Preparedness

You spend nearly every waking moment of the past few months psyching yourself up for the moment when you’ll demand your independence, when you’ll put a stop to that nebulous relationship that is equal parts frustrating and comfortable, that doesn’t have a label, necessarily, but that you know can’t be sustained forever because it’s smothering you both. And then you do it, you put your foot down, you make the call, you end it — really — and you just suck it up and decide to deal with the loneliness and the withdrawal and you know you’ll both be better off for it, and it all makes rational sense, and you enjoy your newfound solitude and your flirty availability, and things might be weird and you might be shouldering some weighty yet invisible guilt over essentially giving your best friend the cold shoulder, but you’ll be fine.

And then you’ll go to your ex’s house to pick up your shared pet for the weekend while the ex is out of town, and you’ll do something monumentally stupid — even while you yell at yourself in your head to JUST FUCKING STOP AND LEAVE — and you peek into the bathroom to see if there are two toothbrushes — no — so you peek in the shower and sure enough you see a girly razor and girly shampoo and girly face soap and holy shit there’s a blow-drier under the sink and oh dear god it feels like you’ve seen a ghost and you just have to get the fuck out of there because your emotions are just sort of taking a dump there in his place and why did you even come over here, anyway? And before you know it, you’re crying in the fucking car and berating yourself for crying, because this is what you wanted, this is what you SAID ALOUD SEVERAL TIMES that you wish would happen so the ex would take his focus off of you and you could just be alone and both of you could move on. Except never in your equation did you actually acknowledge that you’d be ALONE alone for a while while his rock star ass picked up whatever chick caught his eye first (in all fairness, she seems like a truly nice girl). And so there it is, the morals, screaming from the headlines: Be careful what you wish for, good things come to those who wait, humans with penises and guitars have all the luck, etc. etc. etc. Also there are probably other morals but they don’t matter as much.

And you know this is just a pothole in the road to your personal nirvana, a learning experience, everyone’s been there, it’s a Part Of Life^TM, but that doesn’t make it any less … weird and humiliating. To be bitchslapped by your emotions — the very emotions your rational brain had told you it had quashed — is just embarrassing. And indicative that you’ve got some more work to do. Which your rational brain knew but wasn’t going to tell you about, because your rational brain is kind of a dick.

But then you come home and you see some still-inflated heart-shaped balloons in the trash bin, and you have to laugh, because obviously The Universe has a kind of badass sense of humor, even if it’s often at your expense (which you appreciate because you dig a bit of the schadenfreude). And you realize, yeah, things will be fine. Maybe not tomorrow but some day. Blah blah self-helpcakes. And you wonder how wise it would be to take yet another emotional dump on the internet, but you console yourself with the thought that there are people out there who might get a chuckle out of your stupid situation and think, Yeah, been there or Yeah, am there right now, and the world might seem just a little less huge and indifferent to your utterly superficial plight. But mostly that shit doesn’t matter. You just want to make sure you write this moment down. Get it on tape, so to speak. Because you’ve had a LOT of moments over the past two years or so that you’ve kept to yourself, that won’t show up when you’re 40 and skimming your archives for a glimpse of what your life was like. And this moment, well, it needs to be there. Because it was real. And it sucked. And it was part of the story that can’t be ignored any more.