Giving Up The Ghost

I clearly remember, in what feels almost like another lifetime, when I was smack dab in the thick of trying to process the end of a very frustratingly complicated and heart wrenching break-up, a friend of mine sent me a note, telling me to hang in there. Things would get better, she promised.  "I remember when it happened to me," she explained.  "I was applying mascara one morning when I realized, in that very moment, that I didn't care anymore.  I had moved on." 

******  

 
In the years since we broke up, I have seen him twice.  Once, from across the street, as I made my way into a concert venue.  I was in a hurry that evening, scurrying to meet friends who were already at the show and holding a spot for me among the drunken crowd in our general admission standing room only section.  I'd innocently glanced across the street while showing my ID to the bouncer and knew in an instant it was him.  His hand motions, his stance, the way he tossed his head back with a laugh, these were all gestures that had once been intimately familiar to me and I realized - with a nonchalance that surprised myself - that he was a person I no longer knew.  There he was.  Standing across the street, under an awning, was someone I no longer knew anything about; just as he no longer knew anything about me, my world, my life.  Once so connected we often didn't need to speak to know what the other was thinking, we were now complete strangers.  Ships passing in the night...or, the street, as it were.

Ironically, the second time I would see him would be in that same concert venue, a handful of months later.  We crossed paths coming in through the same door at virtually the same time. I would be surprised to learn he didn't see me in that moment, as the timing was too close, the entryway too small to miss one another.  Still, if he did spot me, he didn't acknowledge it; nor did I acknowledge him in return.  My friend and I walked in and moved toward stage right, pushing our way through the crowds to get as close to the front of that same crowded general admission area, eager to see one of my favorite bands up close and personal.  Funny, I thought to myself.  He's here and I'm here and neither the two shall meet.  That was, as they say, that.

We live in an age where past lives are harder to bury, where leaving ex's behind suddenly becomes more challenging, as social media is seemingly forever linking past companions and their web of relations and friends to ours.  Gone, it seems, are the days of reflecting with a girlfriend or two over a glass of wine about old crushes and loves, of asking the rhetorical question "I wonder whatever happened to so and so?"  before dissolving into giggles about that one particular annoying habit they had or waxing poetic about how if it had just been the right place and the right time, things might have been different.

It is not easy to watch a relationship crumble.  There is excruciating heartache and turmoil and the wounds cut deep. Those days are - mercifully, blessedly - far behind me. And while I no longer ache for any sort of a reunion or truly even wish that the relationship had, in fact survived, I have never once forgotten how difficult that time in my life was; of how I wouldn't wish that sort of emotional misery on my worst enemy.

(Okay.  Maybe my worst enemy, yes.  But no one else.  Promise.)

******

 
He got married earlier this summer.  As one might expect, I hadn't been eager to know the exact date of the nuptials, nor was I really all that interested in any of the specifics. Not because I wasn't over him or anything like that, but because...well, he was still a first love.  While he is quite truthfully a total stranger to me now, he wasn't at one point.  And I anticipated that knowing the details of his big blissful day would hurt me somehow, would wound a piece of my heart that I had worked so diligently to heal.  Of course, with the way things go in this ever connected world, there is always news and there are always updates, no matter how cautious we've been with who shows up in what feeds and what information pulls in to whatever social portal is the updating venue du jour. What I'm getting at, is despite all of my precautions, I did ultimately learn of the exact wedding date just as their weekend celebration was getting underway. So it goes.  But here's the crazy thing - and the very reason I sat down this evening to write this post.  If you had asked me anytime prior to his wedding, even the night before the big day, how I'd feel when I thought about his wedding day, I'd probably have told you anxious or bittersweet or some other such melancholy type of emotion. 

So here's the part that surprised me.  Do you know that all I felt - whenever my thoughts wandered back to his wedding as I went about my own business - was a flood of immense and complete relief that I was not the one to walk down the aisle to meet him that day.  Never, ever in the wildest corner of my mind during those horrible, awful, drawn out months when we went back and forth and back and forth, stomping on one another's hearts repeatedly did I ever imagine I'd one day feel what I ended up feeling.

I moved on. Without even realizing that I did.

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There is a part of me that is hesitant to publish this post.  There's a nagging little voice in my head that worries someone will misinterpret what I write, thinking I sound jaded, cruel, spiteful, mean, or bitter.  I write not to play the role of wronged pining ex-girlfriend, let me make that abundantly clear.  Instead I write because, way back in 2005(!) when I started blogging I decided, if nothing else, that these posts would be a record of my days, of my own journey.  In just a few days I will bid my 33rd year a found farewell (which is another post entirely) and someday, when I'm sitting on a porch with my granddaughter beside me and she is heartbroken and sad about a boy, I want her to be able to read this.  I want her to know that I get it.  I do.  I know. 

Perhaps even more than that though, I want her to know that, in the end, it's all going to work out even better than she could possibly begin to imagine.  Because it does.  It will.   

******

Once upon a time, I read a blog post where an author was talking about her day to day routine.  She wrote a line that's always stuck with me - even long after I've forgotten the author, the blog itself.  "The future looks nothing like what I thought it would," she said.  "And yet, it is so much better."

Really.  Truly.  It is.