So, maybe this was a dumb thing to do, but I did it anyway.
About five years ago, I was in a relationship with a girl, probably the happiest one I've had. It ultimately ended, for a lot of reasons, some of which I understand and agree with, others which even now I haven't quite gotten my mind around. But that's always the way and really beside the point.
The point, as usual, is karaoke.
She's in town this weekend and called me to see if we could hang out. Now, I've never really gotten the whole "being friends with exes" thing. Maybe there's something actually wrong with me, but I can't exactly work out why, having broken up with someone, you'd want to be friends. But more importantly, I can't work out
how. The whole idea of trying to relate to someone on that level once you've got a history like that just seems strange and alien.
So I had some misgivings, but I invited her to karaoke anyway. I'm not sure what exactly I was afraid of. Maybe that seeing her again would open all the old wounds. It took me a long time to get over her. I recover slowly from broken hearts. Maybe I was worried that I wouldn't know how to relate to her.
Whatever it was, what I had was a pleasant time with an old friend.
But...
Saying that I had a pleasant time with an old friend is not to say that it wasn't still very strange. The main thing that troubled me, really troubled me, wasn't that the old pain was still there. It's that it wasn't.
And this was a problem, because without that pain, what was left? Well, what was left was that I spent the evening with an attractive young woman who is exactly the sort of person I'd like to be involved with. More than that, as we've both grown as people over the last few years, my impression is that she's even more the sort of person I'd like to be involved with now than she was at the time. It's not that I'm still in love with her but that it seemed like I could so easily fall in love with her again. In fact, if she had been anyone else, I'd have been strongly tempted to ask her out.
But of course, I didn't, because we'd already tried that. That's the really weird part. That it was so much like the old days and yet irrevocably
not.
I don't know. Maybe I'm making too much of things. After all, it's not like there's some kind of law that says I
couldn't have just asked her out again (provided I wasn't such a coward. At this point, I think a rejection would be hard to survive.). In any case, I think the aftermath of tonight is going to be with me for a while.
That said, do I regret seeing her again? I don't want to. I'm not sure. That's why this merits my ponderings: I literally
do not know how I feel -- and isn't that itself a pretty strange state of affairs?
Inappropriate Thoughts will return Sunday, but before I go, since I have a long history of trivializing things that are deep and worthy of contemplation with a pithy one-liner, here's the inappropriate thought that kept coming to me tonight:
We went out on our last date on December 11, 2000.
I really wish I hadn't fought her for the check.
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