valentine redux (final)

It was only one month after that night that the two of them got together.

It just kind of happened, he told me far afterwards. Just a week or so ago.

I cringed, hoping he would not continue. He did not. It is sad that I had to ask, that he could not tell me in passing, the next time I asked him what’s new. He said he had wanted to tell me in person. In person? To do what? To watch my face change? In person? Can you believe he doesn’t realize what little dignity that would have left me with?

Can you believe too that I found a frozen, sad smile on my face when he said it? Can you believe I was almost happy for him? I know he was in love before I asked him anyways. The ex who told me he would never get over me. I knew deep down he was lying to himself. I knew at the time that he was still too afraid to give in to his own recovery. He finally proved me right.

The success is bittersweet, at best. Right then, I remembered how we first started, the rush. I thought of him starting again and it twisted like lime. I thought of him like this again, and I must have brushed against some glimmer of his repressed excitement, some possibility of a happy future. Because strangest thing, I smiled. I smiled and it hurt.

Yes, I know, I said. It always does.

She tells me things still, the way she always did.

I want to get married soon, she tells me.

I don’t know what to do for Valentine’s.

You find someone when you least expect it.

I know he is important to you.

I hope this will not affect us much

I wanted you to bring it up first because I was afraid you would hate me.

I tell her no, I don’t, though it would be simpler to. I tell her I’m just lonely.

She knows that it’s hard for me. I am so deep in this daytime drama I have spun myself into with us three, needlessly, inevitably. It is just that I do not do well with rules, limitations, distances. My choice. The world of typed chat makes this damningly easier, allows all of us to blurt these truths to each other.

I tell her, I wish he wasn’t my ex, so I could be properly happy for you. I know how much she has cared about him, wanted him. She has told me as much.

At least I’m not that bitch girlfriend, she says. My girlfriends tell me, how can you stand her even talking to your man? But I’m secure about him. I trust him.

I notice she doesn’t say, I trust you. She doesn’t know about his birthday night, but she’s heard of another close time from both sides. She didn’t like me much then but she figured out that it was between me and him and it goes both ways. She too knows how these things go.

She has struggled so hard to see this from my point of view. I respect her for trying. I know she accepts me because she accepts him. I know how much pain she has had in her life and how much she deserves a guy who will be decent to her. I know too how much she is like me sometimes, the parts of me that I happen to like.

I realize how hard it must be to have me around now at all. I do appreciate but I wish she wouldn’t speak of her man and that she didn’t have to exist and I didn’t have to know her. Still I cannot bring myself to any kind of hate. I just smile. Adjust, I think to myself. Adjust, adjust, adjust, whatever way works for you.

I think that I will walk away from both of them for now, to breathe. I don’t really care what anyone thinks, who else I have to stop seeing to do it, and how increasingly lonely I will have to be for a while to achieve this break. Well, I care, but there is no other way I can take.

I tell you instead, weak but brief, because I cannot be bothered to feign cheerfulness and can’t be bothered to lie about my lack of cheer either. Also... because I want to tell you.

You tell me too that he will always be important to me. It is important, you type to me in your characteristic broken bursts of speech, pausing quickly in between, to stay positive about him... so you don’t feel empty... dealing with exes is tough.. complicated.. but it will empower you....help you see yourself more clearly- a woman who established herself in the context of a relationship but then grew beyond it

I tell you little, yet you use your experience to orate like a Hallmark card, like a TV psychologist, like a self-help book. It seems banal, yet somehow it comes across sincere. I feel strangely understood. I thank you and I joke that this is why I let you do all the talking. (I wish I could give you comfort like this.)

.....and his moving on comes likely in part from the strength of character you shared and gave to him...

Strength. Right. Looking back though, I have shown moments of strength against my moments of weakness. He has too. We have done our best. I think of the times I wanted to scream how much I missed him, I think of how I wanted to support him and couldn’t and left him to her instead. Asked her how he was doing. At least I never asked for him back, even when every fiber of me just wanted to crawl back into this. I never said, let’s try this again, even at my most lonely. I knew I could never pull through with it. And I told him always the only trite thing I could think of saying: we are going to be okay.

Ugh. This is my sappy valentine address.

I’m waiting for the relief to kick in. I think to myself it is only one last time. Everything before this was just training. One last time to be stupid about this, to pretend the nightmare times over this past year will end and to pretend his face smiling next to hers in a photo, their heads nearly touching, is something I can wake up from. So I can find him once again close, lying peaceful under the crook of his arm. Find us again taking turns licking my thin cum off his fingers, like scientists comparing curious notes, sitting on opposite ends of the library because we can’t concentrate when in each other’s view, wiping our tears, writing each other sugary emails, walking through that park across that icy bridge to his car, hiding behind the shelving in my lab with his cock in my mouth. Knowing we have each other, in this mesh of sex and love, whenever, always.

I tell myself one last time to curl up under blankets and cry. No regrets, just cry.

And actually, yeah, it's not too bad at all.

You are kind not to laugh at me. You know I’m new at this.

If anyone knows why Blogger swallows my spaces and displays code from time to time.. lemme know, will ya? Thanks.