I am not inclined to be nosy or sneaky. In fact, I generally care so little about other people’s biz-nass that I mistakenly am perceived to be a biz-natch. I’m quite a good listener when called upon, I think, but I do not meddle in the lives of others with such questions as a) Where did you go to lunch? b) What did you have for lunch? or c) Are you boinking the boss? In fact, I probably already know the answer to C, and yet I am unimpressed and don’t even bother gossiping about it. So I hope those who know me would be surprised to learn that, during a dark period of something approaching madness, I committed a heinous act of cyber-stalking.

It was, of course, committed against the only man I have over loved, the same one I’ve loved for the decade since we were virginal high school juniors. It also was, of course, committed post-breakup, as my adrenal gland raged feverishly before my ex’s dusty computer monitor. My adrenal gland has an impressive work ethic, developed when I was puffing second-hand smoke in my mother’s seventeen-year-old womb. Seriously, the low birth-weight thing is a crock, but look into nicotine’s effects on prenatal brain development. You will see how my calm demeanor may deteriorate into homicidal rage.

It was said rage, not my true heart and soul, I tell you, that sleuthed its way onto Love of My Life’s secret LiveJournal in 2003. He still was saying he loved me, and yet he did not want to be with me, and what could a girl do but look to the Internets for answers? His clever username would not foil me—I found the blog, and with a feral masochism read and re-read every post, as a schizophrenic might lock and re-lock every door. The posts ranged from boring (“Cool dude”) to horrifying (“I don’t miss her, I miss the idea of her”). He had not, I deduced, had relations with others (nor had I). But within his response to gothgrrl666’s comment, “what’s your fave memory,” lay a powerful blow. One that would forever shatter a perfectly epic Annie Lennox song into jagged, wrist-slitting broken glass.

One of his “fave memories” involved me, though I can’t remember it now. The tribute failed to warm my heart, as it was followed by another account: “riding around listening to Annie Lennox’s ‘Why’ with a drunk Scottish girl.” Now, I will spare you the details, but I knew of this dirty Brit transplant and her designs, and the idea of her sitting in the car seat where I had sat so many years—not just sitting there but listening to “Why” by fellow Scot Annie Lennox and swapping tales in a shared cloud of melancholy and self-pity clearly meant to rain drops of new love and desire—was absolutely sickening, and again there I was with the overactive adrenal gland. How could I, Love of His Life since 1996, share such a small space of cherished reveries with an androgynous pop star and an international student Love of My Life had known for one semester? As I didn’t know the Drunk Scot personally, I could not gouge out her eyes with a broken Eurythmics CD, and rather enacted vengeance by changing the station whenever “Why” reared its devil-horned head on the radio, which it did frequently in following months due to God’s grand sense of humor and timing.

Love of My Life and I reunited a year later, somewhat sweetening my venom for “Why,” which was a relief since I like that part where she goes, “this is the FEAR, this is the DREAD, these are the contents of my head.” I finally realized I needed to get over myself when Annie performed the song at the tsunami relief telethon. Because a broken civilization is quite worse than one broken heart. And while the telethon was marred by many a celebrity douche-bag, Annie’s performance seemed to genuinely channel the human suffering wrapped up in that age-old, unanswerable little question. But I still change the station when I hear that song.