Out Of The Past

Writing this particular entry was kind of like sucking out old, stale venom from a reopened wound, but this is something I needed to get out in order to clear my head of old ghosts and goblins from another life. In other words, I can't imagine that reading any of this will be anywhere near as therapeutic or enriching for y'all as it was for me to post it ... think of this as I Am A Bug Goes LiveJournal and you'll get an idea as to what to expect. Otherwise, I'd skip ahead ...

By the time I'd met Sarah in an old online hangout we both frequented in the spring of 1999, I hadn't dated anyone at all in nearly three years. The last actual relationship of any kind I'd been in before that last one-off date in the fall of 1996 was the third in a series of ill-advised 1-2 week flings I'd had the year before (1995 was apparently a great time to be working in a mall record store as far as pulling chicks was concerned). Before then, I had been in a couple of lengthier relationships, but there has always been only one Ex in my life.

This past Monday, I had the day off and decided to do some running around in Mentor (mostly dumping off some old cruft at Half Price Books). Since I was going to be in the area, I decided to use up my Christmas gift cards at Borders and Kohl's, and it was at the latter location that I unexpectedly found myself nearly face-to-face with The Ex for the first time in more than seven years.

There really isn't a lot to say about the moment beyond the above paragraph; no words were exchanged, no eye contact was made, and there were no dramatic gestures or even a grand swelling of strings in the background. I had been standing in line with an armful of clothes, fumbling around for my gift card in the inside breast pocket of my coat. I looked up briefly to see out which register was open, looked back down, and then did a shocked double-take, murmuring to myself "you've got to be fucking kidding me."

I wasn't fucking kidding me ... it was The Ex, working at one of the open registers.

The last I'd heard (and this was a few years ago now), The Ex had been working at a bank in downtown Cleveland. Based on that, I'd figured the chances of us ever running into each other again as nearly negligible (and that was correct ... I'd just forgotten about that pesky "nearly" part). As I told Sarah later on, I'm pretty sure The Ex knew I was there the whole time as I had wandered throughout the store over the previous twenty minutes, absently looking around at what all was on sale aside from clothes. While I was standing halfway between two registers, dumbfounded, The Ex's attention was thankfully centered on the customer she was dealing with. I was just starting to wonder exactly how I was going to say "hello" when the cashier at the other open register called me over. Greatly relieved, I purchased my new clothes, my mind kind of fogged up with the wonder of it all.

While it took me a few minutes to get past the complete surprise of seeing The Ex that night, it has not been nearly as easy to put her out of my thoughts a few days later. The reason for this is that I had a long chat with my old friend Ike earlier this evening: the first time we'd talked at length in years, actually. It was while we were reminiscing over acquaintances/members of the old "gang" when I let slip that I'd run into someone I hadn't seen in a long time while when I was at Kohl's. Ike immediately started to laugh in recognition: he knew exactly where I was headed. Small world.

As it turns out, Ike and The Ex (who have known each other since at least high school) still hang out on occasion with some other members of the old gang, and we wound up in a short conversation about her in the midst of our catching up. I started off asking questions about her in a rather catty fashion, but forced myself into more civil territory in deference to Ike's situation: being friends with two people who have fallen out is never a comfortable place to be.

While discussing hanging out and playing Texas Hold 'Em (can someone please explain to me when the hell poker became out new national pastime?) with The Ex and friends, Ike crossed over into mentioning her current boyfriend in unremittingly hostile terms. Listening to Ike describe a near-fight that broke out over a recent poker game, I felt my face harden a bit, my good humor replaced by a sudden, unexpected flash of old, rotten anger. Surprised at myself for this reaction, it took me a few hours of thinking things over to figure out what that was all about, and out of that reflection came this post.

Full disclosure: I knew The Ex was interested in me long before I ever got the nerve to move things beyond the neighborhood of "just friends." I hadn't really said much of anything to her beyond pleasantries until she appeared at a small party I had thrown at my parents house in the spring of 1991. I had seen her around at Newberry's for months beforehand (she apparently had been hired while I was living in Columbus or working in Willoughby for most of that year) and she also was in my English class at Lakeland the fall quarter I returned to school in an ill-fated effort to get myself off the shop floor and into the office at the factory job I had been working for three months. For the first six months I knew her, The Ex was a kind of mysterious and shy presence: I wasn't attracted to her, but I sensed she was interested in me ... a feeling that was confirmed a few months later when I learned of her feelings from a mutual friend of ours. Amusingly enough, I was completely disinterested at the time, as I was very interested in that mutual friend instead, but alas that interest was not reciprocated (and she was quite frankly way out of my league anyway). Funny how what goes around comes around, eh?

