In a city of eight million people, the possibility of running into him seemed unlikely. And daytime took him completely out of context. But as soon as my brain's facial recognition skills kicked in, I realized I was standing face-to-face with Mr. Weird Science project. My ego retreated. I couldn't even pretend to be normal.
Okay, Keex, enough of the DRAMA! So what if OkCupid dude disappeared like poof? And so what if his dating profile is still active minus the two photos which he curiously deleted? And who cares if, after test driving me for two months, he possibly picked a different chick but still prowls on the down low in case he wants to upgrade? In the end, I was disappointed but not devastated.
It was during that ATTACHMENT PHASE that I came to realize just how little I had truly known my EX when we first got married. I know that sounds weird. It's just that, as years passed, the depth of our friendship plus my love and attraction to him expanded in ways I never thought imaginable. I felt as if I had grown to know his true character, his persona and his ego; having equal love and compassion for each. I remember staring at him, soaking him in and feeling so lucky. He made me feel loved, cherished, respected, admired, appreciated, and desirable. And I equally loved who he was as a man, husband and friend. We had created such a strong bond that, life without my EX, seemed inconceivable. He was my family, a part of me... we were attached at the hip.
Never before had I experienced such numbness. I felt as inanimate as the luggage in the cargo compartment of that 6 hour flight to NYC. Whoever I am or was had seemingly escaped into the ether. My physical body may have been sitting on that plane but I was an empty vessel. But maybe I wasn’t numb after all, because the gravity of whatever was going on in my psyche felt suffocatingly impossible to escape.
Maybe it was pure shock but I somehow took the whole break-up well. I knew he didn’t want to hurt me. And admittedly, in the beginning of our relationship, neither of us ever envisioned marriage as part of our life journey. But we fell in love and did what you do when you fall in love... plan a beautiful wedding to celebrate that love, take a romantic honeymoon vacation, buy a house, get a dog... We did everything but the kids.
The whole break-up is a blur. I was completely blind-sided. Well, maybe not completely. My ex had been acting “funny” for a couple of months. By “funny” I mean distant. But the distance seemed to run concurrently with his couple of months of sobriety so; instead of feeding my insecurities with my hyper-analytical mind and tendencies toward self-loathing, I allowed myself to have compassion for my ex. I mean, how could I be so self-absorbed to think that everything was about ME?
