Here comes your ghost again
For some as yet unknown reason, my first boyfriend has come for a visit. In my brain. It’s like he arrived some time last week and hasn’t left. I’m rather baffled, as I haven’t thought about him in years. Sometimes I’ll think of someone and then suddenly they’ll call, or I’ll run into them, signifying some sort of psychic connection to the greater oneness.
Well, it’s been over 20 years since the bf and I had any oneness, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why he is suddenly front and center in my mind. I suppose I’m picking up on his energy; maybe he’s in the area or maybe he’s thinking about me. And it’s weird. I’m remembering things about that relationship I never thought I forgot. Lyrics from the musical we met in, the green bath towel he carried his trumpet in, in lieu of a case, the lilac oil he gave me, the 3am kiss on the footbridge, the thick pink carpet in the apartment I’d rented that summer for $100, the Trivial Pursuit game (1st edition) we played upon it, the rock in his pocket, the curve of his hip as he lay beside me, and me trying to squelch the “I love you” in my throat every time I looked into his eyes…
And then my stomach winces when I recall his prelude to sex, “Are you okay with this, things being what they are?” At the time I thought, “Sure - I’m in love with you! Things are great!” But alas, that was his way of saying he wasn’t, and I had fallen too far and too fast to see that or pay it much heed.
So when I say he was my “boyfriend” I am using the word in a very general context, like I really don’t know what to call you because you were so screamingly important to my psychosexual development but to you I was just a one night stand. Because a few nights after our full frontalness I developed a very high fever and headache, the kind where if you move your eyeballs at all you will die. And I was rushed to the hospital via ambulance because they thought I might have meningitis. Thankfully it wasn’t, but I was in the campus infirmary for a week and I remember calling him, wanting him to visit, because I was sick, I was lonely, and the nurses were threatening me with an enema if I didn’t give them back the goods at least once while I was there. I asked him to bring me some clean clothes, but he must have thought I was asking him for a lifetime commitment because he never came.
And I just didn’t understand. I couldn’t fathom how someone could be so intimate one minute and so cold the next. When I recovered, I attempted to meet up with him several more times. Each time he said he would call me, each time he never did. And he never had an answer for why he didn’t call.
It took me a long time to get over him, brief as our summer was. I don’t know why he’s popped into my mind after all this time; maybe it was to get me to remember a time in my life when I put up with being treated poorly. Or when I was not quite so jaded. Or that I’m more practical now.
“Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground, you in mid-air?”
- from A Little Night Music
Or that maybe I just have a phenomenal memory for trivia such as birthdays and phone numbers. Even though he moved house at the end of that summer, and he said he wasn’t going to have a phone in his new apartment. And you’d think I would have seen through that one, but I didn’t. For about 20 years. Now I sit here, amazed that he actually used a line like that, and that I fell for it.
But today’s your birthday. And in the intervening years, I hope you’ve learned some solid interpersonal communi-cation skills, and that you attempt to speak your truth no matter how much it may hurt someone. I wish I felt some regret coming from you, like Damn, I was such an ass.
I’m not going to bake you a cake, but you’re welcome to stick a candle in the leftover Halloween candy. And when you’re done haunting me, there’s a goth girl across the street who drives a hearse. You two would be perfect together.
I feel this…my ex-husband pops into my dreams unexpectedly. Is is self-centered to wonder if I pop into his?
LOL No…though what do you think you would be doing there?