Hated, no. Pitied, yes.

Last night I had dinner with some high school classmates. After a few drinks, the topic quite naturally turned to insane ex-girlfriends. One of the guys mentioned that I had one of the craziest stories that he’d ever heard. I told the story and got the typical reaction. So while the story is still fresh in my mind, and before time, imagination, or faulty memory start augmenting the story, I hereby commit it to the internet.

Once upon a time, during my senior year in college, I met a girl whom we shall call “Selena.” She spoke Japanese, majored in architecture, and was very artistic. I thought we hit it off well enough, but that was mostly because she was pretty and gave me a painting of Bill and Opus from Bloom County and a pretty good mix tape (“You see, son, in the days before iPods, people used to listen to music on long strips of magnetic tape, wound onto two plastic spools…”).

While things looked good on the surface, I quickly realized that there was something wrong with her. She didn’t say anything in particular, or do anything in particular, but I just knew. Kind of like spider-sense. All my life, whenever I sneezed, it’d be at least twice in a row—until the second day of our relationship. For the first time I could remember, I sneezed only once. No follow-up. Something was amiss.

After about a month, three weeks of which was Christmas vacation, we broke up. I told her that there was absolutely no way on Earth we were going to end up together, so why waste any more time on each other? She was devastated…

…but not so devastated that she didn’t start dating my friend “Burke” two weeks later. It didn’t bother me at all–Burke and Selena were a far better fit than she and I could ever have been. They were both very artistic, they had similar tastes in clothing and music, they frequented the same coffee shops with the same regularity—they looked and acted like they belonged together.

That said, there was one significant difference between them that, evidently, Selena just couldn’t let slide. Burke had had dozens of lovers in his brief time on this Earth. Selena had not, and was offended by (or, perhaps, jealous of?) Burke’s past. So, after a month or two of dating, she decided to express her jealousy artistically.

This is where the crazy part of the story begins: Selena wanted to paint the words “My future husband f@#$%d another woman on this mattress” on one of Burke’s old mattresses—in her own menstrual blood.

Go back and re-read that. I’ll wait here.

Back now? Good. The sad thing is that Burke actually gave her a mattress, ostensibly because of his commitment to artistic expression, but in reality because said commitment outweighed his own sense of dignity.

Upon hearing of this, I was disgusted with both Selena and Burke. Selena was letting her jealousy corrupt her, and didn’t seem to think anything was wrong with putting her own bodily fluids on such sordid display. I was embarrassed to have known her, much less been her boyfriend.

As for Burke… well, one of my co-workers often says that if you beat a dog often enough, if you really abuse it, it’ll eventually soil itself and won’t bother to avoid its own filth. Burke reminded me of the dog in that aphorism. He didn’t have the spine to stand up to Selena, tell her she was bonkers, and dump her.

I assumed that Selena would come to her senses and condemn the project to the ash heap of stupid ideas. Then word came that she had gone so far as to start collecting the blood, and had enlisted the help of my then-roommate’s then-fiancé in said collection. He decided to have a word with Selena.

I warned him that it was pointless. The problem was that she couldn’t see anything wrong with her idea—it was artistic expression, Burke himself was contributing to it, and besides, he shouldn’t have slept with all those people, blah blah blah. It was as though the mere existence of her jealousy and bitterness combined with the fact that she was an artist compelled her, forced her to express her feelings in the most provocative manner she could muster.

Now, I can appreciate art. But my view of art is parallel to Ian Malcolm’s view of science: just because you can express an idea artistically, creatively, or provocatively doesn’t mean you should express that idea. Especially not if it makes you look like an utter psychopath.

Where was I during all this? Happily off on the sidelines, receiving congratulations left and right for having had the good sense to get away from Selena well before she went overboard with the scarlet letters. I had my nose to thank; it knew long before the rest of us that she was bat-guano insane.

It would have been a few cycles before Selena would have enough blood to paint the mattress. Thankfully, she ran out of patience and abandoned the project. Soon thereafter, Burke regained a modicum of dignity and dumped Selena. A few years later, he asked me whether I’d hated him for having dated my crazy ex-girlfriend so soon after we broke up. I replied, sincerely, that I did not.