Being that I was in vain, unspoken pursuit of that mutual friend, I found myself hanging out with The Ex's quite a bit over the summer. The lot of us would usually head into the warehouse district in The Flats to what was then called Metropolis on Sunday nights to dance, drink, smoke, and attempt to conduct conversations for hours on end, all the while being pounded mercilessly by relentless Belgian techno. At some point, somewhere during that summer, I had started to regard The Ex differently than I had before and it wasn't until we were on the way home from Metropolis at 3 A.M. on a Sunday that September that I got up the nerve to take her hand in mine while we both lounged tipsily in the backseat of Ike's car. A couple of nights later, nervous as hell, I started to clumsily make my moves. I was a complete novice at this kind of thing and flying by the seat of my pants, but my fears that I had waited too long and missed my opportunity were unfounded: in a few days, I found myself in my first full blown relationship.

When we started "going out," The Ex was living in an apartment complex a couple blocks from my house: she had gone through a huge row with her parents and for the time being was rooming with Lisa, a cousin of her best friend. One might think was a dream come true scenario for me, but in fact this arrangement was the complete opposite of that: Lisa had no concept of time, a rather over-ripe intellect, and a mouth that had no shut-off valve. Visiting The Ex at the apartment usually entailed waiting until nearly 4 A.M. to get some quality time alone with her as this was when Lisa finally started to wind down and head to bed after bombarding us with World War II trivia or whatever else came to her mind for five solid, soul-smashing hours.

I was initially overjoyed a few weeks later when The Ex announced she was moving back in with her parents as that finally meant I wouldn't have to endure Lisa The Human Encyclopedia for hours on end every night ... though in a cruel twist of irony, that also meant my time with The Ex would be severely curtailed, as her parents had her under lock and key as if she were a ninth grade delinquent rather than a college student. Once she moved back, The Ex had to be dropped off at home by 11 P.M. every night. No exceptions. No more going out dancing, no more breathless groping at 4 A.M., and any time we would have alone together was either at my house or on the rare occasions her parents were out of town. So much for lucky breaks ...

To get around the maddening new time restraints, we would quietly talk on the phone for hours at night, and it was that enforced distance between us that pushed us even closer together. Falling in love with The Ex was all too easy for me: she was energetic, passionate, extremely talented, and affectionate: almost everything I could have asked for in a significant other. However, she also had a stormy, almost bipolar personality and attendant mood swings that could come along at the drop of a hat. Ours was a stormy, almost soap-opera worthy relationship at times: it seemed like we spent half of the time we weren't imitating rabbits either fighting with each other or going through some kind of dramatic crisis that needed working out. For me, completely new to this kind of thing, this was a healthy relationship: it became perfectly normal for us to get completely fed up and exasperated with each other on one day and then spend the next two in bed. Looking back on this now, I'm a little ashamed of myself for putting up with so much grief so gladly in the interests of getting laid: guys really can be malleable, sex-centered apes when given the chance. We can also get lazy ... dangerously so: and if we're too content with the way things are to pay attention to little signs of things going wrong, very bad things can happen.

From September of 1991 until May of 1993, The Ex was The One I was destined to be with forever, the Love Of My Life, the cream in my coffee ... insert cliche here. In a few short weeks after that, she also became The One That Got Away.

It was right around Memorial Day 1993 when The Ex dropped the bomb and our relationship immediately went into an calamitous, five-month long tailspin (the epic length of this breakup was entirely thanks to my stubborn refusal to just let go already). While I never seriously considered, say, throwing myself off the top of Terminal Tower, I spent a most of the second half of 1993 believing that I had lost everything worth living for.

Worse, I had lost my everything to someone else who had simply waltzed into the picture when I wasn't looking and stolen her right out from under my nose. By the time I'd found out what was happening (it was kind of like a live "Dear John" letter in conversation form), it was already too late to do anything about the situation, though I didn't believe that while it was unfolding.

HARD-LEARNED LESSON TIME: Listen up, alright? Let's be really clear about something here: if there is already someone else in the picture, it doesn't matter if anything has happened physically or not when you find out, because your time is already over. Real life is not High Fidelity: there is no successful pleading, bargaining or changing your loved one's mind after someone else has already seized their imagination. If you ever find yourself in this situation, then do yourself a favor by suckin' it up and walking away with what is left of your dignity intact. If you don't, you're only going to wish you had months later, generally after you've made a complete and utter fool of yourself attempting to undo the irreversible.

