Posts tagged with "ex-girlfriends"

Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend: Michele

Why should I stay and pre­tend?
You make me laugh again
My dar­ling, truth is we are not even friends
Love comes and it goes
Where your heart stops no one knows
How did I wind up in this mess, here with you?

Just a moment of weak­ness
I should exam­ine my head
Just a moment of weak­ness
I nev­er meant a word I said

—Bif Naked, Moment Of Weakness

The first thing about you that caught my eye was your plat­form shoes. More specif­i­cal­ly, the lanky way you walked in them with your plaid skirt on. You had such a fun­ny gait that I would study when I was walk­ing behind you in the halls. Sometimes you looked like an injured fawn, vul­ner­a­ble and awk­ward­ly run­ning away with your long, slen­der legs. It was the very def­i­n­i­tion of sex­u­al­i­ty to a depressed, hor­mon­al teenage male.

Those shoes gave you an extra cou­ple inch­es, and I resent­ed every time you sub­tly knelt so you would­n’t be taller than me in any pic­tures.

I only have a sin­gle good mem­o­ry of our rela­tion­ship. You were sit­ting on my lap in the jacuzzi at Cammy’s place. It was February, and there was snow all around us, but we were warm and wet. Every few min­utes, we would dunk our heads under the water, then style each oth­er’s hair, the win­ter air freez­ing it with­in sec­onds.

The more I got to know you, the more I learned that it was all a big mis­take. I stuck it out because I did­n’t want to break up with you in the months lead­ing up to your exams. It was espe­cial­ly hard when Lisa start­ed show­ing inter­est in me, but I could­n’t do it.

You were a sex­u­al bore. No sound, no reac­tion, noth­ing in bed. Your friends were all snobs. Your thoughts were trite, and your inter­ests were shal­low.

You nev­er knew it, but I had to decide between dat­ing you and Marina. It tore me up for a week, know­ing that one of you was going to be hurt. I chose you in a moment of weak­ness.

It was the biggest mis­take of my high school career.

The Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend series

  1. Introduction
  2. Ashley
  3. Michele
  4. Christie
  5. Jackie
  6. Louise
  7. Bronwen

Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend: Ashley

The lovin is a mess, what hap­pened to all of the feel­ing?
I thought it was for real; babies, rings and fools kneel­ing
And words of pledg­ing trust and life­times stretch­ing for­ev­er
So what went wrong? It was a lie, it crum­bled apart
Ghost fig­ures of past, present, future haunt­ing the heart

—Belle & Sebastian, Another Sunny Day

Our rela­tion­ship has always rep­re­sent­ed the inno­cence of my youth.

The Friday nights, play­ing with can­dle wax in the dark, learn­ing how our bod­ies worked. Or the rush of wor­ry and excite­ment about par­ents walk­ing in the door. Olfactory sense has come to mean a great deal in my rela­tion­ships. From those nights we made love with Beth’s voice com­ing through your tin­ny speak­ers, I get turned on when I lis­ten to Portishead.

I kept the bot­tle of Gap Earth you used, some­thing dear to me since it was dis­con­tin­ued. Every time I smell the noz­zle, it brings me back to the time we were togeth­er.

Out of all my oth­er girl­friends, I thought you would be the one to end up in a D/s rela­tion­ship. I nev­er real­ized it until my own intro­duc­tion to the lifestyle, but the things you did were the most nat­u­ral­ly sub­mis­sive. The way you want­ed to be tied up with our belts, the enjoy­ment you got from pain, your desire for me to be in con­trol, the way you would take my hands is yours so you could kiss my knuck­les. To this day, I won­der if you still like these things.

I’ve always tried to fig­ure out why I’m nev­er sat­is­fied in my rela­tion­ships. It’s usu­al­ly not the fault of the peo­ple I date. Sometimes I blame my par­ents for their failed mar­riage, and how this has made me feel that’s it’s nec­es­sary to find the per­fect per­son so I don’t end up like them. Sometimes I think it’s because you were the first, and you came to define what was “right” or not.

Why then, did I break up with you?

I wish I could explain. I thought things would last, because you nev­er hurt me in any way. In fact, you did noth­ing wrong. Maybe we were just too young. They say you should­n’t mar­ry the per­son you can live with, you should mar­ry the per­son you can’t live with­out.

And I knew that I could live with­out you.

The Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend series

  1. Introduction
  2. Ashley
  3. Michele
  4. Christie
  5. Jackie
  6. Louise
  7. Bronwen

Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend: Introduction

An ex e‑mailed me out of the blue the oth­er day. She blamed it on the fall weath­er, caus­ing her to rem­i­nisce and Google my name. We had­n’t seen or spo­ken to each oth­er in over five years.

After feel­ing each oth­er out for the first part of the exchange, we caught up on each oth­ers lives. She’s been mar­ried for three years. Moved out to Kingston after liv­ing through the pol­lu­tion and over-stim­u­la­tion of down­town Toronto. She has a full-time job while work­ing toward her Master of Education part-time. Her hus­band’s an artist at heart, she says, try­ing to make a liv­ing off cre­ative writ­ing. No kids yet, but instead, two cats, Emily Wednesday and Shadow.

