An Ex by Any Other Name
I’m traveling with two laptops but the shittier of the two which weighs more than my cat and has a battery life of no more than 30 minutes is the one that I have the easiest access to.
Drinking and driving is a lethal combination with potentially devastating consequences. So is drinking and dialing and the penultimate, drinking and Googling which is how I came to find the email address of a guy that I dated during the summer of 2001 during the same time I was dating the man who ever so briefly became my husband.
I’ll stop here for second to point out something that drove the one high school friend to fire me as her friend and that is my propensity to go backward and look at things long after the expiration date which is probably not the healthiest of behaviors. However, I find that with the passage of time comes the necessary perspective that I need to put certain relationships into a context that I can neatly archive.
The only one of my friends that met this man was Annapolis. She met him and liked him- understanding what the attraction was between us but for reasons that I don’t want to go she suggested that I needed to call it quits while I still liked him; that if we continued to see one another that there would come a time when I didn’t like him very much. Knowing that she was right, I broke it off and we spoke just one other time, right after September 11th when there was a national bygones consensus.
Finding him on-line proved too great a temptation and we traded a few quick emails before I got one from him that said, ‘how are you, really?’
There is a reason why an Ex should stay that way. I have a good friend of mine who got married today and has managed to stay good friends with most if not all of her former lovers. Even relationships that ended badly remain within her circle.
Not so with me.
I’m not sure what I expected; the relationship with this person hadn’t run its course. It ended for one big reason and several smaller ones among them that I had decided to give my relationship with Alan* a chance and I couldn’t do that with the other guy in the picture. Still, I cared for this person and wondered, I guess, what if?
Either he has the emotional depth of a teaspoon (a borrowed line from JK Rowling) or we were two people in two very different relationships. In any case, as I consider the next 365 days, there will be less looking backward as I spend more time in the here and now because as it turns out, nothing good can come from examining the cadaver of a past love, an old flame, an Ex.
And the biggest lesson of all might be to reserve the use of Google to search for things and not people.
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