| | A Case of the Ex
January 11, 2002
I got an e-mail from my ex today and it messed me right up.
This is not a recent break-up; Paul and I called it quits nearly two-and-a-half years ago. That's four months of hell, six months of grieving and self-analysis, a year of forgetting and finally a frighteningly short nine months of peace and happiness. I haven't even spoken to him in since April - and I thought I'd passed a poignant kind of milestone back in October when I belatedly realised his birthday had passed days earlier without my noticing.
So I was aghast to find that a few simple words on my work computer could throw me into such turmoil.
He didn't even have the nerve to send me a real e-mail. Just a few words in the header - Are you still on earth, or media-managing in another galaxy? Eleven lousy words that set my stomach churning. That stripped away all of my hard-won self-assurance. That for about five seconds slammed me right back into the middle of the dark time.
I have no idea why that one sentence should have set off the same sort of inner trembling that makes you feel sick immediately after you've had a near miss in your car.
When I think about it now, alone in my apartment, I'm thankful that the unexpected physical reaction was followed relatively quickly by a very familiar friend - a tired and resigned kind of slow anger.
The whole thing was just so like him.
I know Paul too well, you see. I know from that one sentence that he's lonely and it's summer and he thinks he can still count on me to pick up the pieces of his ego and stick them all back together. I know that he spent quite some time thinking about those few words before hitting send, ensuring they were non-committal enough to protect him from emotional exposure in any way. I resent that. And I hate the fact that for a critical split second, before my brain caught up with the churning in my gut, I not only wondered whether he wanted to get back together, but found myself unable to dismiss the prospect.
I need to make something clear right now - I am no longer in love with Paul, and I haven't been for quite some time. I'm generally ambivalent, although there have been moments of anger that come from nowhere. They shock me, these detonations, just as I would be shocked by a jet of boiling acid surging up through a crack in the footpath on my way to work.
But usually it just doesn't occupy any place in my thoughts. On the rare occasion I do think about it - usually at the prompting of someone who wants to know whether I think we would ever get back together - I patiently explain that no, it's truly over, and I could never force myself back into those incremental compromises that were as corrosive as battery acid.
If it's someone I know well, I may go further, explaining that the break-up was like taking off a veil - that all of a sudden I could see the two of us clearly, and that I neither liked nor respected what I saw. And if it's a very close friend, I may even confide my honest if unflattering belief that Paul has always been too emotionally cold and self-obsessed to ever be capable of any more than the most superficial emotion.
In the first six months I couldn't talk about it - not even to my parents who took me in without question. I was afraid that talking about it would destroy the tenuous control I needed to get through each day. And I knew that any overt demonstration of my pain would simply hurt them, because it was pain they couldn't make better as they did when I was a child.
In the second six months I spoke of it haltingly to my closest friends, and grieved privately in my new, empty apartment.
In the second year Paul and I saw each other a few times, slept together a few more for old time's sake, toyed with the idea of reconciliation and reopened the wounds. I remembered what had been wrong with the relationship, and found it impossible to really let down my defences. We dated other people but kept coming back to each other, swinging wildly between the need for emotional sustenance and independence, and exhausting each other with the constant push me-pull you way we were together.
It finally came to a head in early April, in a stupidly pointless telephone argument. For once, I didn't hold back. For once, I let go with all the things I had come to think but not say, out of a ridiculous deference for his feelings. It was cathartic to say the least and it was the last time we spoke.
Since then I have thought about him barely at all.
So why the stupid reaction today? How the hell can something which is now so distant still inspire an outbreak of mental melodrama? I hate it that I reacted that way, and I hate it that I've even allowed this to make it into my journal.
Last night I was tired, and casting around for something to write about. Tonight I'm just tired, and disappointed in myself, and sad.
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