Actually it's not that long. And only two of them would tell you that.
Every year at some point I get, oh, let's call it nostalgic. Or insane. Whatever. The last time I felt that way, I deleted a ton of blog entries to try to move on. Clearly it didn't work, because here we are.
The thing is, there's this one guy. I thought he could be The One. He didn't think that, so he must not have been. It has been a ridiculously long time. He told me he couldn't be what I wanted. He told me to move on. I moved on. I've been married (...not to him) for 17 years, I have two kids, a mortgage, pets, a life, the whole nine yards. I still think about him. And I don't want to, and I can't figure out why I do, and I don't know how to stop it.
We aren't friends. We haven't kept in touch. I occasionally google him. There isn't much. We have a couple mutual friends, and he keeps up with them, and so he sometimes pops up on my social media. He seems to be doing well. I am confident that he never -- or possibly once in a blue moon (of Kentucky) -- thinks of me. I have other exes. I have lost touch with really good friends. I occasionally feel a pang about them, but it's no big deal.
But this guy. If I'm driving too long I start to have conversations with him in my head. Sometimes he acts like my little internal conscience judging me.
There used to be this website, Tomato Nation, and the girl who created it would do advice columns. And when people would write in about not being able to get over their exes, she would tell them to go cold turkey, cut all contact and voila! You'll be over it. He himself told me, before we lost touch, that I just needed to change my perspective. I have no contact with him, have had no contact with him, and changed my perspective (because #metoo, haaaaaaa, and parenting a tween girl), and he STILL will not get out of my head.
I decided it would be fun to write a collection of short stories for my kids to read one day after I'm gone. Mid life crisis or whatever. I just feel like they only know me as mom, and I had a whole life before that. I don't think they'll actually care, but you never know. It'll be there. So I was writing about resisting temptation, aka The Magnificence, which come to think of it, I should call him something else, because they probably don't want to know how that name came about. ANYWAY. I'm writing about TM and then ALL OF A SUDDEN I'm writing about this guy I can't get out of my head. It wasn't his chapter. Why? WHYYYYY???
