry than love. I was given over to intense infatuations that swallowed me and the recipient like black tar. For better or worse, after we ended, I held his memory a little too tightly in my fist, convinced I could correct the feeling of worthlessness his treatment had implied.

Shortly after incinerating me, he became Courtney’s boyfriend. At the time, she was a stranger to me. Rather than demonize a boy I wanted so desperately to love, I decided that it was all Courtney’s fault. Because I staunchly preferred that narrative.

Courtney in Wyoming

I let her be my scapegoat - and I did it for years. So attached was I to the mythology of ‘first love,’ I couldn’t imbue his character with the rancid traits he exhibited. Instead, I painted her - a girl I’d never met - with those very colors. I reacted to her as if she had carried out the foul things he did. He evaded accountability, without even trying, because I let her personify my rejection and discontent.

During these “dark ages,” there was only ever one hint that perhaps she yearned for a truce. After I published a Puckermob article about how the loss of him was eating me alive, I found an anonymous article on her Pinterest account (because of course we stalked each other there). With a note of compassion, it read like a response to my article. In it, the writer addressed a girl unable to let go of her first love, despite his having moved on with the writer. She explained how the girl’s vitriol toward her was unfair and unjustified, referring to herself as the “fabricated opponent in your heartbreak warfare.” A sentiment so poetic, it bothered me to think she’d written it. I long suspected Courtney the writer and I the subject, but she told my best friend it wasn’t her.

Me in Arizona

The boy and I met at a coffee shop when I was 19, and 5 years later, it would become the hole where I'd bury the hatchet with Courtney. Knowing they'd broken up, I invited her to coffee. She knew the significance of the coffee shop, almost mythic in my personal lore at this point. Initially stilted and unsure of each other, she slowly saw that I'd brought no guns, no barbed remarks - only curiosity, and I watched her guard drop like a shawl that fell lower and lower round the shoulders. Five hours unfurled, during which we discovered we were both writers, deeply introspective, prone to anxious attachment, with unnervingly similar tastes in music and art.

The pandemic had stilled the world, and we found ourselves agreeing to meet again and again. She taught me to make dirty vodka martinis, and threw me an "apartment rave" so that I could try molly for the first time. She was my novocaine during lockdown, numbing me to the pain of having lost the routines of the world I loved. And across countless nights on her sofa, martini in hand, we began to heal the emotional burn marks that covered our bodies like Dalmatian spots - the wounds the boy inflicted.

And so, to take this trip with Courtney was nothing short of significant. It was a triumphant trophy we could raise to the evisceration of girl hate. And to the simple fact that we’d both come to our senses - about him and about each other.

Us at Grand Tetons National Park

I had just seen Thelma & Louise a few weeks prior to our departure. Joint suicide notwithstanding, how poetic was it that we too would be taking to the great American highways. It was the thundering exclamation point on the statement our friendship made. Not only had Roya and Courtney buried the hatchet, they were building a temple of self-love and mutual respect atop the burial site. 

And then the day came. Hair dyed starburst pink, I bid adieu to the town that raised me. A town I’d fled many times before, but found that each time had a different aftertaste. I was eating peach gummy worms when I picked her up that August morning. Those long car rides were ripe for heart-to-hearts and accidental empowerment sessions. When she blocked him for good, we sent celebratory cheers into the Utah countryside.

We winded in and out of caves along the Arizona border, navigated slot canyons, scaled waterfalls in the Wyoming wilderness. At Grand Tetons National Park, we mounted several enormous silver boulders, and ate crackers and tuna overlooking the cascades and musical streams. We proceeded to the boulder Tuna Rock.

At a KOA campground just outside of Yellowstone, we sat on the swingsets sipping oat milk lattes. Swinging in opposite directions, she recounted one of their worst fights to me; I lent an intent ear. In that moment, I asked her a question that had been burning in my mind for years. Was it her who penned that anonymous article? There on the swingsets, kicking up sand, she grinned, “Of course it was me.” Every such admission brought us a few degrees closer.

A strange and exhilarating moment happened one morning at a Days Inn, when I awoke and launched into a story about my dream. Courtney froze - “Roya. I had the same dream.” Somewhere, somehow, I like to think that mine and Courtney’s paths were always meant to intersect, and that the boy was just a conduit - an over-complicated means to this most glorious end. 

I fondly recall the first night we slept in the backseat of my car, watching the pilot of Sister, Sister in a hushed volume. I came to realize that the deepest emotion to emerge from that old tangle of wills was not her love for him or my love for him. It was the platonic love blossoming here in the backseat. 

After twelve glorious days, I dropped Courtney off at an airport in Montana. She left a pronounced absence in the front seat. 

Today, I see my “first love” not as the story of a boy, but as the fantastic tale of mine and Courtney’s survival. A circuitous route that brought me to a new friend. One who helped me realize that our first love is, in fact, self love - a feature we now water and cultivate in one another. I found that every mile driven was a brush stroke of healing on the canvas of sisterhood, covering that old mosaic of “heartbreak warfare” in full.