How I Feel When My Ex-Girlfriend Reappears In My Life

My heart skipped a beat when I see that familiar, yet uncomfortable name on my phone screen—then I felt as if I were about to throw up large pieces of ice. It has been a while, yes, and she wants to catch up.

“Let me know when and where do you wanna meet,” read the last line.

“Sure. Let’s meet at that place—the same one where we met the last time,” I typed almost in a reflex action and clicked on send without a single drop of hesitation. Then I realize that I really don’t want to meet her.

I keep insisting that we meet in the same coffee shop, where we exchanged Christmas gifts, broke up, and met again for the first time after breaking up. I guess this is an extension of my attempt to keep her in the past—blocking her on social media, deleting her number and avoiding every vegetarian venue in the town, futilely resisting the fact that she has moved on and lived new moments where I am no longer partaking.

I hate to admit my pettiness and cowardice, but yes, this is my pettiness and cowardice, reflected in my possessiveness that seeks to limit her as “my girlfriend,” morbidly afraid of imagining her in any other context. And to this, I add a layer of excuse that is not any better—probably worse—than the perception of myself as a hopeless emotional wreckage, framing my cowardice as a sign that I’m in pain and vulnerable, subtly, but unequivocally signalling that every little thing that had to do with this relationship—that little pond in the park, the theatre where we watched Life of Pi, the classroom where we kissed for the first time—has been traumatic as fuck. You broke me. I’m hurt. I pretend to be okay but I’m not.

Every time she re-emerges in my life, I have to confront the sly, manipulative and passive-aggressive sunovabish that is me. And, this leads to another layer of bullshit on top of the said pile of horse-crap—that, I don’t want to deal with this emotional baggage, even after 1.5 years of hiatus, which makes me seem a bit more nonchalant and more than eager to move on. This version of myself seems better than the clingy, emotional train-wreck, but ultimately a reflection of my inability to let things go, of the brutal and frustrating truth that I still love her very much despite the failures and physically painful nights during the last eighteen months or so.

And at the end, completely disgusted myself and exhausted of the masochistic mental and emotional exercise, I decided to lie to myself that meeting her, seeing her, smelling her, and talking to her will not pulverize my feelings again, for now.