Her Boyfriend Was Somewhere Else
She was tall, had long black hair, and her boyfriend was at the base. Those were the essential facts, processed in about four seconds at a farm party on the edge of my hometown, where the wind smelled like cheap lager and the far corners smelled like vomit and someone had a portable speaker going. His name was Ferdinand. Ferdi. Three years together, somewhere with the military, not here. His loss.
My conscience—which arrived factory-calibrated too small—switched off entirely around the time we slipped away from our drunk, shouting friends at three in the morning. We ended up at her older sister’s apartment (the sister had some kind of intellectual disability, which made the whole situation feel exactly as complicated as it was), and in the moonlight coming through the window we swore each other eternal love in that slurring, half-laughing way that feels completely real at 3 a.m. and slightly absurd by noon.
The phone was going off before I’d had coffee. You stole Ferdi’s girlfriend? Man…
A few called me a hero. A few called me an asshole. Her best friend sent Good luck!
—and based on what followed, she wasn’t talking about the relationship.
Ferdi, as it turned out, was not the kind of man who processes emotions through journaling. He was the kind of man for whom concrete walls are a mild inconvenience. I’ll spare the full retelling of running to a bus stop in nothing but boxers, or begging some unhinged flower vendor for a euro thirty, because the slapstick deserves less airtime than the emotional theater that followed: Ferdi calling Katha in tears, stammering about marriage and children and eternal devotion, apparently teetering on the edge of something dramatic. She laughed and hung up. Then she sent me nude photos with her favorite teddy bear. So it goes.
The relationship lasted four weeks.
Which brings me to the question I’ve been half-circling ever since, though I don’t lose sleep over it—I traded my conscience for whatever this journal is, and I’m going to hell regardless. How bad is it, really, to move on someone who’s already taken? If she was clearly miserable in what she had? If you want her more than he ever could? Or if you’re just devastatingly horny and the geometry is too convenient to ignore?
The counterargument, I know, is patience. Let the relationship collapse under its own weight, which it almost always will. Be the shoulder. Be nearby. Be available. The moral high ground and eventually the same outcome. But there’s an argument—a morally bankrupt one, sure, but still an argument—that accelerating an already-doomed situation is efficiency, not cruelty. I have never been good at waiting.
I saw Katha twice after that. The first time, she told me about a spontaneous anal sex party in her boss’s Jeep, which he’d organized with his girlfriend. Context, not judgment. The second time, she climbed up on a table in a bar and announced that she and Ferdi were getting married the following spring in a little chapel in the woods.
I was genuinely happy for them. Both of them. I mean that.