It Really IS Out with the Old

My high school boyfriend, who barely made the transition to my college boyfriend, is relocating.  He sent me this message today:

 

Goodbye my orange moon, thank you for your light and remember, Mr. Lionel is always the man

 

-The Former

 

 My response was this:

 

(my, that sounds finite)

 

this occasion feels like it warrants a more momentous message, but I will follow your lead and keep it simple. 

i wish you love, many adventures, hard-earned successes, opportunities for growth, and all the happiness a skeptic can hope for.  so long, sir.

 

“you say goodbye, and I say hello”

 

-Me

**

 

I fancied myself a creature of extraordinary relationships.  This boyfriend of yesteryear, he of the end of my high school and beginning of my college career, was my first real love.  We experienced an intense crush, a high school senior prom and senior trip (with food poisoning on the side), a sweet post-high school summer, an emotional breakdown, separating for college (he in the North, I in the South), his breaking up with me one semester into our freshman year of college, my beginning to date homeboy (who would become HomeBoy – peep the capitals, that’s significant) which felt like a second break-up, slanderous emails, reconciliation and innumerous well-intentioned but malevolently-incited freestyle battles.

 

I felt special for being able to say “I’m still friends with my ex”, despite that fact that he and HomeBoy are not fond of each other.  HomeBoy is supremely secure in our partnership (as he should be), and, to be honest, the friendship that existed between myself and “The Former” had become little more than bare bones.  I sometimes pondered the significance of our continued communication.  It had become a “2 calls per year” sort of thing – one for birthdays and one in late spring to discuss the anticipation of summer blockbusters.  (Neither of us celebrate holidays.)  There may be an additional call here or there to share a new piece of writing or hold the other accountable for the writing that isn’t being done.  But that was all.

 

I struggled with whether or not to make some sort of formal break, or just let it continue to decline – fade into obscurity.  Two phone calls a year would surely dwindle to one and then none at all.  I would go to a book store with my husband and kids (many, many years in the future) and see his name on a book and smile; he would do the same in a book store half way across the world (or at least across the country), and that would be that.  So when I received  this message today, I was relieved and yet… there was this teeny, tiny feeling of loss.  So I cannot boast “I’m still friends with my ex” anymore, but we are neither enemies nor strangers.  I guess we  aren’t anything except “he” and “I”.

It is as it should be.