11/26/2014

Brother from No Other Mother

Story Sent in by Jonathan:

On my dinner date with Tanya, she informed me out of the blue that her older brother had disappeared years ago and had never been found. I was shocked by that and asked her questions about it.

"Why are you so curious about it?" she asked, "It's a sensitive subject."

I replied, "You brought it up. We can stop talking about it."

And so we did. Instead, we talked about college. For about a minute.

"When my brother disappeared, it really threw my family for a loop," she said, bringing it up unprompted, "As I'm sure you can imagine."

"Are you sure you want to talk about this?" I asked.

She paused for a moment then said, "No."

After another minute of talking about the food, she said, "I miss my brother sometimes. Is that weird?"

I said, "It wouldn't surprise me if you missed him for the rest of your life."

She nodded and said, "Yeah. Thanks for bringing it up. AsshoIe."

"You brought it up. And there's no need to be mean," I said. Honestly, I had tried to be understanding.

"You brought it up," she lied.

And so I crossed the line: "Maybe your brother just couldn't take you anymore. Did you think about that?"

She said, "I can't believe you just said that," and started to cry.

"I'm sorry. Let's actually talk about something else for real, now."

But she wasn't having it. She sobbed on and off for the rest of dinner and that effectively ended the date.

Curiosity settled upon me, though. I afterward asked around about her to a couple of mutual friends. From what I was told, Tanya never had an older brother.

6 comments:

  1. Jonathan is on a date. A date like no other. His companion, Tanya, won't stop talking about her brother. Her brother... that she never had. The setting for this bad date? The Twilight Zone.

    ReplyDelete
  2. She actually at that moment realized that all those years: SHE was the older brother.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sounds like those people who post "I'm so depressed" on Facebook and then say "It's personal" when someone asks why.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Maybe she talking about a doll.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I've dealt with a few too many paranoid schizophrenics over the years, I'm thinking she might have been in the early stages. The delusions all seemed to follow the same themes, and one of those was a sibling that they never really had.
    (This sibling, of course, was conspiring with the person's spouse, the IRS, and the Catholic church to poison the person and steal their stuff, while running cruel experiments on the person's child. It's actually kind of creepy how alike the different people's delusions were.)

    I could be completely off, but her story sounds very similar to how the other stories started. A sibling that went missing, then suddenly came back and tried to destroy them, only the sibling never really existed.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Content Policy

A Bad Case of the Dates reserves the right to publish or not publish any submitted content at any time, and by submitting content to A Bad Case of the Dates, you retain original copyright, but are granting us the right to post, edit, and/or republish your content forever and in any media throughout the universe. If Zeta Reticulans come down from their home planet to harvest bad dating stories, you could become an intergalactic megastar. Go you!

A Bad Case of the Dates is not responsible for user comments. We also reserve the right to delete any comments at any time and for any reason. We're hoping to not have to, though.

Aching to reach us? abadcaseofthedates at gmail dot com.