Me? I moved to Ottawa for uni­ver­si­ty, bought a house, recent­ly got out of a rela­tion­ship, been work­ing as the mar­ket­ing and IT man­ag­er at a den­tal lab­o­ra­to­ry. Oh, and I have one cat, but I’m think­ing of a sec­ond.

There were some things I’d been mean­ing to ask her for a while. Going through a series of rela­tion­ships since ours has changed my per­spec­tive, and I’ve always won­dered whether she’s grown in this way as well. I put a few ques­tions to her, but she told me, in an ami­able way, that she was­n’t com­plete­ly com­fort­able indulging my curiosi­ties.

What she had no prob­lem talk­ing about before was now taboo and off lim­its. Was she afraid of upset­ting her hus­band by dis­cussing such per­son­al things with an ex-boyfriend, or did she sim­ply change so much?

There are a lot of things I’d like to say to my ex-girl­friends, but the nature of a break-up can be that of ran­cor. Communication breaks down. People lose per­spec­tive. I’ve always had a tremen­dous need to express myself, per­haps to the detri­ment of my rela­tion­ships, but dig­ging up what’s past and buried for the sake clo­sure seems a bit self­ish. After hav­ing this ex tell me that she was uncom­fort­able, I real­ized that it may have been rather inap­pro­pri­ate of me.

It’s only here that I can say what I want.

The Letter To An Ex-Girlfriend series

  1. Introduction
  2. Ashley
  3. Michele
  4. Christie
  5. Jackie
  6. Louise
  7. Bronwen

Show Me Which Constellations You Know, A Denouement

Eternal Sunshine 1

Eternal Sunshine 2

Eternal Sunshine 3

People always say that this song or that book or some movie is a sto­ry about them­selves in some way. One of my friends is tru­ly deter­mined that his life has been proph­e­sied in the eight and a half minute rock-opera Paradise By The Dashboard Lights. My sto­ry was told in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but it was­n’t any­thing with as much grandeur, it was sim­ply about a girl.

Interestingly enough, it’s not the sto­ries them­selves, but the details of each sto­ry that give them such relat­able con­vic­tion. In Paradise By The Dashboard Lights, Meatloaf sings about a coerced com­mit­ment lead­ing to an even­tu­al eter­ni­ty spent with the wrong per­son because of a stub­born, but more impor­tant­ly moral, refusal to break a promise. The prog­nos­ti­ca­tion of these par­tic­u­lars sends my friend sweat­ing when­ev­er he hears the song.

For me, it took the form of pangs, from the details of Clementine’s char­ac­ter. The fucked up girl look­ing for her own peace of mind, who applies her per­son­al­i­ty in a paste. A per­son who keeps you off bal­ance, always guess­ing, and con­stant­ly frus­trat­ed. A girl who sends off sirens in your brain telling you to run as far as you can before you get burned, but you stay any­way, against all log­ic, resigned to the even­tu­al fate.

And here I was, wait­ing to be saved, think­ing she’s a con­cept, or she’ll com­plete me, or she’s going to make me feel alive. When it did­n’t work out, I used to say that it was for the best, that I was in it to have no regrets, but it was real­ly because I could­n’t leave. I was drawn mag­net­i­cal­ly, inex­plic­a­bly, to the last per­son to deserve even the effort of all the torn up thoughts.

To the one that got away.

On the week­end, I dis­cov­ered that I could final­ly watch Eternal Sunshine with­out those pangs when I had felt them for so long, even when I already knew how impor­tant it is not to for­get these expe­ri­ences, as Joel fig­ures out while hid­ing Clementine in his sub­con­scious. All the resid­ual emo­tions have passed, and now I can talk, and laugh, and think, and share the expe­ri­ence like an embar­rass­ing ado­les­cent mem­o­ry. It only took two years.

Everybody’s got­ta learn some­time.

The Everyday Sickness Of Stress

Thumbnail: Card by Elle

I called in sick again today, but this time I did­n’t go in.

In Psych 101, you learn that a group of stu­dents are sprayed in the face with the cold bac­te­ria dur­ing their exams, while a con­trol group is sprayed dur­ing the reg­u­lar school year. The result is that the stu­dents going through their finals are more than twice as like­ly to get sick. Stress low­ers the immune sys­tem, and the les­son here is that there’s a direct con­nec­tion between the health of the mind and the body.

Knowing this isn’t enough to pre­vent it. Sometimes it all adds up, and you get worn down.

Little sur­pris­es come in the form of friends offer­ing to pick things up from the phar­ma­cy, peo­ple I’ve nev­er even spo­ken to ask­ing if I’m okay, or care pack­ages from ex-girl­friends, con­sist­ing of choco­late bars, vit­a­min C drops, African peanut soup, a DVD of BMW shorts, and even a get-well-soon card.