The Wrath of Seeing Your Ex
A Night Out On The Town, Part 3
This post will be unlocked in one week for free subscribers 💌
Hello Wonderful Readers,
As you come out of the bathroom at Casa Franca you see him standing there, kissing her. She has her back to you. You see his swoosh of black hair, and his mustache. You can tell from the way he’s holding her. It is him. You just know. Before you can remember his name, and before you remember that you blocked his number on your phone over a year ago, you get a heaving, painful feeling in your chest that melts into your stomach. It sinks and swims in that kind of teething nausea. It’s in some weird, cavernous pit, deep within your insides that you had no idea existed. You did not take Biology for long enough to name those inner depths.
You feel like a shaking image of your past self and your present self are oscillating into one. Like when you threw a bouncy ball as a kid, only to have the big up and down swooping motions of the ball bounce lower and lower and faster and faster to the ground. No wonder you feel sick to your stomach. The anxious, dazed, heartbroken person you were the day he broke up with you on the sidewalk outside your house meets your present self. Who you are now. A young woman on the brink of thirty with longer hair. He once told you he preferred women with longer hair. Have you been trying to prove to him all along that, at some level, you are lovable?
What are you feeling in this moment? Is it your disgust at him, and how he treated you? Are you recoiling from him as if from a hot flame? Or is your body shouting at you, “Danger!”? Or is it your pure, unaltered, seething hatred of him that you were never able to say to his face, that you’ve suppressed all this time? You grew up in a place and a culture where it was bad to feel anything. Since then, you have become quite fond of the multi-feeling. The complex feeling. A feeling that, in moments that smack you in the face like this one, has many layers and many tinges of the same, repulsive hues of brown in it. Like a bruise that springs up on your knee. But that shit isn’t “bruise” color. It’s dark and oozing blue and purple in the middle, and lighter on one side in a molded yellow that somehow transitions into your normal flesh color. This bruise is a part of you, nonetheless.
There is some physical pain, undoubtedly. The kind of heartache where the barriers between the physical body and the emotional body, mind and soul became a blur. Of course, your brain is in your body. You were wrong to believe that these things were separate. Obviously, each of them needs the other. Otherwise you wouldn’t be alive.
As you see him close his eyes, you remember the time when you were trying to cuddle on the couch in your living room, and he said to you in a low voice,
“I just feel like we have no emotional connection.”
After you had slept together for weeks and you had neglected your job and your rest and your normal existence and your habits. You were torn off from your own self and your own life like a ship in a storm. You missed a deadline or two and your teammates and your clients became worried. They were wondering: is something wrong? But you were too distracted. You were trying to care for this new-born baby dragon of a relationship. So much of your soul had already been burnt alive for this male creature. And at one point, around this time last year, you had slept over at his house so much that your lives had kind of melded together; well, your life had melded into his.
You remember seeing his eyes quivering in that moment of tenderness on your couch, and somehow you found yet another well of compassion inside yourself to dig from for him. And you said to him,
“Hey, don’t worry at all. You can’t force yourself to feel anything. An emotional connection is something that we can build over time. You’ve been in love before though, right?”
And he explained to you, as a full-grown-adult-male of 34 years or something, that maybe he had been in love before, only once, but he wasn’t really sure. It was with some girl he had a “spiritual connection” with in Tulum. And then after you comforted him emotionally, and felt pity for him in a way, you still let him stay over that night at your apartment and have sex with you. And that level of weird, pitiful intimacy had morphed into something strange and emotionally confusing inside of you.
At the time, you knew it wasn’t you. And yet you kept trying. Kept hurling the bowling ball down the alley with little safety. With neither of the side railings on either side to catch you. After you had been so sure when you went to the bathroom in his house the first night you met, and he had this beautiful, glorious, clean apartment in Condesa, with vast, light wood floors that made your apartment feel like a shoebox. You had said to yourself, as you sat naked on the toilet,
“I want to have children with this man.”
And in that sense, with your own color-blindness to reds, and your aversion to flags, you let the preciousness of your dreams creep into this man’s eyes, through his crop of black hair, through his glasses. You didn’t really want to write about him since. Not even today. You didn’t want to waste any more of your breath on him. Not until you realized that he had wounded you. Let the light in and shined it brightly on your trembling, neglected inner child. Let him play with your soul like a demi-god, all the while your inner child was wailing at you with cries of abandonment that were unfamiliar to you, to your own self, so you left her out on the landing to cry herself to sleep, just like your dad did once, and you continued on. It was not that this man had abandoned you. It was the person he had made you into: someone who abandons herself.
He told you he wasn’t interested in monogamy from day one. He told you that his ex-girlfriend apparently called him a psychopath. And at the time, you thought that was odd and wondered how long they had dated for. You see, despite being emotionally reckless with many men you meet, you’ve also become a lot more attuned to what men tell you that other women have said about them. You take his word for her word, and you think: what prompted a woman to say that? He also had an infuriating way of saying, “No?” rhetorically at the end of his sentences. This was nothing to do with his accent. He had perfect English after studying in America. And if it was him, he made this squelchy sound every time he kissed you. After every, single, kiss. It was so annoying. He also told you he used to have “mommy issues”, but that he didn’t anymore. He had promptly gotten over them somehow, even though he hadn’t been to therapy. He was adamant about that.
When you see him again at the jazz bar, you wonder if you were too harsh for blocking him on everything and never speaking to him again. You reconsider this because you honestly believe he was not a bad person, just one of the most emotionally irresponsible people you have ever met. Undoubtedly. You think back to his special interests in startups, his businesses and an anime series he couldn’t stop talking about, and you wonder if the fact that his father has autism means that he might have it also. You reassure yourself that there is truly nothing wrong with that if he does have it, but getting a diagnosis might be helpful for him to know. But you are not a doctor, so why are you thinking about this, anyway?
You remember his hairy inner thighs, and the grunting, exhale he always squeaked out as he came into the condom. He was always very nervous about contracting an STD, and he had a strict exercise regime schedule that he stuck to, and his house was immaculate. Those things you liked, or found useful, but you wondered if you could ever get used to his sex squeak. Could you accept him and love him anyway? Even though, in the whole month that you were together, he never once offered to go down on you? And that made you question your decision to go natural and leave your pubic hair as it is? The natural state of your own body. He had made you question that. It makes your blood boil just to think about it.
And in this moment, as you watch him kiss her in front of you, you wonder whether this man, as much as he likes to have sex with females, will ever be ready to welcome a real woman into his life, in all her imperfect, love-handled, stomached, hairy glory. And you shake your head to yourself, and you think: No?
Tune in next week to discover what happened with Arturo.
Much love to you, wherever you are out there in the ether.
Love,
Tash
💌 ✍️
Ahhh the socialized forgiveness of men who offer us little to nothing. Socialized to strive for acceptance from people who we don’t even want to be with. Socialized to think in building/molding a partner instead of expecting them to come fully formed.