When I fantasized about my ex getting what he deserved, I imagined something beautiful. Something poetic. A dramatic third-act reckoning. Maybe he’d see me across a dimly lit bar, glowing under the soft flicker of a candle, laughing effortlessly at something a much hotter man had said. Maybe he’d overhear someone at a party mention my name in a reverent tone, and he’d have to step outside for some air.
But instead, the universe handed me something deeply unsexy: he got fired.
A minor infraction. A technicality. A ridiculous, small-stakes mistake that somehow cost him everything. He didn’t fly too close to the sun—he tripped on a loose shoelace and fell headfirst into the ocean. And now I feel like a Dickensian villain who wished suffering upon the undeserving.
I wanted the thrill of his misery, not the burden of it.
I should be sipping a Cosmopolitan, basking in the schadenfreude of it all. But instead, I suddenly became the patron saint of unemployed losers. Mourning a downfall that I had wanted—just not like this.
And this is the problem with hating someone so much that you accidentally start caring again. Because the second I heard the news, my first instinct wasn’t smug satisfaction. It was guilt. I immediately pictured him sitting in his dumb little apartment, eating cereal at 2 p.m., spiraling into some half-assed identity crisis. I wanted him to be lightly ruined, the way a man in a Bergman film is—tortured, brooding, forever smoking a cigarette in a dimly lit room, staring off into the void.
Instead, the universe absolutely bodied him.
And then, because I am pathologically female, I started worrying. How will he pay rent? Does he have savings? Will he be okay?
Like, hello? Am I his mother now?
And here’s the real kicker: If I had gotten fired, he would not be having a moral crisis about it. At best, he’d text a mutual friend, “Damn, lol,” and then go back to scrolling TikTok. But me? I’m questioning if my hatred for him was so powerful that it actually manifested as divine retribution.
And that, unfortunately, is the true tragedy: No matter how much you hate them, no matter how justified your rage is, you will never fully enjoy their suffering. Because at the end of the day, you still cared.
If he gets desperate enough, he’ll probably start a Substack about “resilience” and try to sell a course on monetizing your failures. Maybe then I’ll finally get my revenge.
spring break 