This is my first weekend alone, with The Suitor gone for a camp reunion weekend in Boston.  It’s Friday night, St. Patrick’s Day, and he returns Monday night.  Ten minutes before leaving he tells me his friend Adam (with whom he’d planned to stay the entire time) is up in Vermont one of the weekend nights and suggested my suitor stay with their mutual friend Annika. The Suitor has had sex with Annika.  We have a rule of not speaking with our exes, especially those with whom we’ve slept.  Annika has a boyfriend now.  This means nothing to me.

“You had sex with her, didn’t you?”
“Oh, come on.”
“Well didn’t you?”
“Yes, yes I did,” he says in a non-confrontational tone that surprises me.
“So don’t we have an agreement?”
“Tell me what you want me to do.”

We have an agreement.  We no longer speak with or see our exes.  Period.  We certainly don’t stay at their houses.

“Do whatever you think is right.”  I mean this.
“What does that mean?”
“It means do whatever you’d want me to do.  Do what you think is right.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes.”  And I did.

Of course he’s not staying with her, but he will spend time with her because she is a mutual friend, and it’s silly for him not to spend time with a group of his friends just because she will be there.  I am actually okay with this.  I’m still breathing, alive, and quite fine, actually.  Though I’m less so when I recall the last time they were alone together. He was at a bar with her and had to get one of his friends to pull her off of him.  She asked him to mercy-fuck her.  She felt lonesome and sorry for herself.  She used the word “please.”  I know all of this because it was from a time when we were first dating, a time when you share it all before thinking the better of it.  He was at his vacation home, where she stayed as a guest.  They were drunk.  He texts me something, "ha ha ha, my friends had to pull her off me."  Not those words, but the stupid sentiment was there.  I’ve done it too.  You share these things, in part, because you want to remind the other person that you’re desirable to others.  This basically means you’re insecure.  But fine.  You also share it because you really don’t care and think it’s mildly interesting.  But mostly we do this when we have no idea where things will lead, and most importantly, what kind of neurosis we’re up against.  Oh, how very little he knew. If neurosis were rain, I’d be Meghalaya.

We share the things we shouldn’t at the onset, like which of our current friends used to be ex-lovers.  Big mistake.  Huge.  "Oh, yeah, we once fucked until we broke the bed."  Hee. Hee.  No.  Don’t do that.  The seed is planted and grows with the relationship, so each time that friend’s name is subsequently mentioned, quiet, seemingly innocent, questions follow.  “Oh really?  You two are hanging out again?”  Suspicion sets in, despite the whole, “but we’re just friends now.”  Biz Markie is ruining relationships, decades later. 

It feels strange being here without him, knowing he won’t be coming home.  It feels a bit like middle school.  A Friday night when I wasn’t in the mood to be out with friends.  Facial masks.  Magazines.  FED UP nail polish.  Cuticle cream.  Girl movies on TV, commercials and all.  And he’s out with a woman he used to be intimate with.  And quite honestly, I don’t even care.  But I think I might if she were pretty or successful.  Horrible to say or think, but I will anyway.  I’m insecure.  We know.  I could write an entire television series about it. 

I rented the first season of Felicity, and after watching the pilot I realized any show has to succeed with that Scent of a Woman music.  It made me realize Straight Up & Dirty will work as a series, as long as it captures how neurotic I am.  We love the neurotic; we relate to it.  Or we know someone who does.  That Felicity chick was scary psycho stalker there for a while.  I have no doubt, though, that I must have seemed like that at that age.  I think we forget that time in our lives, how unsure we were, when we didn’t realize, even, how insane we were.  Now, at least when I’m being insane, I know it.  Until years from now when I look back at this age, shaking my head, wondering how I could have thought the way I did.