Let's Talk about Your Hair

Call me retrospective, but-- you know what, let's just stop right there before whatever ridiculous but statement I was about to type. Call me retrospective. Full stop. I'm done.

Lately I've been having these thoughts. Visions. Nothing new, really, except the cliché thought that comes immediately post. Take yesterday, for example. I woke up in the morning, super tired and not wanting to move because I had a friend at my house the night before until almost four but having to move because I had a birthday party I couldn't not go to, and for about a minute but no more, I lay there thinking about what my Sunday mornings used to be like. I thought about how I used to get up and go downstairs and do whatever on my computer while I drank coffee and listened to music, usually Peripheral Vision by Turnover once all the way through before either moving on to their next album, Good Nature, or something else, and then after a few hours, I'd go and get into bed with Jonathan (who from here on out will be known as Jonathan - not my Virgo, not my ex-Virgo, not the ex-Virgo, not the liar, and not the come pinga as I often think of him in my head because Jonathan is what he is to me now. Nothing more, nothing less), and we'd start our day. I stretched out in my bed, all alone as I've been every morning when I've woken up since the last time he slept over some time in late June, my mind started to wander into the land of retrospect, and I stopped myself before I let myself get lost. 

That was another life, I told myself, and I made myself get up.

It also happened more than once Saturday, the day before, first when I was at the eye doctor and needed help picking out glasses. Jonathan helped me with this the last few years, I thought, and then immediately the subsequent thought came: But that was another life. It also came when I was at Sip Java a couple hours later. The weather was gorgeous, the kind of weather that used to prompt Jonathan and me to go get something to eat either from Parlour or Happy Vegan Baker, go eat at a park, and then walk around. I was sitting there thinking about the times we sat at some Fort Lauderdale coffeehouse and how we'd be sitting there together, me grading papers, him playing Dokkan, and I know you think that thought popped into my head, and it did, but not at that point. What was in my head at that point would be impossible to describe, but maybe - maybe - you can imagine what was in my head if I tell you it was based on just having seen this

Talk about instant sickness. Last year Jonathan was sitting with me on gorgeous weather days as was the plan for every day for the rest of our lives, and that day, in real time, I was watching his new life unfold in a land of pumpkins and ice cream (that clearly neither of them needs) in a ridiculous-looking wife beater of all things with the girl he assured me he didn't have feelings for and who didn't have feelings for him (What a scummy scumbag, a friend of mine wrote after saying, Please tell me that's not the coworker, and finding out that it was; I regretfully have to agree). 

After texting everybody I've ever met and being told how truly masochistic I am and that I can't keep doing this to myself; after talking to my best friend who called to see if I was all right; after sitting there at an outside table at Sip Java where I alternated between crying and looking at dining room tables at Wayfair for two hours (and surely making the man directly on the opposite side of the window from me horribly uncomfortable (albeit clearly not concerned)), the whole time thinking about how Jonathan had been my boyfriend and he was supposed to be doing those things with me (except not in a wife beater because gross), the thought flit across my mind: That was another life. 

I'm at the acceptance stage, I guess. I mean, I'm still sad - not constantly, but if you were to put me on a sad-o-meter right this very second, I'd break the sadness scale - and I'm still angry - angry enough to have posted this

- but the more frequently That was another life pops into my head, the more it seems, at least to me, that I'm starting to understand that as truth, and while I know that's supposed to be a good thing, the fact that I'm accepting this, the fact that I'm realizing that my life before June truly was another life, the more heartbroken I am, but not for the reason you think. 

Along with my That was another life, I don't know, thought process? Realization? Idea?, I've been thinking something else, and that's, How many lives have I had? And, How many lives do I have to have? Like, seriously? How many? I'm forty-eight years old, and I've lived so, so many lives, but I'm not a fucking cat, and I only ever wanted one.