If you think I sound bitter now, heh heh, you should have seen me thirteen years ago. I think it's fair to say that I was not a very fun person to be around during this time of my life. Reflecting on that year mainly brings up pangs of regret and embarrassment: my wheels had come off and I wasn't myself anymore. The intended "post-breakup-but-can-we-still-be-friends" relationship The Ex tried to institute with me didn't work at all thanks to the borderline-psychotic way I was handling the situation: not only was I floundering in despair, but I was also seething with rage at the way things had turned out. Conversations on the phone degenerated into ugly recriminations or humiliating pleas for one more chance please and I swear it will work again I love you so much how can you do this to me et cetera. In the end, it took a tense, but civil chat with The Ex's father on the phone one afternoon for me to finally get the message to just back off and move on.

The following summer, in a futile exercise, I blundered into a "bounce-back" relationship with someone far too young for me that was pretty much doomed to failure from Day One and should never have lasted six days, let alone six months. That plastic sham of a relationship flew to pieces in nearly identical fashion to my first, and after that disaster came the previously-mentioned wave of brief, purely-physical one-week-stands. These little flings were a nice boost for a sorely-woudned ego at the time, sure, but they were also completely meaningless: by then, everything was on my terms and I had no patience or desire anymore to take things beyond a few rolls in the hay.

After ducking each other for two years (we still worked in the same shopping mall, mind) a couple of tentative letters were sent back and forth between The Ex and I, and we eventually found ourselves on civil speaking terms again by the beginning of 1996 (we even saw a movie together at some point and headed out for an after-work drink at TGIFs). I wish I could say that I didn't try to ask her out again that year, but I felt I had nothing to lose by trying. You can guess the answer I got for yourself.

Time heals all wounds, perhaps, but in this case too much damage had been done for things between us to ever return to anything beyond pleasantries and small talk. While I'd made a couple of halfhearted overtures, we never moved beyond the point of cautious, casual friendliness again, and I lost contact with her completely after Record Den moved out of the mall at the end of 1997. I'd had little or no reason to ever head back in there since, and I believe it was just before Christmas of 1998 when we talked to each other for the last time.

More than anything else, talking with my close friends about The Ex over the years since the breakup finally began to fundamentally alter the way I viewed our relationship, displaying loud and clear just how fraught with problems and flaws it had always been. We all tend to remember the best times and the best attributes about people we've lost contact with unless someone else who was around reminds us of how things really were, and refocusing on everything that was wrong with our relationship is what finally started the healing process for me all those years ago.

It was hearing about her current boyfriend from Ike that finally gave form to a thought I'd been kicking around for some time: The Ex was not really The One That Got Away at all ... I had that line of thinking completely backwards. That surge of anger and/or resentment that I'd felt during that chat wasn't about losing The Ex to yet another meatheaded asshole, it was about losing me for the better part of six years and letting myself seriously think that I'd made the mistake of a lifetime at age 24 when all I'd done was refuse to fucking grow up a bit and carry on.

Ultimately, Ike had to take off and I had to return to my work. We exchanged good-byes and handshakes, with me passing along a message of "hello" to The Ex as an afterthought, but having written all of this down for posterity, a part of me now hopes that message doesn't get through after all. That "hello" was intended as a kind of "hi, I thought that was you, heh" though it could just as easily be taken as a "hey, gimme a call sometime" or "stop by and say hi wilya?" These interpretations can only set up another pointless dead-end, and I have no desire (or reason) to re-establish contact with The Ex, much less re-enter that part of my life any further than I already have while bopping all of this dreck into the ether.

That said, I don't have much to worry about as I'm fairly confident The Ex doesn't want to revisit any of this shit, either. I'm not exactly a difficult person to find (I've only been working at for the same store since the end of 1987, for crying out loud) and having not heard nor seen her since the last freakin' century says it all right there. Also, there is something that The Ex probably knew well before our break-up that took me ages to face up to: we aren't similar people, and I'm not sure that we ever were. While the physical part was great, the endless emotional sturm und drang that she fed on for the sake of her art and the constant fiery battles we waged with each other over friends, futures, careers, whether or not we were going to move to New York City and who knows what else ultimately made the whole thing untenable.

I certainly wish things hadn't gone as spectacularly badly as they did, but I have no regrets hanging over my head anymore. My life would be dramatically different than it is now had things somehow worked themselves out ... and "different" in a way that I most likely wouldn't have been happy with, one way or the other. Looking back now, I wasn't really happy from 1991-1993, either. I'd let myself believe that those years were the absolute pinnacle of happiness and contentment, and I couldn't have been farther from the truth. Despite all of the recent shenanigans with finances gone amok over the last year, I am happy now -- personally and professionally. In fact, life is better than it has ever been, and I'm in love with someone who isn't going to dump me for Marky Fucking Anarchy or slip into a funk if I go see a U2 concert without her or (heaven forbid) decide to go to my parents/friend's house for a visit while she wants to stay at home.

The feelings of irreplaceable loss are long gone: The Ex was a "learning experience," as we guys say when we can think of no other good reason why so much effort was expended on so fruitless an endeavor.