On un-exing. in On loves.

What do you call an ex-boyfriend you are, once again, dating? 

“My ex” had felt foreign on my tongue for so long. A title reserved for other people I had once cared about but who now made me sigh, roll my eyes, think “Good riddance” in regards to, or, worse, hardly think about at all. 

We held onto our relationship for years after it was dead, held onto it as it drove into the sea, clung to it as we drowned, as we clawed at each other underwater, pushed heel-on-head, eyes shut tight, killing each other, and for what?  

“I want you to turn and look at each other for five minutes,” our first couple’s therapist had said years before we finally broke up. 

We did. Stared into each other’s flat eyes. Widened our eyes awkwardly. Tried not to roll them as the clock ticked on. “Bored now,” he used to joke sometimes when I was mid-sentence, and he didn’t say it then, but it’s what we both thought, I’m sure. “Bored now.”

Shortly after we broke up, I ran off to a weirdo retreat in the woods and he ran to Japan and we turned into warm-blooded beings who were unrecognizable to ourselves and to each other. Eight months after we broke up, we looked at each other again. 

It was a Wednesday, our first time seeing each other in over a month of silence, which had followed two months of silence previously. I’m a little disappointed by the lack of depth and emotional closeness in our interactions today, I said to him when it was dark out.  He paused, acknowledged that things had felt a little off. Maybe, he said, it was because this was the first time we were seeing each other since breaking up that the future stretched long and open between us, uninterrupted with one of us traveling or with a need for no contact so we could heal. Maybe we were being protective, he said. 

Maybe, I said. 

Also, he said, we hadn’t really looked at each other all day.

We’d sat next to each other at Dolores Park. Next to each other as we ate tacos at La Gaillenita. Next to each other on the couch at the home he was dog-sitting at, and next to each other on the couch at the home where I was dog-sitting. 

We rotated our bodies towards each other on the couch. His eyes were soft, his face open, and I understood that the Modern Love column that said you can fall in love with someone by looking into their eyes for five minutes wasn’t about looking, but about seeing and being seen. I couldn’t hold his gaze, though. I glanced down, back at up him, looked away again, shy, and when my eyes turned back to him, the tenderness in his eyes held me.

Oh shit, I said.

What, he said.

I’m super turned on. (editor’s note: TMI, SRY)

Let’s date slowly, we decided, and casually. Ten-hour dates aren’t casual, we agreed. Let’s see each other next Tuesday afternoon, and use my 5 pm writing class as a deadline, an outside time limit. Two hours, maybe three.

I revisit my diary tonight. I am looking for an old entry that I was sure started, “He’s not happy,” and in searching for it, I come across thousands of words written a year ago, two years ago, three, about our relationship and about how shitty things were, how shitty we were. I was no angel, but I didn’t write about that (who writes about that in their diary?). But what I did write about was how mean he was, the hurtful things he said, and said again, and the way he blamed me when they upset me. I clicked through those entries, relived those moments that I’d long since forgiven, that feel so long ago, and I realized they aren’t gone, they haven’t disappeared. I hold them in my body. They’re behind the eyes he is looking into with such tenderness. They’re tense in my muscles when he makes a joke I’ve heard before. I hear them when I look in the mirror at the skin gravity is pulling down, and they’re whispers in my ear when I write something I’m not happy with. I hear his words when he rests his hand on my arm and when his fingers are soft on my hair and I hear them when I admit to not knowing the origins of a historical event and he fills me in and they come as a nearly imperceptible wince when I show up late.

Seeing each other fosters emotional intimacy, but trust, I think, might need more time.

Do people kiss on first dates, I ask him.

That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out, he says.

They either don’t kiss at all or they have sex, I say.

That sounds about right, he says.

Right before he leaves, he kisses me at the door. One, two, three times.

I stammer.

What, he says.

Do you have a boner, I say.

Sure do, he says, and he is out the door.

Last updated November 03, 2019