Better Off Dead

I know lots of people, men mostly, who pride themselves in staying friends with their exes. I don’t do that. Be you my ex-husband or a mere exploratory flirtation, if you’ve jilted me, you’re as good as dead to me – unless I find occasion to chortle at your expense or flaunt my successes in your face, in which case I will use you as I see fit.

I had just such an occasion this evening, enjoying vicariously through a friend the sweating and fidgeting that comes when my name is mentioned to someone who has reason to be embarrassed about their behavior toward me. The subject of that uncomfortableness is a boy who tortured me in high school and suddenly became “smitten” with me more than ten years later, after finding a modeling portfolio of me in my underwear.

I will see him at our twenty-year reunion, provided neither of us has drunk ourselves into an early grave by then. I had hoped we would be there together, regaling our classmates with how two arch enemies connected over Facebook and became the cute hipster couple, his scruffy beard and my big tattoos…

Instead, I spent two nights on the floor of the Denver airport bookended around four awkward nights in a tent, wrapped around someone who decided mere days before I got on the plane that he may or may not be ready for a romantic relationship. The man who wished me sweet dreams every night for three months took three days to kiss me, by which point I was pissed. His logic? “I thought it would be kind of fun to make you work for it, and I got disappointed when you stopped trying. I was hoping you’d make the first move.” Last time I checked, I wasn’t fucking psychic.

The end of the trip could not have come fast enough, and his “I can’t do this; I have nothing to give,” could have come a lot sooner. Like five hundred dollars and a disaster of a camping trip sooner. Perhaps he could have mentioned his emotional crippling before talking about moving east and marrying me, too.

The only thing about those three months that was not a complete waste of my time was an amazing campfire-grilled pork loin and some chargrilled lamb chops. If I had been so lucky to be present when my successes were casually flaunted in his face, I would have told him so, too.