What Every Ex Wants to Hear

As it turns out, you can get closure and answers from 2011 on a random Thursday in 2015:

You weren’t crazy: I wasn’t honest with you about X and I’m sorry.

I think about you every day.

I was a coward who wasn’t ready to meet someone like you.

You deserved better.

Read your book. Saw your New York Times column. Watched all the TV videos with your daughter. So fucking proud of you.

I love you and want to wake up with you every day.

Oh, fuck me.

Actually don’t.

In fact, pardon me while I figure out how to resist the mouth saying these words because

if I don’t, I know what happens next.

Watch me retreat to the bathroom four times to process these phrases. Contextualize them. Remind myself how much alcohol is likely compelling them.

And when I come out and realize his promise to host me at his place is the empty kind, hear me call him out.

His response?

C’mon, let’s just get a hotel. Or go to your place.

Flashback to 2011.

And the gajillion times I caved.

Cut to me

in 2015, shaking my head.

I take no glee in leaving him on a Hell’s Kitchen sidewalk with his acoustic guitar on his back. 

Watching him fumble with his phone to find another Thursday night plan.

Like our break-up three years ago, tonight’s choice is quite possibly one of easiest hard decisions I’ve ever made.