Ex Communications: Lessons From Running Into Your Ex

“Sooner or later, you'll find yourself right where you were” - MUNA

Photograph by Coco LaRochelle

Call it circumstance, call it fate, call it what you want to, but the universe always finds a way to humble us. Often, it’s in the form of a special kind of hell–running into the very person you want to, depending on the moment, punch or kiss in the face. The ex. The wrongdoer. The girl next door. The boy you imagined bringing to Thanksgiving dinner. That one. 

I have rare moments of clarity when I seem to inhabit a body that feels like mine and only mine. Lately, it’s been little instances on campus, walking into a classroom or finally having the consciousness to take my ID out before the Walker building security guard skewers me for holding up the line. 

Being myself means actually backing up my actions with thoughts that aren’t aimed at getting somewhere–or someone. But all dominoes must fall. 

Thursday. I’m in a hoodie in a school where no one wears sweatpants. I’m already worried that I’m behind on my readings and God forbid I don’t make any friends in my classes. The Boston Public Garden felt like the right call on a day where I was making so many wrong ones.

It’s a simple story. But I’ll try to tell it well. 

I saw him.

See I’m actually not sure how to describe the paradoxes that happened in my mind because I would be trying to pinpoint a physical description of a chemical explosion. On one side of the bushes, my heart exploded. On the other, he did his best to wipe my existence from the matrix. If a tree fell in the woods, did anyone hear it?

In that split second in the garden I was exposed––nothing and no one could have prevented me from the sheer terror of being recognized by someone for whom I would have at one point cut my left arm off for. A familiar feeling encircled me, the recognition of a knife about to be thrown. 

Shame. 

A few years ago, the first time my eyes found him was when I decided I, too, could love someone. I couldn’t explain it to anyone, let alone myself. It simply was. Now I can tell myself many accounts of what I did, what he did to me, what I said, why I wish I had reacted differently, but it doesn’t really matter––the only truth that matters now is that I loved him more than I respected myself. Self-deprecation and degradation was the only love language I had known. I guess as my feelings grew increasingly uncontrollable so did the knowledge that I would, and could, do anything to keep him. When we walked together, shame followed.

There’s so much I see about him now that I didn’t before: his dual insecurity and hubris, his blatant manipulations and justifications. He had a tendency to separate himself from his actions as if his affection occurred in a vacuum. His world was that of blue blood ease, pretty girls at his fingertips. Waiting for his calls, I felt like an actor in need of direction. We argued about everything, so much that it became a necessity for me to be able to emote any insecurity through not-so-thinly veiled blows. In off-campus basements, the boy I knew turned into a blank canvas for people who gleaned from the confidence of knowing they were from a class of unimaginable wealth.

The end came just as sporadically as the beginning. Some version of the same fight about promises broken and lack of respect turned into the perfect weapon to call me crazy. At last, I could assume a role and do it justice. 

In the present, just as the many girls before me, and I’m sure after me, I was dismissed from his line of vision. Erasure in the form of a casual walk-by. 

I called my best friend crying. 

“But Julia, he was wearing that navy sweater.” 

“But Julia, he was wearing JEANS.”

“But Julia, what if I don’t feel that way about someone ever again.”

Even now when I sit down to categorize my pain into neat little paragraphs for this article, I struggle to form the descriptions necessary to let you in. Because ultimately that's what he took from me–some semblance of both a true understanding of the nature of his relationship to me and my relationship to me. 

So yes, I’m good at the Taylor Swift style fragments and poignant vignettes. I’m not so good at specificity. Although I’m sure I hit all the right surface notes, the past me deserves more, and yet I can’t quite give it to myself with this piece. I’m the author but I still wait for him to come and add to the story. I think I have to learn to live with that. 

I know deep down that I am no longer the same person that I was three years ago. 

Time moves despite the visceral pain, it doesn’t wait for your apology or theirs. With their absence, you have to start talking to yourself again. You have to ask yourself: What did I see in them to begin with? You have to confront the “you” that dated them or loved them. For women it’s often the assumption of fault or blame. Shouldering what they did wrong on your shoulders. Maybe we start to think about who we let into our lives and how much gravity that can have–what exactly are we running from when we run from our ex? Why do we punish ourselves for feeling “too much”?

The me in the garden on Thursday was breathless. My hair stuck out from the sides of my hoodie, my spandex was most certainly out of order, and I had to stop to tie my shoelaces twice. For a few seconds I felt as powerless as when I was when I was with him. On the phone, my best friend told me to sit down on a bench and try to write. Up until this article I have denied myself this chance. I told myself that I wasn’t ready to address the events of the past. I know it’s not just me who thinks that they have to have the events of their lives dissected and arranged perfectly in order to have any rights over them. I may not have the razor sharp insight I’d like but I accept that uncertainty. I hope you can welcome yours.